Hello everyone, this is Ria with a quick note.
This is a full episode preview of a story featured on Little Stories for Sleep, a bedtime podcast just for Little Stories premium subscribers.
The episode I'm sharing with you today is part of a series I'm calling Wandering Sleep Stories.
These new stories are peaceful, calming, and perfect for that last track on a bedtime playlist.
On Little Stories for Sleep, Wandering Sleep Stories have no intro or outro, it's just the story framed by soft music.
So grab your weighted blanket, snuggle up, and fall asleep to this sweet tale.
Enjoy. In the depths of a dense forest, under the cover of a fallen tree, in a burrow, below the forest floor, the Fishermouse twitches awake.
His mind catches the tail of a disappearing dream, and he tries to reel it back in, to take stock of it, maybe write it down, and the leather notebook he keeps, but it slips away, lost, like a fish, broken free from a hook.
He knows it is gone, there is no use wishing it will return to him.
He rises from his bed, and shuffles across his burrow.
It's small in there, barely able to fit his bed of feathers, his wash bucket, the armchair where he does his reading.
There are no windows, but he learned long ago the scent of coming rain, the vibrations of a storm, the whistles of a harsh wind.
Now he puts his nose to the air, and tunes his ears to listen.
Hmm. The day will be clear.
He sits on the edge of the seat of his armchair, and pulls on his boots.
They were a gift from his father, months ago, a modest but meaningful contribution to his new vocation.
He could have never acquired them himself.
He'd have nothing to trade for them, not yet anyway.
They are top of the line.
So impressive, they made the rest of his belongings look ancient, shabby.
Most of the items in his little burrow are second hand, passed along from friends of his parents, well wishers whose own early struggles to find their footing are still clear in their minds.
Someday, the young fisherman tells himself, he will pay it forward, give his own son a pair of embarrassingly well made boots, pass on his well worn things to his friends, young mice.
He thinks of this, imagines being in such a position, as he ties the laces of his boots.
It is a solid aim, he decides, one to build a life upon.
The fisher mouse leaves the utter darkness of his burrow, grabbing his tackle box and fishing pole on his way out.
He scrambles up through the tunnel that connects his burrow to the outer world, as his nose predicted, the dark morning is clear and still.
He sets off through the trees, his stomach murmurs, seeming to wake up after the rest of him as he trudges along the faint trail.
He imagines the day when he'll have enough food stored up to allow for breakfast before setting out for a day's work.
It seems like a fanciful daydream, the kind of luxury meant for other mice.
He sighs, wistful, trying not to focus on his growling stomach.
Today, and likely for many days, he will eat what he catches.
He hears the familiar rush of water over rocks as he rounds a curve in the trail, and the river comes into view, a dim view at least.
Dawn is still a ways off.
The moon casts light across the water's choppy surface.
The fisher mouse finds his favorite spot, a broad, flat rock that juts over the river near a bend where the current is light and the fish congregate to rest, the perfect place to drop a line.
He sets down his tackle box and paws through it for the bait he collected last night.
A shadowy figure appears on a rocky outcropping on the other side of the river.
The fisher mouse, keen as his eyes are, cannot make out the creature with any detail.
But he knows who is setting up on that particular rock.
All the regulars know each other.
The fisher mouse waves.
The shadow waves back.
There are other lives he could have pursued.
He could have gone to the city where there is food everywhere, all the time ripe for the picking.
He could have gone to the farm.
There's a big one not too far away where, if a mouse can evade the cat that roams around, he can live like a king.
Instead he chose this, chooses this.
A quiet life by a river where food comes and goes, where the winters are cold and the loneliness can get to a mouse now and then.
But every morning, when he casts out his line for the first time, watching the weighted lure on the end of it sink below the rippling surface of the water, he knows why he has chosen this life and he knows it was the right call.
Throughout the next hour, the forest is quieter than at any other time, day or night.
The nocturnal creatures have gone to bed and those on the day shift are just getting up.
The fisher mouse casts his line every minute or two, waiting as the current pulls it gently downstream.
Sensing nothing except the subtle pulls of underwater reeds, he reels it back in and repeats the process.
He is in the middle of a daydream when a series of events occurs all at once, the sky turns pink, signaling the sun's imminent rise, the wind picks up, forcing him to put up a claw to save his hat and the other mouse, now fully visible across the river, pulls back his fishing rod as the line grows taut.
The fisher mouse watches as his associate calmly and methodically reels in the line.
His tummy grumbles as a hefty fish emerges from the river, gleaming in the first light of day, dangling from the mouse's line.
The fisher mouse looks down at his own line, listless in the current, he's had barely a tug, not even a false alarm, no tangles in unseen plants.
No lost boots dredged from the deep, nothing.
Lunchtime comes and goes.
The sun is brilliant against a blue sky.
The fisher mouse stood all morning, now he sits, allowing his boots to hang over the edge of the rock.
The birds are out in force, calling to one another as if kept apart for years with stories piled up that simply must be shared right this minute.
The fisher mouse casts his line again and again, by mid -afternoon he is light -headed from hunger.
One of the hardest things is to know when to call it a day, when to pack up, trudge home, put away his gear, and head out in search of something, anything to eat.
But what if he's only three casts away from a hearty dinner?
This what if always whips up a war within himself.
Today he does not have to wage it for long.
He feels a sharp tug on the line, then a steady, insistent pull.
Swiftly and with the gracefulness of a more experienced mouse, he reels in the line.
The sun has thoroughly baked the forest by the time the fisher mouse makes it home, his catch slung over one shoulder, his pull over the other.
He makes a fire in the stone -ringed pit near the entrance of his burrow and roasts his only meal of the day.
Once he is full, a profound sense of calm washes over him, another successful day in the books.
Not every day ends with a full belly.
That fact makes him all the more grateful for the days that do.
The fisher mouse puts out his fire as the sun sets behind the trees.
He sits, watching curls of smoke drift upward into the darkening sky.
The stars gradually assert themselves.
The forest quiets between shifts.
The fisher mouse sits in a chair he builds himself.
It is crooked in places.
He will make a better one in time.
But it is comfortable enough that he falls asleep without really meaning to.
The call of an owl wakes him hours later.
The darkness is intense, jarring.
He'd fallen asleep beneath a watercolor sunset.
Now, he cannot see the outlines of trees he knows are mere feet away.
The owl's cry comes again, and he knows he cannot sleep here, out in the open.
The fisher mouse eases up from his makeshift chair and allows his nose to guide him through the dark several paces to the hidden entrance of his tunnel.
He scrambles down through it and into his bed, lined with feathers.
As he falls asleep, it occurs to him that his boots are still on his feet.
No matter, he thinks, his mind hazy.
It will save him a few moments in the morning, get him an extra cast or two, before the sun is up.
This has been a special full episode preview of a Wandering Sleep Story.
To hear more Wandering Sleep Stories, you can join Little Stories Premium by visiting littlestoriespremium .com.
And thank you, as always, for listening in.
Thank you.
