The Penguin People of Antarctica

This is a story that was told me me by the Penguin People. Long years ago, when the creator fashioned the earth and sky, he gave the seas to the oceans, the land to the rocks and the air he gave to the winds. Once he had peopled the lands with animals and created the first plants and trees, he called the rocks and the winds and the seas to him and asked them if they wanted anything.

They paused for awhile and then asked him for a land of their own to which no animal or bird or fish might come without their permission. And the creator nodded and out of the rocks he fashioned a great continent which he placed at one end of the earth and around it he placed the sea like a girdle. And he told the winds that they could blow and protect the land and the seas could roar. And he placed great sheets of ice on the land as a coat.

For long years, no bird or beast came to the land. One day a bird, tired and bedraggled, foughts its way across the seas and came finally to the land of Antarctica. As he lay there on the brink of death, the wind whispered in his ear and asked him if he would be his messenger and pass messages from the land to the sea. The bird agreed but asked for changes, for otherwise, "I shall die on this land."

And so the wind gave him a thick coat, white on the front for the ice and black behind for the rocks. and he made his wings into flippers that he would fly through the sea when once he flew through the air. And this was the first penguin, a bird six feet in size, the father of all the penguins.

And still they pass from the land to the sea, taking messages between the winds and the rocks and the sea.