Three Mouths, One Hum

The hum came down out of the dark before Ravi could see what made it. Low and round and slow, like somebody humming into an empty jar. Ravi was a little penguin, no taller than a kettle, and he stood at the edge of the ice with his flippers out and his beak tipped up. Far off, between one small sun and the next, a smudge of silver slid along. The comet. It came every evening, and every evening it hummed.

Under the middle of the penguin colony there was a hollow in the ice shaped like a bell. It had three mouths, three round openings in the frozen ground, and when you hummed across the biggest one, the hollow hummed back. Your note went down into the bell and came up fat and round and rolled out over the ice till it reached the comet, and the comet heard it and hummed again. That was how the moon said goodnight.

All season Ravi had watched the grown penguins take their turns. All season he had wanted one. 'When you're bigger,' they told him, kindly, every single time. So Ravi had practiced. He had a hum ready, small and true, and he kept it in his chest the way a smooth pebble sits in a pocket, warm and ready.

Tonight the grown penguins had waddled off to the far side of the ice to gather cloud-moss for the nests, that soft gray stuff that smells like clean sheets. Tonight the hollow was all his. Ravi's feet were cold and his heart was going fast, and he was, if he was honest, a little nervous of all that empty ice. But Yusuf was there, and Yusuf was never in a hurry.

Yusuf was a walrus, old and wide, with a mustache like a frayed rope and whiskers going every direction at once. He came to the hollow every evening, sat a little way off, and listened, and nobody could remember him ever humming a note himself. 'Go on then, small one,' said Yusuf. 'I'm listening.'

Ravi took a breath. He hummed. The sound came out of him thin and wobbly, slid along the ice, and stopped near his own feet. He tried again, louder. It leaked away like air out of a scarf. Nothing in the hollow woke up at all.

'That was a good hum,' said Yusuf. 'It just didn't have anywhere to go.' He nodded at the ground. 'Look.' So Ravi looked. The second mouth of the hollow, the one to the left, had a round lid of ice frozen over it, thick as a dinner plate. The third mouth, up on the little hummock behind, was packed tight with drifted snow. Only the big mouth stood open, and one open mouth is a hollow with its hand over its mouth.

That was the trouble, then. A hollow can't hum with two mouths shut. Ravi leaned into the big mouth and gave it his best hum, and the hollow swallowed it and gave nothing back.

Yusuf pushed himself up and leaned his whole big shoulder against the ice lid. It didn't budge. 'It's frozen under the ledge,' he said. 'I can't get a flipper into that gap. My flipper's the size of a door.' So Ravi lay down flat and wriggled into the gap, and it was dark and cold and narrow, and his smallness, which he had never liked much, fit it exactly. 'Push now,' he called. 'Not that way. Left. Left. Now.' Yusuf pushed, and the lid slid off with a sound like a chair being dragged across a floor, and the second mouth breathed out cold clean air.

High up, something whistled. A snow petrel came down in a long curve and landed on the hummock, folding her wings. 'The comet's turning the corner of the little suns,' said Nia. 'You've got about as long as it takes to count to a hundred.' She looked at the snow packed into the third mouth. 'I can sweep that, but it's drifted hard. It wants a beat to break it up.'

'Then whistle one,' said Ravi. Nia went quiet. 'I can't hum,' she said at last, and she said it quickly, the way you say a thing you've said to yourself many times. 'I only whistle. Whistling doesn't count.'

'I can't hum either,' said Yusuf. 'Not one anybody wants to hear. Last winter I hummed near a kettle and the kettle cracked right down the middle.' His whiskers went pink at the tips.

'But you do have a hum,' said Ravi. 'The lowest one there is. I heard you once, after everyone had gone home.' Yusuf looked at the ice. 'That was a private hum,' he said, and his whiskers went pinker.

Ravi looked at the hollow, at its three round mouths, and something in him went quiet and clear. A hollow with three mouths was never waiting for one voice. 'Then we do it together,' he said. 'All three mouths, all three of us. Nia, you whistle the beat and sweep the snow. Yusuf, you take the left mouth and hum as low as you've got, lower than that, the lowest hum in the whole colony. I'll take the big one. We'll all start when Nia counts to three, and we won't stop.'

So they did it. Nia flew up and beat her wings, three, four, five times, and the drifted snow went up in a white cloud and came down somewhere else entirely. She whistled the beat, sharp and quick. Yusuf put his mouth to the second mouth and hummed, and the ice under him buzzed like a jar of bees. Ravi took the biggest breath of his life and hummed, small and true, and it went down and down into the bell.

For a heartbeat nothing happened. Nia's whistle went thin. 'Keep going,' said Ravi, and his voice came out steady, which surprised him. Nia whistled, high and clear, and it found the top of Yusuf's low hum and sat on it like a bird on a branch. And the hollow woke up.

The sound came up out of the ice, all three of them at once, low and middle and high, round as a bowl. It rolled out over the colony and out over the dark, and it went on and on, and the thousand small suns seemed to glitter slower as it passed. Ravi felt it go up through his own feet.

The comet heard it. It slowed. It dipped, just a little, the way a person nods. Then it hummed back, one long note and a shorter one after, and the note hung in the dark a while before it faded out past the little suns. After that there was only the hum of the planets turning, slow as a sleeper's breathing, and the cold clean smell of the ice.

Yusuf sat back down. His whiskers were still pink, but he was humming, very quietly, on purpose. Nia folded her wings and said, 'Well.' She said it twice, which is what a petrel does when she has decided something. Then, 'I suppose whistling counts.' Ravi didn't say anything. He stood by the big mouth with his flippers out, and his chest felt light, as if the pebble had finally gone out of his pocket and turned into something he could hum.

The grown penguins came waddling back with their arms full of cloud-moss, and the nests got soft, and the colony settled down in a row, all facing the same way. One by one the small suns turned over and showed their dimmer sides. The ice creaked softly, the way a house does at night, and the wind went around the hollow and around the hollow and did not need to hurry.

Ravi curled into his nest with his beak tucked in. It smelled of clean sheets and cold air and a little bit of salt. Far off, the comet was still going, humming to itself, and the last thing Ravi heard was Yusuf's low hum rumbling along the ice like friendly thunder, and then even that faded, and the moon went on turning, slow, slow, slow.