Taffy took a marrow bone and sat mousy-quiet for ten whole minutes, while her Daddy scratched on pieces of birch-bark with a shark’s tooth. Then she said, “Daddy, I’ve thinked of a secret surprise. You make a noise — any sort of noise.”
“Ah!” said Tegumai. “Will that do to begin with?”
“Yes,” said Taffy. “You look just like a carp-fish with its mouth open. Say it again, please.”
Taffy and her father are creating the alphabet by drawing pictures of the sounds they make. Her dad’s “Ah” becomes the letter “A” because it looks like the carp’s mouth Taffy scratches out with bone marrow on a piece of bark. It’s happening in Natalie’s favorite story in Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, “How the Alphabet Was Made.” She picked the book out of a box of freebies at the Sand in the City festival in Olympia, Washington, where we’re on vacation. The paperback used to belong to the Thurston & Mason County Schools, according to a yellow sticker on its back. I also like “The Singsong of Old Man Kangaroo,” which starts out:
Not always was the Kangaroo as now we do behold him, but a Different Animal with four short legs. He was gray, and he was wooly, and his pride was inordinate: He danced on an outcrop in the middle of Australia, and he went to the Little God Nqa.
That second sentence is as good as it gets.
