Noah and the Great Boat

Noah was a kind old man with a big soft beard, a wide hat, and a hammer he'd had since he was young.

One day he heard a voice, gentle as rain on a roof, and it said something very strange.

“Noah. Build a boat.”

Now Noah looked around at his garden. At his vegetables. At the hills, and the dry brown grass, and the sky with not one single cloud in it.

There was no sea anywhere. Not a puddle. Not a pond.

“A boat,” said Noah. “Right you are then.”

And he picked up his hammer.

It took a long, long time.

The neighbours came to watch. They leaned on the fence and said, “Noah, there's no water,” and Noah said, “Not yet,” and kept hammering.

Tap. Tap. Taptaptap.

Some days his arms ached. Some days it rained sawdust in his beard. Some days he built one single plank and that was all he had in him — and do you know what?

One plank is enough. One plank, and then tomorrow, another one.

That's how the whole enormous boat got built.

Because then the animals came.

Two by two, up the long wooden ramp — elephants going thump thump, giraffes ducking their heads, rabbits hopping between everybody's feet, birds settling in the rafters like a fidgety choir.

And behind them, very softly, the first grey rain began.

It rained for a long time.

Inside the great boat it was warm and noisy and it smelled of hay and wet dog. Noah fed everybody twice a day and lost count of the giraffes at least once.

And then one morning it was quiet.

No rain. Just the boat, rocking gently on a wide grey sea, and the sound of water going shush… shush… against the wood.

Noah waited. And waited. Waiting, it turns out, is its own kind of brave.

So he opened a little window and sent out a dove.

She came back with nothing.

He waited seven whole days, and sent her again.

And this time — oh, this time — she came flapping back with one small green leaf in her beak.

One leaf. That's all. But one leaf means a tree, and a tree means land, and land means home.

Noah held that little leaf in his enormous old hands and cried, just a bit, in the way grown-ups do when something good happens.

The boat came to rest on a green hillside, and Noah opened the great door, and out they all went — bounding and galloping and flapping into the wet shining world.

And above them the sky did something it had never done before.

It went red. Then orange. Then yellow, green, blue and purple, all at once, in one enormous arch from one side of the world to the other.

A rainbow.

And it meant: the storm is over. It won't be like that again. You can rest now.