The Why Siblings and the Missing Boat

One morning, the three otter siblings woke up and ran down to the river. And their little wooden boat was gone.

“Our boat!” cried Whyla. “Where did it go?”

Whyatt, the oldest, stood tall. “Let’s find the because.” He looked around. The rope that had tied the boat to the dock was lying loose in the water. “The boat floated away because the rope came untied.”

“That’s a good because,” said Whynn, the middle one. He looked at the sky, and the bent-over reeds, and the twigs scattered on the dock. “And also because there was a big wind last night. Look how the reeds are bent. The wind pushed the boat away.”

Whyla, the youngest, was wondering. “Maybe because a beaver took it!” she said. “Beavers love wood.”

Her brothers looked at each other. A beaver? That seemed unlikely. But neither of them laughed. They remembered what Larkin always said: a maybe is a good place to start. Then you check.

“Let’s check,” said Whyatt.

So they checked. They looked for beaver tracks in the mud. There were none. They looked for chewed wood. There was none.

“Okay,” said Whyla, and she didn’t feel silly at all. “My maybe doesn’t fit. I’ll let it go.”

“Now,” said Whynn, “which reason is mostly why?”

They thought about it together. The wind was strong. But the wind couldn’t have taken the boat if the rope had been tied tight.

“The rope,” said Whyatt slowly. “If the rope was tied properly, the wind couldn’t have pushed the boat away. So the boat floated off mostly because of the rope.”

“And also because of the wind,” said Whynn.

“And not because of a beaver,” Whyla giggled.

They walked along the riverbank, all three together, and there, a little way downstream, tangled in the reeds, was their boat. Safe.

As they paddled it home, Whyatt did something new. He tied the rope with a double knot. Then he tied it again.

“Because of the wind,” he said.

“Also because of the rope,” said Whynn.

“Maybe because you’re scared of losing it again,” said Whyla.

Whyatt laughed. “That one’s true too.”

The three siblings sat on their warm flat rock, feeling proud and close. Alone, each of them had one kind of why. Together, they had all three: because, also because, and maybe because. And together, they could choose which one was mostly true.