The Day Before · Sprout · ages 6-8
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Read by an AI-generated voice. The words on this page are the transcript.
Every Moon
The hammer rang once. A spark jumped off the anvil and did not go out. It waited. They followed.
Warm wind blew the Green away, and the ground under their feet was somewhere else, the day before.
A river. Falling leaves. A thin moon. A girl.
"My uncle is going away for the winter," she said. "In spring the salmon come back. I must know the day."
"I noticed it! That's a..." said Inkling. Bzzz.
You can't bring the answer. You can only bring the question.
"We go when it feels warm," said the girl. But last year a warm week came in winter. The falls were empty.
She tied a knot every day. Soon the cord was a tangle.
"What comes round again?" said Inkling. "The moon! Thin, round, thin. Count moons, not days."
"Could each moon have a place in the ground?" said Lan.
The girl dug twelve little pits in a row. A stone sits in this moon's pit. Each new moon, it moves along.
"Twelve moons are a bit short of a year," said her uncle.
"Where does the sun come up on the shortest day?" said Lan.
In a dip in the hills! They pointed the pits at the dip. When the sun rises there, the stone goes back to the start.
In spring, the girl read the stone. "Now!" The salmon were jumping!
Warm wind blew the day before away, and the grass under their feet was the Green.
Under DOOR, after O and P, was a new letter. E.
The spark dimmed to a warm dot and settled back on the anvil. The Green was just the Green again.
Back on the Green
Lan moved a button along the calendar each day until her birthday.
Tell the story back to someone. Why did the moons work?
Who you met
-
Inkling a child of the Green Names what she notices -
Lan a child of the Green Goes first; makes a friend in a minute
Every recurring character has a short tune, so you can tell who is on stage before a word is said. The tunes play only when you tap, and the Reading Access sound switch turns them off.
The Honest Page
Which parts are true, stretched or made up — and what does nobody know?
True
- At Warren Field, near Crathes Castle in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, people dug a row of twelve pits about ten thousand years ago. They were first dug up by archaeologists in 2004. Source
- In 2013 a team of archaeologists explained the pits as a calendar of the moon's phases, lined up with the place on the skyline where the sun rises on the shortest day of winter. They called it the oldest calendar of its kind yet found, made by people who hunted and gathered their food. Source
- From one new moon to the next takes about twenty-nine and a half days, so twelve moons come to about 354 days, about eleven days short of a year. Source
Stretched
- In the story one girl digs all twelve pits in one evening and keeps the count for a winter. What we simplified: Nobody knows who dug the real pits, or how long it took. People at the time hunted, fished and gathered, but nobody knows whether these pits were used to time the salmon.
Made up
- Lan and Inkling, the spark, the buzzing word, the girl, her uncle and the salmon falls are made up.
Nobody knows
- Nobody knows for certain what the pits were for. The calendar is how archaeologists explained them; the people who dug them left no words to tell us. Source