"So it's not impossible to cross the Allalonaya Mountains?" asked the little mouse acrobat with great eagerness.

She had been so daunted by the sight of these mighty mountains that she could not think of anything but her mother's sweet face which she had not seen for so long a time. But now she took heart and thought how beautiful the lands described by the Unicorn sounded. How she longed to hear the song of the flowers that carpeted the rainbow sand deserts when the clouds came! Or, if that was only a Unicorn legend, then still, how very beautiful a legend it was. Perhaps, other things even more beautiful were on the other side of those great mountains.

"No," said the Unicorn kindly, "it is very difficult to cross, but not impossible. We will have to climb and climb and climb and hope that the moon wishes us well and that we can find caves to shelter in along the way. But we will try, because Blanche may well live just on the other side of these mountains. I, too, have been troubled by the sound of far off battles. Did you know a Unicorn's horn picks up so many different kinds of waves and messages from the air that, if a Unicorn is not careful, he may become confused and pierced to the heart by the sorrow of what he hears and knows?"

When he said this, his face looked so sad that the little mouse acrobat's heart was moved. She was moved and also a little bit shamed, because she had been so caught up in her own fears and troubles and hopes and worries that it simply had not occurred to her that such a mysterious and marvelous creature as the Unicorn could have sorrows of his own. She thought how she would have hated being locked up in that toy cabinet herself, unable to move at all. She reached over and patted him. As she did, she shed a tear. The Unicorn reached out and licked the tear from her cheek.

Now, dear readers, I apologize to you. For all my love of words and trust in them, I can not describe the feel of a Unicorn's tongue on the cheek of a brave and tender mouse. Some things are beyond words. But what is beyond words is not necessarily beyond imagination.

So you will have to take on in the silence of your own tender and brave hearts, the job of imagining the feel of a Unicorn's tongue licking a single tear off the cheek of a brave and tender little mouse acrobat. As you do this work, dear reader, dear fellow writer, you take over the leading part in that collaboration which is the telling of a story. Thank you for mingling your life with mine.

After a brief rest, the little mouse acrobat and the Unicorn, now closer than ever before, started off, leaving their skates covered in a small pile of snow just at the lake's edge.

The little mouse acrobat kissed hers as she took them off and whispered to them, "Sleep peacefully, sweet skates, until we come back or until some other seekers such as we, whether with two feet or four, come by. Thank you for all the shapes you have shown us."

She patted the Unicorn's four skates, too. At first the climbing was not too hard. However, by late that afternoon, the only way they could move forwards was for the little mouse acrobat to cling tightly to the Unicorn while he leapt. His leaps took her breath away. She had never suspected any creature could move with such grace, agility and balance.

By dusk, they were not only higher than she had ever been, but higher than she had ever imagined being. The world of doing flips off the pendula of grandfather, great-grandfather and even great-great-grandfather clocks seemed far off, tame and very definitely appealing. She was beginning to wonder if adventure was such a good idea after all.

"If you listen very carefully," the Unicorn told her just then, "I think you can hear the stars singing to each other in the far off distance."

She pricked up her ears and tried to listen. Mice have very keen ears. They were at a little plateau just above a great bowl shaped wall that they had managed to climb. The little mouse acrobat happened to turn her head so that she saw, standing very quietly just a few paces away from them, a rabbit and a leopard, both white as snow. The rabbit was standing back on the pads of his back legs and smoking a long pipe with a wide grin on his face. He looked like he was having such a good time that the little mouse acrobat took an immediate liking to him.

"Now, why," she thought, "couldn't that horrid little man with all the candy in his sack have smoked a pipe like that, so peacefully, so contentedly, so endearingly?"

In fact, the rabbit did have bow legs and wide eyes, but there the resemblance to the little man, to the owl, to Druid Meyer and his ilk stopped.

"We've come to guide you," said the rabbit, "because we approve of your errand. We want you to know that the Allalonaya mountains need not be quite as lonely as creatures think they are. In fact, we have our own kind of sociability, perhaps a bit quieter, a bit less exciting, but then the air is very thin up here."

The snow leopard purred in agreement. So it was that the snow leopard and the snow rabbit led the little mouse acrobat and her Unicorn friend higher and higher in the days that followed. They climbed while it was light, then took shelter in a cave where a bear was sleeping. The sleeping bears kept them warm while they themselves rested and slept. Even the Unicorn slept a few winks, because it was awfully hard work climbing so high.

Each night, the snow rabbit took his pipe from its pouch, lit up and began to tell stories at once wondrous and sweet. The little mouse acrobat didn't know what it was about these stories but they took her fatigue and fear away, smoothed her brow and sent her off to sleep with a smile on her face, so that she woke feeling fresh and free in the mornings. In the mornings, she did flips and twists, back and forward for the snow rabbit and the snow leopard. They laughed and laughed.

The snow leopard was so impressed that he began to try to do flips and twists himself. For all his natural grace, he found them very difficult, so that he looked at the little mouse acrobat with new respect. His flopping cheerfully this way and that was such a jolly sight that soon they were all four swept away in laughter. The Unicorn's laughter was like nothing the little mouse acrobat had ever heard before.

It rang out in the thin air of that high cold clear morning near the blue roof of the world like the call of a tiny golden bird riding a swift running river all its own in the wind. Only the bear that had warmed them through the night slept on and on. Perhaps the sound entered his dreams and changed them so that a small contented smile appeared around his lips.