Celebrate The Season: Winter
	Stories by Allen Morgan
	Art by Vladyana Krykorka
	Six stories - 72 pages

The White Wolf's Secret Cave (part 1)

One day when Megan was making her way through the snow in the woods, she came to a place where a number of trees had clusters of ice in their branches. The pieces of ice were sparkling in the bright sunlight and the mounds of snow on the ground down below were unusually sparkly too. It made Megan wonder just how it could be.

"They look like diamonds," she said to herself.

She picked up a handful of sparkly snow, but the flakes were too small for her to know if they really were diamonds or not. She stretched on her tip-toes and tried to reach the clusters of ice overhead in the tree, but they were much too high in the branches. She was beginning to the think she would never be able to touch them at all when Winter came by.

"Can I help?" she asked Megan.

"Lift me up to the branches, Winter. I want to get some diamond ice."

So Winter lifted her up in the air and Megan broke off a piece. But when she was down on the ground again, she found that the ice wasn't quite what she'd thought. It had broken apart and was starting to melt as she held it in her hands. Megan felt disappointed.

"Diamonds are supposed to be hard," she said. "Maybe it's not diamond ice after all."

"Oh, it's diamond ice all right," Winter told her. "It's just not the very best kind."

"There's more than one kind?" Megan asked.

"There certainly is, diamond ice can be hard as rock, but it's not that easy to find," Winter told her. "Diamond ice comes from the sap of the tree. When the weather is warm the sap gets runny like syrup. When the weather is cold it gets icy and hard and turns into diamond ice."

"Then why is it melting?" asked Megan.

"When diamond ice grows high in the branches, the sun never lets it stay hard. True diamond ice comes out through the roots."

"You find real diamonds underground in caves," agreed Megan.

"You find diamond ice the same way," Winter said.

"I don't think I can dig that deep today," Megan said. "The ground is all frozen and hard."

"Sometimes a piece of diamond ice gets pushed to the surface by the roots of the trees. If you dig around in the snow a bit you might find one if you look."

"I'll look right now."

"I'll come along with you. I'm trying to find the White Wolf again. He's off to some secret place that he knows and I haven't seen him all day," Winter said.