One day, as Linwood and Ralf were going for a walk, a Trail-eating Tanager flew past. He was being chased by an alarmingly large flying cauliflower. Linwood and Ralf jumped hurriedly out of the way and watched the tanager and the cauliflower curiously. They had never seen anything like this before.

The cauliflower was about three feet in length and bright white, with large grey feathery wings. The two snail friends had never seen a flying cauliflower behave in this way before; they were generally quite docile, and were wonderful pets. They were usually much smaller than this one as well; a foot and a half at the very most.

The tanager also seemed very shocked. Perhaps it had done something to upset the cauliflower, but nobody had ever heard of cauliflowers chasing birds.

The two snails followed the cauliflower and tanager as fast as they could, but since snails move very slowly, they were soon left far behind.

“We should see if we can find out what’s going on,” said Linwood.

“Yes, we should!” said Ralf.

They continued on their way, following the path of the tanager and cauliflower as well as they could.

After a while, Ralf and Linwood met an eagle and a dove who were staring roughly in the direction in which the two snails were traveling.

“Excuse me,” said Ralf, very, very politely as he found eagles to be intimidating, “but did you happen to see a cauliflower chasing a tanager?”

“Yes we did, young snail,” responded the eagle. He seemed to be upset. “It was the most startling thing that I ever saw,” he explained to the dove. The dove nodded in sympathy.

“Which way did they go, please?” asked Linwood.

The dove indicated a direction close to where they had been heading.

“Thank you very much!” said Linwood.

“Do you plan on catching that wild cauliflower?” asked the dove, curiously. The eagle looked hopeful.

“Well, we want to try to discover what is happening and why the cauliflower is chasing the tanager if we can. I don’t know if we will be able to catch the cauliflower, but we will try.”

“Please do!” exclaimed the eagle. The dove nodded her head in agreement. “No bird is going to be safe with that cauliflower loose!” said the eagle.

Linwood and Ralf politely said goodbye to the eagle and dove, and then continued following the cauliflower.

A little while later, they met a flying horse, treading air in a similar way to how someone might tread water, and looking in a direction close to that in which the two snails were traveling.

“Excuse me,” said Ralf, “but have you seen a giant cauliflower chasing a tanager?”

“Yes, they passed by here half an hour ago, after flying circles around me twenty or thirty times,” said the flying horse. “I am still dizzy.”

“Oh, thank you!” said Ralf. “Which way did they go?”

“Off towards those cliffs.” The flying horse pointed. “Are you two trying to catch it?”

“Well,” said Ralf, “we don’t know if we’ll be able to catch it, you know, but we are very curious about what is happening.”

“We told a nervous eagle and dove that we’d try to catch it if we are able to,” added Linwood.

The flying horse examined the two snails and smiled. “If you are wanting to catch the flying cauliflower, you’ll want to go a bit faster, don’t you think?” she asked them.

They looked at each other. Now that the matter was mentioned to them, it seemed very obvious, but it hadn’t occurred to either of them. They had just been planning on going on slowly, asking everyone they saw about the cauliflower, and hopefully the cauliflower and tanager would eventually get tired and stop so that the snails would be able to catch up.

“I suppose that would be a good idea,” said Linwood.

“Climb onto my back,” said the flying horse, “and I’ll carry you. I want to know what’s happening, too, and I’m much faster than you.”

“Thank you very much!” said Linwood as the two snails crawled up onto the flying horse’s back.

Once they got up there, they had to admit that she was much faster than them. The wind blowing in their faces was so strong that they hid inside their shells, and just peeked out.

By and by, the flying horse slowed down and came to a stop on a cliff. The two snails slowly and cautiously poked their heads out of their shells to make sure they had really stopped, and then found themselves face to face with another sky snail, one who they had never met before.

“Hello there!” called the flying horse, “did you happen to see a cauliflower chasing a tanager coming this way?”

“About five minutes ago” was the calm response.

“Oh!” said Linwood, “I think that we will catch up with them!”

“Maybe so. If you don’t mind the dark,” said the other snail.

Linwood and Ralf exchanged glances.

“What do you mean, if we don’t mind the dark?” asked the flying horse.

“They flew in there,” said the snail, moving his head to point at a cave that was just below them in the cliff. “I’ve been hearing tanager echoes since then. I suppose the bonkings and bangings I’ve been hearing are the cauliflower running into the walls.”

The flying horse was not ready to give up this easily. She was interested in this matter, and she was never a horse to give up something interesting very easily (so long as the interesting thing did not make her dizzy). So she said to her passengers, “Well, I’m not afraid of the dark. Shall we go in?”

Linwood and Ralf nodded, though Ralf was a bit nervous and Linwood wondered how they were to keep from knocking into walls.

“I’m coming with you if you’re going in, of course,” said the other snail, coming onto the flying horse’s back.

And then the flying horse took off and circled around towards the cave, paused a moment, and then plunged inside.

Sure enough, they heard the tanager and cauliflower somewhere in front of them. Moving cautiously and much more slowly, the flying horse followed the noises. It grew darker, and darker, but not completely dark; the new snail turned out to glow in the dark, fortunately.

And the noises grew louder and louder.

And then, when it was very loud, it started to grow lighter again. Soon, the flying horse walked into a lighted cavern, and the horse and snails looked curiously at the giant cauliflower still chasing the tanager. Both were moving much more slowly than before; it had been a very long chase for them. As the adventurers neared them, the cauliflower landed on the floor with a bump, exhausted. The tanager, catching sight of them, landed and walked slowly towards them and hid in between Linwood and the new snail. It curled up and pretended to be a snail shell.

“Now what?” asked the flying horse. “Should we catch the cauliflower?”

“I... suppose so,” said Linwood. “But how?”

The flying horse considered. “Perhaps you three sky snails try making a snail trail basket in which to carry it?”

“Would that work?” asked Ralf in surprise; their slime trails were just slime, after all.

“I think it would if I helped you,” said the flying horse. “Flying horse breath makes sky snail trails quite strong.

“Oh,” said Linwood in surprise. But he supposed the flying horse knew what she was talking about.

So the three sky snails made a sort of basket (and a lid to go on it) out of their snail trails, and the flying horse breathed very carefully on just the bits of snail trail that made up the basket and lid, and she was right. They became quite firm and solid. (The tanager watched them cautiously with one eye, and pretended that its head was completely hidden underneath its wing.)

The next thing to do was to get the cauliflower into the basket. The snails tipped the basket over and the horse rolled the cauliflower into it with her hooves. Then the horse and snails together tipped the basket upright (that cauliflower was heavy!) and, making sure the cauliflower’s wings were nicely folded inside the basket, someone put the lid on top.

The tanager, excited, helped the snails get the basket onto the flying horse’s back and, when it was up there successfully (with strange but quiet thumping noises coming from it now and then), the tanager sat on the lid. Possibly to make sure that the cauliflower couldn’t get out.

The snails having come onto the flying horse’s back as well, they set off towards the mouth of the cave and the light. The three snails held the basket in place on the flying horse’s back. After they were back on top of the cliff, everyone helped to put the basket on the ground.

“So,” said Linwood to the tanager, after they had all caught their breaths again after that effort, “why was the cauliflower chasing you in the first place?”

“I perched on it, thinking that it was a bush,” the tanager admitted. “It was not a mistake that I will ever make again! I never would have done it,” he added, “if it had been the normal size. It didn’t occur to me that it was animate, being that large and its wings folded around it so subtly."

“It is a very unusual cauliflower,” said Linwood, comfortingly.

“Well,” said the tanager, “thank you very much for rescuing me! But I need to go home now; my wife and children must be wondering where I am.” Still, he hesitated, probably not looking forward to flying all the way home.

The flying horse laughed. “Would you like a ride home?” she asked him.

The tanager brightened up immediately. “Yes, please!” he said.

Linwood and Ralf consulted with each other and announced that they would stay here with the cauliflower and start for home the next day.

“There’s no hurry,” explained Linwood to the flying horse. “Nobody’s expecting us, and we can take as long as we like to get home.”

“Besides,” said Ralf, “somebody ought to stay with the cauliflower to make sure it doesn’t chase anybody again!”

The other snail said that he would stay with the cauliflower too, so the three snails said goodbye to the flying horse and tanager, and watched until they were out of sight.

Now that they had time to talk, the other snail introduced himself as Frankie. He suggested that they let the cauliflower out of the basket and see how it would behave.

Cautiously, they lifted the lid and, since that the cauliflower didn’t try to escape, they tipped over the basket and rolled it out, patting it soothingly.

“I think that I will tame it,” announced Frankie. He tied a string around the cauliflower.

“Let me help!” said Ralf.

“Me too! Me too!” said Linwood.

“It is a long way home,” said Frankie. “With an untamed cauliflower, it ought to take us about a week to reach the seashore if the cauliflower doesn’t try to chase birds again, don’t you think?” he asked.

“Oh, do you live near the seashore too?” asked Ralf.

“Of course. I recognized you at once; I see you all the time. You’re the only spotted snail in the kingdom; you’re easy to notice."

Linwood tried not to laugh; Ralf blushed.

2. Spotted Snail

Now, in the kingdom of the sky snails, there were snails with a variety of patterns on their shells. There were shells with stripes, and shells with zigzags, and solid-colored shells. But there was only one sky snail in the entire kingdom who had a spotted shell. He was a dark blue snail named Ralf. He was very proud of his spots, and the other sky snails admired him very much. Except for Linwood.

Linwood was a smallish sky snail of a pale purple color. He wasn’t ever particularly excited by what was popular. Of course he realized that there was a spotted snail in the kingdom, but he wasn’t impressed by this. Interested, yes, but not nearly as interested as the spotted snail himself would have liked. He was a simple snail with simple pleasures. He liked chatting with trail-eating tanagers, giving chipmunks and rabbits rides, and drawing slime trail pictures in the air.

One day, Ralf happened to notice suddenly that Linwood wasn’t paying him the proper attention. He decided, naturally enough, that this situation had to be fixed. But how?

First, he tried getting some of his more enthusiastic fans to follow him as he paraded around and around Linwood, shouting loudly, “Here is the spotted snail, Ralf!”

But Linwood just smiled cheerfully and said hi to all of them. He kept on his way to visit his grandmother and didn’t really know why these other snails kept circling him. Still, if it made them happy, it didn’t particularly bother him.

Since that didn’t work, next Ralf decided to have a long conversation with Linwood about the patterns on shells. Linwood was busy examining a daisy tree that was in bloom when Ralf found him. Ralf was disappointed that Linwood didn’t listen to him silently. Linwood responded politely enough to Ralf, but he also inserted his own comments on the beauty of daisy trees and other matters that he thought might be interesting to Ralf.

Ralf decided to try something more drastic next. That night, after Linwood was snugly curled up in his snail shell for the night on top of a pleasant hill, Ralf got to work. He had spent hours making posters, and he now posted them all over on the trees and bushes surrounding Linwood. Some of them said, “Spotted Snails are Best!” some of them, “Pay Special Attention to Spotted Snails!” and still others, “Ralf: The Only Spotted Snail in the Kingdom.”

Ralf was getting along nicely with his poster posting when Linwood woke up and poked an eye out of his shell.

“It’s not morning yet, Ralf, is it?” he asked, sleepily.

“No,” the embarrassed Ralf hurried to say. “Go back to sleep. I won’t be here long.”

By this time, Linwood had noticed one of the posters, and he poked the rest of his head out of his shell to examine it. He solemnly studied each poster, and as he did, he was confused at first. But by the time he had looked at the last poster, he understood.

“So that’s what you’ve been up to all this time!” he said. “I had been wondering. You’ve never paid much attention to me before, and I was wondering why you were suddenly interested in me. But…” he continued, confused, “naturally a spotted sky snail shell is interesting and unusual, but doesn’t mine work just as well?”

Ralf stared at Linwood. He hadn’t thought of that before. He felt even more embarrassed now. “That’s a completely new idea to me!” he finally confessed. “I think that you are right.”

Linwood smiled a snaily smile. “Why don’t we go back to bed?” he asked sleepily, and after a cheerful good-night, he went back into his shell, except for one eye that peeked out at Ralf.

Ralf settled down next to one of his ridiculous posters (deciding right away to feed them to a sea cucumber in the morning, as sea cucumbers loved to eat paper that other creatures no longer needed). He curled up inside his shell, except for one eye that peeked out at Linwood.

Then, happily, they both brought their eyes inside and fell asleep.

It was noticed after that day that Ralf stopped talking so much about his spotted shell. The other sky snails also noticed that Ralf and an ordinary-looking and smallish pale purple snail (whose name, Linwood, they could remember if they thought about it hard enough) were suddenly firm friends and were often found together drawing pictures in the sky, or giving sea cucumbers papery treats, or going to visit Linwood’s grandmother.