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Once upon a time, in a peaceful, green forest, there lived a little fox named Lila. Lila was quick, clever, and very curious. But she had a dream she couldn’t get out of her head…
“I want to fly!” she would say every day as she watched the birds in the sky.
The other animals looked at her in amazement.
“But you’re a little fox, Lila! Foxes don’t fly,” Imma the tortoise would tell her.
“I don’t care! If the birds can, I can too!” she would reply resolutely.
For days and days, Lila the fox tried everything she could think of to learn to fly.
First, she took large chestnut leaves and attached them to her paws and back with honey she had found near a beehive. She jumped up and shouted:
“Now I can fly! Look at me, Imma! I’m the fox-bird!”
But she only got stuck to a branch, all sticky and with the leaves flopping in the wind.
“Maybe I need real wings…” she thought.
So she made some wings with thin twigs and fallen feathers, tied together with dry grass. She put them on like a backpack, climbed a tall tree trunk… and launched herself, shouting:
“Fly!”
She landed headfirst in a pile of leaves. Plop!
“I’m not hurt!” she said, laughing with leaves on her head.
Then she tried to make a balloon with cork bark and old fabric from an abandoned shop. She filled it with hot air with the help of the inventor beaver, Master Brunet.
“Now that’ll go up!” she said happily.
But the balloon just went “poof!” and deflated, flying away like a punctured balloon.
She also tried to run as fast as she could to gain momentum, jumping off rocks and hills. Each time she ended up rolling on the ground, a tangled mess of paws and tail, but she never stopped laughing.
“You’ve fallen fifty times!” Quirze the squirrel told her, her eyes wide.
“Yes, but each time I fall a little farther!” Lila replied.
“Aren’t you going to hurt yourself?” Quirze the squirrel asked.
“If I give up, I’ll never know!” the little fox answered with a smile.
One day, a very wise old owl appeared in the forest: Mrs. Estrella. All the animals listened to her when she spoke.
“What are you doing, little fox?” she asked in a gentle voice.
“I try to fly, but I haven’t managed it yet,” said Lila, a little sadly.
Mrs. Estrella smiled and said,
“Perhaps you can’t fly like a bird… but you can do things that birds can never do. You can run among the trees, sniff out clues, hide, help others… And if you look with an open heart, you’ll see that flying can also mean dreaming, learning, and growing.”
Lila was thoughtful. She looked at the sky, and then around her. She saw her paws, strong and agile. She smelled the wind. And she smiled.
From that day on, she stopped wanting to fly… but she never stopped dreaming.
And so, Lila became a very special little fox: the one who taught all the other animals in the forest how to dream.
