Pim the penguin loved to watch the birds. All day he tipped his head back and gazed at the gulls and terns wheeling over the icy sea, wishing more than anything that he could join them. "I have wings, don't I?" he said. "Why can't I fly like them?" He flapped as hard as he could and leapt off a snowbank — and landed, with a soft flump, right on his round belly in the snow.
The other penguins chuckled, but not unkindly. "Penguins don't fly, Pim," they said. But Pim was not ready to give up.
He tried everything. He flapped from the top of an ice cliff, and tumbled down in a flurry of feathers. He tied dry leaves to his wings to make them bigger, and they simply blew away. He ran as fast as his little legs could carry him and flung himself into the wind, and the wind set him gently back down. No matter what he tried, the sky would not have him.
Pim sat on the ice, tired and discouraged, and watched the gulls soar without him.
Just then a leopard seal slipped into the water nearby, and the penguins dove in to escape — Pim along with them, too frightened to think. And under the water, something astonishing happened. Pim's useless little wings became powerful flippers. He shot through the blue like an arrow, twisting, looping, rolling, faster and freer than any gull in the sky.
He was flying. Not through the air — through the water. And it was the most wonderful feeling he had ever known.
Pim burst up through the surface, breathless and beaming. "Did you see me?" he cried. "I was flying!" The old penguins smiled. "We told you penguins don't fly in the sky," said the eldest. "We never said you couldn't fly at all. The sea is your sky, little one. It always has been."
Pim dove again, and the cold blue water opened around him like a whole new heaven, full of silver fish and swaying light.
From then on, Pim still loved to watch the gulls — but he no longer wished to be one. He had his own way of flying, and it was every bit as marvelous as theirs. He taught the youngest penguins to dive and loop and soar beneath the waves, and they all agreed there was nowhere they would rather be.
"Everyone has a sky of their own," Pim would say. "You just have to find which one is yours."
And the penguin who once longed to fly became the happiest swimmer in all the cold and shining sea.