One winter’s evening, as the snow came down thick and silent, a poor young man walking home heard a cry of distress from the reeds beside the road. There he found a crane caught fast in a hunter’s snare, beating its great white wings against the cords. Gently he worked the cords loose and set it free, and the bird looked at him a long moment with its dark eye, then rose into the falling snow and was gone.
That night, well after dark, there came a knock at his door. On the step stood a young woman, alone, with snow in her hair and no cloak against the cold. She had lost her way, she said, and begged shelter until morning. The young man had little enough, but he took her in and shared his fire and his supper, and in the morning she did not go, and somehow it seemed only right that she should stay. Before long they were married, and though they were poor they were happy.
One day the wife said to him, “I will weave you a bolt of cloth to sell at market. But you must promise me one thing: while I am weaving, you must never look into the room.” He promised, and she shut herself away, and for three days and three nights the loom clattered behind the closed door, and she neither ate nor slept.
On the third day she came out, pale and thin, and laid in his arms a bolt of cloth more beautiful than anything he had ever seen, white and light as a fall of snow. He carried it to market and sold it for a great price, more money than he had held in his life.
They wanted for nothing now, but the young man’s neighbours murmured of finer cloth and finer prices, and a small greed crept into him. “Weave me just one more,” he asked her. The wife’s face grew troubled, but she loved him, and so she agreed, and once more shut herself in with the same warning: he must not look.
But this time he could not master his curiosity. On the second night, with the loom sounding steadily beyond it, he slid the door aside a hand’s breadth and looked in.
There was no woman at the loom. There was a crane, thin and worn, plucking the last white feathers from its own body with its beak and weaving them into the cloth, thread by thread.
The crane turned and saw him. And at once she was a woman again, and she wept, for the spell was broken. “I was the crane you set free,” she said, “and I came to repay your kindness. But now that you have seen me as I truly am, I cannot stay.” She laid the unfinished cloth aside, and stepped out into the falling snow, and became a crane once more, and rose into the grey sky. Though he ran out into the cold calling after her, she circled once above the house and flew away, and he never saw her again.
Gratitude will give until it has nothing left to give, and the one who demands more than is freely offered is left with nothing at all.