Piglet lived in a beech tree, in the middle of the Hundred Acre Wood. He had a small house inside the tree, with a small bed and a small chair and a small kitchen. Outside, there was a sign by the door. It said TRESPASSERS W. The sign had once said more than that, but some of the letters had gone away over the years, and Piglet had not got around to fixing it.

Piglet was small. He had always been small. He had gotten quite used to being small, except for the times when he hadn't.

The thing about being small, Piglet had noticed, was that big things looked bigger when you were small. Storms looked stormier. Dark nights looked darker. The forest made sounds at night that did not seem to bother Pooh, who was bigger, but bothered Piglet quite a lot.

"I am not very brave, I think," Piglet would say to himself, when nobody was listening. "I am only a Very Small Animal."

He was not unhappy about this, exactly. Small animals have their own kind of life, and Piglet's life had a great deal of good in it. He had friends. He had a warm bed. He had a tin of haycorns on the shelf for when he felt low.

But Piglet did sometimes wonder if being small meant he could not do the things that bigger animals could do. Like helping. Like going out into the dark. Like being the one somebody else could count on.

He did not know yet that being small was not always the same thing as being not enough.

One night, a great storm came to the Hundred Acre Wood.

The wind blew very hard. The rain came sideways. The trees made the sounds that trees only make when they are finding the whole thing rather difficult.

Piglet pulled his blanket up to his nose. He listened to the wind. He thought about how nice it was to be inside, in his small house in the beech tree, with the rain on the roof and the dark outside.

Then, underneath the noise of the storm, he heard something else. A small sound. A worried sort of sound, coming from somewhere not very far away.

Piglet sat up. He listened harder.

The sound was a small voice, too small to make out words, but he was almost sure it was a voice. Somewhere out in the rain, somebody was calling for help. Or somebody was crying. Or somebody was just trying not to be alone in the storm.

Piglet pulled his blanket tighter.

"It is only the wind," he said to himself. "It is only the wind. There is nothing out there. There is nothing out there at all."

He listened again.

It was not the wind.

Piglet got out of bed. He thought about Pooh. Pooh was bigger than Piglet, and braver than Piglet, and would know what to do. He sat down at his small desk and he wrote a note in his best handwriting. The note said: DEAR POOH I HEARD A NOISE OUTSIDE I THINK SOMEONE NEEDS HELP CAN YOU GO. He folded it carefully. He put on his small raincoat. He ran out through the rain to Pooh's house and slid the note under the door, and then he ran home as fast as his small legs would carry him.

He got back into bed.

He pulled the blanket up.

He could still hear the small sound outside.

Piglet lay in his small bed and listened to the rain on the roof. The note was under Pooh's door. Pooh would find it in the morning. Pooh would know what to do.

But the morning was a long way off. And whoever was outside was outside now.

Piglet thought about this for a while.

He thought about how Pooh was probably asleep. He thought about how the note would not be read until breakfast. He thought about the small voice in the rain, getting smaller, maybe, or colder, while it waited for somebody to come.

Piglet got out of bed.

"Oh dear," he said. "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear."

He put his small raincoat back on. He put on his small boots. He stood by the door for a long time, with his paw on the handle.

"Just one step," he said. "Just one, to see."

He opened the door.

The rain came in immediately and did something cold to his ears. The wind pushed him back a little. The dark looked very dark indeed.

He took one step. He was now outside. He was already quite wet.

"Well," said Piglet, "I am already wet. I might as well look."

He walked toward the sound. The path was muddy. The trees were whipping about. Piglet was very small and the storm was very big, and it took him a long time to get there. But he got there.

Under the roots of the big oak tree, with his ears flat and his paws over his nose, was Roo. Roo had got caught in the rain on his way home, and the wind had blown so hard he had been afraid to keep going.

Piglet sat down next to him in the rain.

"Piglet!" said Roo, looking up. "You came out in the storm! But you're very small!"

"Yes," said Piglet. "But you are smaller. And I thought someone ought to come."

In the morning, Pooh found the note under his door. He read it three times to be sure he understood it. Then he put on his ordinary hat in a thoughtful sort of way, and went out to look for Roo.

Roo was perfectly fine, and eating breakfast at home with Kanga. It was Piglet who Pooh found first, on the way back, sitting by the fire in his small house with a blanket around his shoulders and his small ears still a little damp.

"I got your note," said Pooh. "But you went out anyway."

"Yes," said Piglet. "I worried all night. So I went. I know it was only a note I sent you. But I thought the note and me together might be better than just the note."

Pooh thought this was a very sensible way of looking at it. Asking for help and helping yourself, he decided, are not opposites at all.

They sat by the fire for a while. The wood outside was quiet again, the way woods are after a storm, with the leaves still dripping but the sky beginning to clear.

"Piglet," said Pooh, "were you frightened? When you went out in the storm?"

"Oh yes," said Piglet. "I was very frightened. My ears were wet and my feet were cold and I wanted to go back inside the whole time."

"That sounds quite frightening," said Pooh. "It doesn't sound very brave."

"No," said Piglet. "But I went anyway. And I think, I think that might be what brave is. Not when you aren't frightened. But when you are frightened, and you go anyway."

Pooh thought about this for a little while.

"I think," he said at last, "that is the truest thing you have ever said."

Piglet did not stop being small after that. He went on being small for the rest of his life. But the storms did not look quite as stormy after that, and the dark did not look quite as dark. Not because they had changed. But because Piglet knew, now, that he could open the door anyway.

A Very Small Animal who can open the door in a storm is not, when you think about it, small at all.