Before you is the story-tale of the writer V. G. Rutkovsky "Bukhtik from a quiet backwater." Open the book, and its characters will meet you affably and trustingly, like friends. You will read here about the life of the guys in the forest sanatorium, about how the boy Seryozha came up with a fairy tale for a sick girl. And it so happened that the inhabitants of the forest and backwaters invented by Seryozha turned out to be simply necessary in the life of children and helped the children to become friends. And the grain of kindness embedded in this story served the girl's recovery.