The Snow Geese Read Online Free Page B

A pink kite was snared in the churchyard yew tree; there were clumps of moss like berets on the corners of the headstones. We climbed a gate and strode out across Danvers Meadow, heading westwards, leaning into the slope, last year’s sere beech leaves strewn through the grass. My father was wearing tan corduroy trousers and an old battered green waxed jacket; in one pocket he kept a matching green waxed hat in case of rain. We were walking at a steady pace, talking about the journey ahead of me, the rhythm of the walk going on under the words like a tempo.
    A drystone wall ran along the ridge ahead of us, and we knew exactly what to expect from that vantage: gentle undulating country, a system of quickthorn hedges, stands of trees, fields ploughed or planted or left for grazing, and, beyond Lower Clover Ground, a cattle building with a corrugated roof, the herd’s breath rolling out as vapour over wide steel gates. There were three straw bale ricks next to the building, with ladders and broken wood pallets propped against them, and further down the valley, beside the Sor Brook, stood a farmhouse with smoke rising from a brick chimney, a clutch of chicken sheds, a bunting of pink and white towels strung on a clothes line. This prospect was as familiar as our faces, as inevitable and apt, with spinneys, hedges, fields, slopes and the two buildings in their allotted places, each thing distinguished by a name: Hazelford, Buck Park and Jester’s Hill; Frederick’s Plantation, Stafford Wood and Miller’s Osiers; the Brake, the Shoulder of Mutton, the Great Ground.
    We climbed a stile and walked on down towards the cattle building, the backs of my large black gumboots flopping against my calves. The drone of a twin-prop plane made us look up: a few cumulus clouds, purple-grey underneath, topsides gleaming like schooner sails; the furrowed white streamer of a contrail; the bounding flight of small birds. We heard the clang and judder of cattle on the steel gates, the herd breathing like organ bellows. A triangular sign said
Use Crawling Boards on this Roof
, and on the far side of the building there were grey feed troughs and wire fencing rolls, an open flatbed trailer, an old matt red Massey Ferguson combine and a heap of distressed farm machinery: ploughshares, harrows, iron scuffles, rusting discs and tines. Beyond the building the ground fell away to our left, down to the Sor Brook and the cricket-bat willows planted alongside it, their leaves a flashy bluish-green in summer. The brook ran past the farmhouse: a former mill, a tall, narrow building with white-framed windows under black timber lintels.
    We passed the farmhouse, keeping to the high ground, with the Sor Brook meandering below us on our left side, and then we turned down the slope to the brook and walked back against the current through Keeper’s Meadow and Little Quarters, the ground here disrupted by the red-brown earthworks of moles. Month-old lambs, and ewes with daubs of red paint on their haunches, grazed close to the quickthorn hedge; wool tufts were snagged on the quickthorn. There was a constant background chirrup and twitter, and at intervals the boom, quite far off, of a bird cannon. We walked side by side, opening gates and latching them shut, getting closer and closer to home. The spire came into view, the weathercock’s tailplumes glinting in the low sun, and then the white stone chimneys of the house: our points of reference. There was no part of the world I knew so well, or loved so deeply. We walked up to the house, gravel crunching underfoot, taking our coats off as we approached the front door, the rooks garrulous in their high perches. I trod on the heels of the gumboots to get my feet out, and my father put one hand out against the wall to steady himself while he unlaced his boots.
    Later, with the heavy red curtains drawn across the French windows, we leaned forward over my map of the Americas, following the flight of snow geese from Texas