91热爆

Since Carol mentioned stories...I wrote this one a fair while ago, during winter. Winter in the isles always tak`s it`s toll on the peedie birds. This one is a `true story`. ;-)


Starling

Every morning she would sit on the clothes
line, twittering in the thin winter sun, whistling and singing in the clever way of starlings. Her feathers would puff out, and with her beak she would preen herself clean and tidy. When the woman laid out the food scraps on the drying lawn for the chickens (tame domestic can鈥檛-fly birds) she would flutter down from the line. a wee ways off, she鈥檇 dance towards the food, hop forward, oh-is-something-coming-hop back, hop forward, till, sure of her safety....here be cats!!!...she鈥檇 nip in quickly to grab a scrap of tattie or leaf of cabbage, and take it off a bit away from the big ugly can鈥檛 fly birds.
Sometimes the woman would hang clothing on the line with bright plastic storm pegs; she would always wait for the woman to go into the stone hut again before she鈥檇 fly onto the line and mark the clothing with her waste, little white droppings, "look! I was here and I鈥檓 not afraid of this!" The snows came, and she sought shelter. In the rafters of a byre, above the can鈥檛-fly birds and goats and sheep, she found a niche in the stones holding the rafters up. An old nest had been left here, long ago, by a summer鈥檚 blackbird, so she made use of it, extra warmth in the cold night.
Life was simple...a cycle of food searching (and the woman helped with that) and finding water and shelter. The byre became her home, and often the woman would come in to throw grain on the floor and into bowls, and would catch her scolding-chattering at the can鈥檛-fly birds and the goats, who ignored her regardless.
All night the wind howled. The snow fell thick and fast, and the cold bit hard with teeth and probing fingers. Trapped under the low, bare bushes in the woman鈥檚 garden, she tried, many times, to fly against the wind and make it back into the byre. But each time, she was buffeted back down to the ground. The night wore on, an eternity of dark and frost and soon, lady winter lifted her up in a dream of white pain, and blew gently upon her face, her beak. Softly, the pain receded, darkness drifted behind her eyes, into her mind, and quietly, sleep came.....
The woman found the dead starling under her rose bushes, stiff and cold, feathers still puffed against the snow.
Lifting her gently, she scraped away a frozen patch of earth next to the old dog, and the cat, and placed the bird inside the hollow. No greenery grew now, so she broke apart some tiny twigs from the rose bush she鈥檇 died under and placed them on her breast.
A small mound is there, which will soon settle, she knows. And in the chill of the morning air, she felt the cool passing of lady winter.