Flight of the Soul E-Book

alastair macleod

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

A story of geese and men. In 2012 and 2013 a massive cull of wild geese was approved by the Scottish Government after pressure from a small group of farmers.This was happening in Orkney but it could be anywhere in the world where the activities and the demands of humans gain precedence. Two young men find that killing wildlife has a price, one they did not expect.

Leseprobe

alastair macleod

Flight of the Soul

to the wild geese; "The ancients said the geese are the spirits of our long dead ancestors from deep time. Each year they return from the otherworld in the autumn to comfort us in our loss, then leave in the spring. Here, in the energy and life in those birds is a message from nature, the one we long for. The message says “I, summer, will return”.BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

Flight of the Soul

The old gander lifted his head. Around him his family were feeding on the short grass of an Orkney field. It was still. For 3 days a force 9 gale had blasted itself over the low lying islands. But the geese were tough. They were here because here conditions were better than in Greenland where by now the ground was white and frozen.

They had waited patiently for a north westerly air stream to help their muscles make the flight, the same wind that had blasted the land had carried them forward over the stormy north Atlantic but it had tired them. Now they needed to feed up and replace their fat reserves. Who knows, if the weather worsened, they might have to fly south to the Solway or even further.

The gander was extra anxious. He knew that in weather conditions this still, it would be harder for his family to take flight at danger; without the lift of the wind they had to work harder to lift their bodies into the air. From time to time his mate watched in turn, while he ate, teething the grass from in front of his feet. They were seven, four youngsters from this year’s brood the gander and his mate and a yearling from last year.

Their ancestors had flown this migration for thousands of years - before man even. Hearts beating over the ocean driven by instinct and knowledge.

On the Orkney Islands, where there were no foxes weasels or stoats, the threat to the geese was confined to man.

The gander scanned the field edges to front, side and rear for signs of the upright creature.

But it was cunning, and lay concealed in hides made of straw bales placed around the field.

These were not Neolithic men driven by the need for food. They were here for sport. The greedy farmers had egged them on. They were young; they did not know that to create life is difficult while destroying it can take an instant.

It was the dog the gander saw first. A warning cry was barely from his rising feathered body when shots crashed out felling first his mate, then this year’s goslings. He banked, his yearling mirroring the move, foiling the guns whose stray shots bounced off their feathers. He headed for the sun to blind them, beating hard, soon out of range. On the ground all except one, were dead, bodies bloodied. His mate, winged, was quickly caught and her graceful neck wrung.

A summer of feeding and protecting his young was wasted and his mate of three years was dead.

The yearling several times tried to wheel back, but the old gander kept on. He knew what awaited them there. Only when they were over the loch did he wiffle down to the surface, the yearling splashing beside him.

From the field, the four by four took the laughing men to the farmhouse for beer. In the pickup the wings that had flown nearly a thousand miles, grew stiff. Eyes that had seen the Greenland ice cap and followed the stars on their migration grew dull. Only the dog, hunched as he shivered by the freezing bodies in the pickup could really smell their death, sense the emptiness where once there had been life.

Kevin Shearer was 24 and out on the town. He had agreed to meet his pal Jimmy at the Skipper Bar of the Kirkwall Hotel. With other members of the football club, they were celebrating a win. He showered and put on a clean shirt. It had been a busy week on the farm. Combining the barley as much as they could before persistent rain had stopped them.