Air and Angels by Susan Hill Page A

and hollows, knew that what appeared to be so silent, so still, so dead under the moon, teemed with hidden life.
    Then, as he stood, he heard the faintest sound, the soft slip of an oar into the water. And the smell of pipe tobacco came up to himfaintly, sweetly, on the night air.
    The small boats were leaving, the first few gliding away across the estuary, the outline of the men dark as felt against the moon.
    The punt-gunners, the wild-fowlers, at the end of their frustration and confinement in the storm, were making silently, stealthily, for their hunting grounds out on the waters, and their secret watching and waiting for the nightbirds and the dawn birds, their prey.
    He would not sleep again now, would not even wait until first light.
    For he, like the other men, was restless to be away, to be out there on the water, though quite alone, and with a less violent purpose.
    He dressed and packed his things in the canvas bag, and as he did so, he felt that everything else had dropped away, every other thought or considerationin the world, he felt light and unburdened, and full of exhilaration.
    And he was a boy again, the same boy who had got ready like this, furtively, quietly, to go out in the hush of early morning, through the mist that lay low over the Lake, in the fishing boat of Collum O’Cool. Collum O’Cool, who scarcely spoke, only rowed and fished and sat, close and still. And there had been an absolute bondbetween them, a companionship and understanding such as he had never known in the rest of his life.
    Nor did he expect ever to know it again.
    He descended the dark, creaking staircase, and, after leaving money on the taproom counter in payment, went out of the inn and across the moonlit quay to the boat-shed, where Abel Sinnett had made the small dinghy ready for him days before.
    And the smellof the salt sea blew across into his nostrils and the rich, wet, pungent reek of the marsh, and he felt as if his own body were light enough to rise and soar into the night sky towards the stars pricked out in it, like one of the sea-birds, great of wing.
    The island was very small, no more than a few dozen yards across, and marshy, with reeds fringing the outer edges, and thicker grass and somealder and willows towards the centre. On the eastern side stood the hut, with the houseboat moored beside it. And all around, water, flat and still and luminous under the moon.
    He tied up the dinghy and for a moment or two, rested there; as the lap of the waves he had made stilled and died away, there was silence again, thin and pure.
    Then, in the distance, the faintest of cries, a curlew, passingalong the far fringe of the tide.
    And soon, that other sound, like no other in the natural world, at first a breath on the air, a movement, rather than a sound, but growing rapidly louder, as the geese came through the night towards him. He could see the skein now, flying towards the sea, white in the moonlight. As they approached, the beating of their wings sounded across the silent water-lands,and then he could hear them yelping, baying like hounds in full cry, their huge, beating bodies directly over his head, he looked up into the heart of the fast-flying pack, before they had gone, over the marshes and the tongue of the estuary, and away to sea, and only the last echo came back, like the faint wash after a great wave, and was absorbed again into the surrounding silence.
    With thesmallest sigh over the water, the tide turned.
    Then the cold, hard crack of a gunshot, from one of the hidden men, and the crack reverberated, around the rim of the night sky, and others quickly succeeded it, and then the ducks rose in panic and clamour, and made away.
    Once, he had shot birds himself, in Ireland as a boy, and for a time out here, with the fowlers. But his heart had pulled againstit, and he had regretted every bird shot, every airy, feathered body that had plummeted like lead from the free sky. Until finally he had shot a curlew, and felt