As Birds Bring Forth the Sun by Alistair MacLeod

destruction but they had no effect upon his movement. He continued to bear down upon us rapidly but also unhurriedly, as if he were very certain of everything and very much in control.
    In romantic retrospect, I see myself sometimes as one of those “guides” in the Gothic novels, attempting to guard my tremulous female figure from the lascivious, slobbering male who, in the fulfilling of his desires, will cause irrevocable pain. Or by another extension the “concerned father” who will do almost anything to keep his vulnerable daughter from the one he knows to be not right for her. Defence against the figure “with but one thing on his mind.”
    But in the reality of that evening’s dusty road, she swung her head towards him with swift and arching strength. Her sweeping horns seemed almost to whistle through the air and she lifted me, with the rope wrapped tightly around my hand, completely off my feet. As if I were some slight and ridiculous irritant she could no longer tolerate. She swung my body almost into his looming head and I could see, as under a microscope, the dark and deepened liquid of his eyes, the gnarled, yellow rings at the base of his horns, his grey-blue jowls and the strings of beaded saliva trailing from his jaw. I could smell the sweet, heavy hotness of his grass-filled breath as their muzzles touched, and for an instant I thought I might lose my own life if either horned head should swing in thewrong direction. Then with a moan he swung behind her and reared up massively, his heavy shoulders silhouetted and rising into the evening sun which was settling now to the waiting sea. It seemed in that moment as if Morag were approaching her answer even as I was to be denied mine.
    “Is that what you want?” came a voice near at hand.
    “No,” I said or perhaps sobbed, “no,” almost before noticing where the voice came from.
    “Christ,” he said, sliding from the back of the horse almost in one motion.
    He too had come upon us suddenly and unexpectedly around the hairpin turn. He was apparently coming from the village, judging from the two rum bottles which protruded from his faded blue overalls, and it seemed he had not been hurrying because the huge, black horse which immediately began to crop the roadside grass showed no signs of perspiration. He was an old man then, deep into his seventies, and was my grandfather’s cousin and therefore also mine. He was a tremendously big man and had lived the kind of reckless life that big men sometimes lead in such communities – perhaps because there was often no one to stop them from doing almost anything they wanted. He was to die at a future time, late at night and in mysterious darkness, falling or pushed from the rickety balcony outside a bootlegger’s second-storey door. His neck was broken when he was discovered and his money gone and someone had cut the reins of his black horse and its companion as they stood hitched to the steel-wheeled wagon and waiting as on so many other nights. They had galloped home then, wildly through the night, the sparks flashing from the steel of their shoes as they swung the wagon behind them, lifting it off its wheels in the tightest turns and suspending it for seconds over the cliff’s edge and above the darkened sea. The people who lived along the road had been awakened by the sound of the rushing horses and had recognized them from the sure-footed terror of their hoofbeats inthe same manner that their descendants now recognize the individual motor sounds of different cars. They had heard the sounds before and did not know that on this occasion the black horses were careening through the night, driverless and without a human guide.
    When the horses arrived home they were covered with froth, the muscles of their shoulders and flanks trembled and twitched and their eyes were glassy and wild. The people of the house came out then and with lanterns and flashlights began to retrace the journey of the wagon, seeking to