As Birds Bring Forth the Sun by Alistair MacLeod Page A

find him in the roadside ditch or over the cliff’s edge on the boulders touched by the sea, or even perhaps lying sprawled in the middle of the road. But they did not find him all that night and in the morning someone brought the official, final news. They noticed then that the reins had been cut and wondered why they had not noticed it before.
    But that is ahead of my story. For at that meeting on the narrow road and in the presence of the bull, we did not know what future was in store for any of us. Our present seemed too real.
    In memory, now, he moved with tremendous speed, although he did not seem to hurry and the illusion was probably due to the length of his legs and the amount of ground he covered in a single step. Without breaking stride, he bent down and his right hand scooped up a large rock which lay by the roadside. It seemed almost the size of a bowling ball yet he carried it easily and lightly in his gigantic hand. As he approached the rearing, lunging bull, he extended his left hand up and forward until it grasped one of the mountain sheep horns and then in one fluid arc of motion and follow-through, he brought the rocky boulder down between the bull’s concentrated, widespread eyes. The thud of the rock on skull was like the sound on the butchering days and the bull toppled sideways and to his knees. His eyes, drained of their passion, rolled glassily upwards in their sockets, and two thinstreams of saliva now green from regurgitated grass trickled from his nostrils and back into his sagging mouth. His penis, still dripping fluid, collapsed limply within its sheath. His day’s breeding or attempted breeding was over.
    “Did he get it in?” he said, wiping his hand on his overalls and then reaching for one of the rum bottles.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I couldn’t see.”
    “If he got it in,” he said, “you never can be sure. What are you doing here anyway apart from trying to get yourself killed?”
    Briefly and disjointedly I stammered out the nature of my mission.
    “Well,” he said, “you may as well keep going. I’ll go with you partway if you want. Here, you jump on the horse.”
    Easily and with the same arm he had used for the rock, he lifted me up to the back of the horse and then passed me the reins. He took Morag’s rope in his hand and almost automatically she began to move in step with him while I followed behind on the horse. I looked back once at the bull and he was still kneeling and partially lying by the roadside where he had been struck down. His head seemed to loll to one side.
    After we had negotiated the remainder of the hairpin turns and had travelled perhaps a mile, he stopped and passed Morag’s rope towards me. I dismounted from the horse, exchanging the reins for the proffered rope.
    “You should be all right now,” he said. “Perhaps you should go back by the other road.”
    Taking a deep pull from one of his rum bottles, he mounted the black horse and turned him in the direction of his original homeward journey.
    Morag and I continued on our way more quietly and more slowly than when we had set out. When we entered the laneway to the MacDougall yard, the sun was almost setting and I could see that they were hurrying to get their last load of hay into the barn before darkness. Mr. MacDougall was on top ofthe hay wagon, organizing the pitches tossed up by the others, and he was not awfully glad to see us.
    “Jesus H. Christ, another goddamn cow,” he said, driving his fork deep into the hay before him. I was reminded of my father’s earlier remarks.
    Nevertheless, he climbed down from the wagon and his place was taken by one of his sons. On the way to the barn, I told him what had happened.
    “Did he get it in?” he asked.
    “I dont know,” I said, “I couldn’t see.”
    “He probably didn’t,” he said, “if it happened as fast as you say. Perhaps he didn’t reach her. Sometimes it takes them a while to get set. Anyway, we’ll just have to