The Painted Tent by Victor Canning Page B

find her way to the succulent flesh of flanks and hindquarters.
    Her meal done, she flew back to her beam and watched the evening darkness flood the valley while the renewed rain, heavier than before, slashed down as though it meant to drown the world. The brook was so swollen with the run-offs from the valley that it had come up four feet in a fast storm spate, a coffee-coloured foam and scud-topped torrent that beat high against the arch of the small stone road-bridge and was already spreading over the lower parts of the pasture and, within an hour, was to be over the road by the bridge.
    When Smiler went out late that night to visit the barn, the rain battered against his storm jacket and the yard water swilled around his gumboots. He flicked his torch up to Fria and saw her huddled tight back against the barn wall into which the beam was set. For a moment or two he was tempted to creep up quietly into the loft and make a grab for her and put her back into the shelter of her cage, but it was a thought that died almost before it was born. In the darkness and rain he was sure to make a muff of it and, anyway, he knew that Fria would not be sleeping. She would be alert to any noise or movement from the loft. He did his round of the barn, came back across the flooded yard to check the stable doors and then went off to bed.
    He lay in bed, reading and listening to the rain beat at his window, and finally he slept.
    Outside Fria knew no sleep. She knew only the darkness peopled by darker shapes and the noise of the rain and the higher, steadier noise of the spate-filled brook racing away towards the Taw.
    An hour before first morning-light the weather changed. The steady downpour eased off, sometimes stopped for a few minutes, and then abruptly what wind there was backed to the north-west and began to strengthen. Within half an hour it was roaring straight in from the sea and the long reaches of the Atlantic, thundering over miles of countryside and howling down into the valley from the far slope in a full gale that stripped dead branches from trees, seized anything that was loose and tossed it into the air, plucked slates from roofs and tore great patches in the old thatch of cottages. It came now not in one long steady pulse of moving, turbulent air, but in great gusty spasms that would follow a lull, and sometimes – because of the vagaries of the land over which it poured – it would change direction suddenly.
    Her body plumage tightened down against its force, her eyes half closed as she faced the wind. Fria clung to her beam and there was a strength now in her legs and talons that held her firm against the sudden vortices and vigorous updraughts that swirled against the little pent roof above her. Now from this side, now from that, now from above and now from below, the violent, invisible tide assaulted Fria, and she held her place and would have gone on holding her place had it not been for the unexpected.
    The loft door which was open behind her was held in place by a small bar on its rear side which was hooked into a stout staple which had been driven into one of the cross-beams of the roof timbers that straddled the inside of the loft. The hook and staple were strong, but the wood of the cross-beam, though its heart was a solid core of oak, had an outer lay of ancient wood which had been bored and tunnelled by woodworm. Each time the wind roared into the loft and then was drawn back like a violently receding wave, the suction wrenched at the loft door, trying to draw it shut. And each time the door jerked under the vacuum pull of the wind the staple worked a little looser.
    Finally, as the first grey light of dawn struggled through the curtains of wind-driven rain, the gale smashed against the face of the bam, shaking its roof and timbers, soared upwards, howled around the loft and then was drawn back in a fierce outgoing eddy, violent with turbulence and power. The staple was pulled from its beam and the loft