The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace

Author:Jim Crace [Crace, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780330473880
Publisher: Bolinda Digital Pty Ltd

19

DOE AND her daughter were standing hand in hand, the child’s tiny arm a twig in Doe’s strong grip. My father rubbed his head to remind her of the night just past. But he had left the giblets of his lust for her hung up, like a screech owl’s breakfast, on the grasses and the reeds. He was entirely calm. He bent and kissed the child.

‘I could not sleep,’ he said. ‘I went down to the shore …’ He would have entertained her with a greater lie. But, here, the dog began to whine and point its nose towards the distant wood. There were no braids of smoke. The gang of men who had slept there had spread themselves out in a line. Their bows were ready. Their sticks were out. They did not talk. They were advancing across the heath like heavy-shouldered wolves who’ve traced the scent of deer. The dog began to bark. It was too late to strap its jaw. It was too late to flee. The loop of men was tightening round the heath. My father, Doe, the girl, were minnows in their net.

My father – poison all discharged – was not the reckless sort. What was the point in hiding in the hut? Or looking for a stick? He might just as well throw pebbles at the tide. Whatever mayhem was in stock that day would come and go whatever father did. And so they simply stood their ground, the perfect family of the heath – my father, one-armed, a damson bruise upon his head; the woman with her daughter on her hip and her free hand resting on my father’s shoulder; the dog; their frail and reedy hut. Some way off, the wasted semen had thickened and was tacky in the wind.

It soon was clear what it was the men had come to do. The first goose that they found was struck across its spine. The eggs which it had risen to protect were smashed with sticks and feet. Its nest was kicked into the wind. The grazing birds that rose to flee were greeted in the air by flights of wooden darts. They fell like pears. Their carcasses were left. These thirty, forty men were not hunting for the meat. They came to fight a war against the nomad raiders from the sea.

At first their killing was quite calm because the birds themselves were quiet and slow to leave their eggs. The hissing, flapping geese that had quickly understood the purpose of a human delegation armed with sticks on that spring day when father was the hunter had been reduced by the observances of parenthood to docile innocents. It was not hard to lift a stick and break a goose’s back when the victim simply sat and made threats and patterns with its head. But once the men had finished with the outskirts of the flock, the absent males – alarmed by the keenings of their mates – flew in from their browsings and their uppings on the shore to stand and honk beside their nests.

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