Birchwood by John Banville Page B

the birds were only important to him now as bait for this subtler game. But I remember one morning early I was awakened by a confused clamour in the wood, shouts and challenges and the sudden grim roar of a shotgun, and I scrambled to the window and saw a little old man with bandy legs and a hat pulled down to his ears come crashing out of the trees into the delicately-lit dawn garden. His neat green footprints in the dewy grass traced a wide arc behind him as he galloped across the lawn toward the corner of the house and the fane he must have known was there which struck off around the tip of the wood to the road and escape. In one hand he clutched a dead pheasant, and in the other some other bird, a woodcock perhaps. Those winged things flapping and fluttering at the ends of his outstretched arms made it seem as if he were trying to take wing himself. He was skidding past the fountain when Papa, hastily slipping a cartridge into the gun, stepped through the gap the old boy had broken in the trees. He fired from the hip. A downstairs window shattered, and someone in the house squealed in sleepy terror. The poacher faltered, and glanced over his shoulder. Ahead of him a figure in a dressing gown appeared around the corner of the house and stood crouched in his path, capering excitedly. It was Granda Godkin. I would swear I heard the clatter of bones as the two old codgers crashed together. The woodcock, resuscitated for one splendid moment, flew straight up between them, shedding a spray of feathers in its wake. The poacher bounced off Granda Godkin, stumbled, regained his balance, drew back his arm and smacked him across the side of the head with the pheasant. More feathers, flying blood. Granda tottered, keeled over on his back, and the poacher sprang across his supine body and disappeared, leaving his hat behind him slowly spinning on the grass. Papa, the gun shaking in his hands, came and glared down at his fallen father, and for one wild moment I thought he was going to shoot him, but instead he turned on his heel and stamped toward the house, pausing only, almost absent-mindedly, to release the second barrel of the shotgun into the wood, blasting a ragged hole in the leaves.
    ‘Shite r
    When I got downstairs the blood-spattered old man was being deposited on a couch in the drawing room. Mama, half dressed, walked around in circles, speechless and pale. My father gibbered furiously. Aunt Martha cursed him. It was pandemonium. They swabbed the gore on Granda's face and found that most of it was birdblood, though he had the beginnings of a splendid black eye, and the bird, dead and all as it was, had bitten a neat little comma from the rim of his ear. He turned up his eyes until only the whites were visible, or should I say the yellows, and moaned without ceasing. The window which Papa had shot was in splinters, and the wall behind the couch was pockmarked with pellets. He kicked a chair.
    ‘I know his face, I'll get his name, by god I'll make him hop…’ He stopped. Aunt Martha, bent over her father, had turned her head to glance at Papa with the faintest of smiles. He stared back at her, eyes popping, his mouth still working, and then suddenly he laughed, silently, and his shoulders shook. He crept out of the room. Granda Godkin wailed. He was never to recover from that dawn adventure.
    Poachers were one thing, but more sinister by far were those other intruders who began to appear, mysterious wanton creatures glimpsed across the lake, or trailing down the fields toward the beach, a crowd of them, five or six, moving through the wood at dusk. The curious thing is that no one spoke of them, although we all must have seen them, unless I was subject to visions. It was as if their presence were an embarrassment. They might have been ghosts had they not been indifferent to the sombre duties of ghost-hood, for these visitants laughed and chattered, they were almost boisterous, but also, when I think of it, there was a