Ten White Geese Read Online Free PDF Page B

shake. She couldn’t think of anything better to say than, ‘Thank you. That was very friendly of you.’ The boy didn’t say a word, he just grinned and shut the car door. In the wing mirror she saw him watching attentively as she drove off.
    *
    That afternoon she let the new garden rest, using the wheelbarrow to transport the chicken wire to the three ponds instead. The six geese were standing waiting for her. When she walked through the gate and into the field, they ran off. As if they’re expecting something from me, she thought. But what? She used one foot – the injured one, to test it – to push against different parts of the collapsed hut. After she had pulled away a few planks, the roof, which was covered with tarred sheets, rested on the ground as a triangle. More than enough room for the geese. She unrolled the chicken wire and realised that she would need something to cut it. As before, she found useful tools in the old pigsty. She walked back up the drive with a saw, a large pair of pincers and a roll of thin wire. First she closed off the back of the triangular shelter, fixing the chicken wire in place by nailing it tight under planks that weren’t completely rotten. Look carefully and think it through, she thought. If I do that, I could even put together a wall unit. Clucking quietly, the geese watched her. In the next field the black sheep had come closer and most of them were now lined up at the fence. She pulled the packet of cigarettes out of her coat pocket and lit one. A big bird, brownish red, swooped down into the boggy copse and landed on a branch of an oak, facing towards her. ‘Is it you?’ she called out in English, as if a bird wouldn’t understand her if she spoke Dutch. It stared at her unmoved. She threw the half-smoked cigarette into one of the ponds.
    She did the front differently, first cutting planks to size, then using them to close off the top of the triangle. She left wide gaps between the planks; there wasn’t enough solid wood. The chicken wire was 120 centimetres wide. Again she walkedback to the pigsty, this time to look for staples. She found them too. She lined the wire up along the ground, folded the superfluous triangle down over one side of the roof, then attached it by pounding staples in with the hammer. Then she didn’t have a clue. She took a few steps back and considered the shelter. She looked at it and thought deeply. She felt like giving up. Everything in her body said: Stop it. Leave it. Go inside, have a drink, smoke a cigarette, lower your body into a bath full of hot water. There were two good planks left. The short one standing up and the long one on the ground, she thought, and after that I can work out how to close off that last bit of chicken wire, which has to serve as a kind of door. Just keep at it. After nailing the two planks to each other at right angles with another piece of wood at an angle as a brace, she put the structure up against the front of the shelter, then crawled inside to staple the wire to the wood. With nothing to hold the horizontal plank in place, it was very difficult to get them in. ‘
Godverdomme
,’ she said. She had to put something behind the plank. She crept back out of the shelter and looked around. There were large rocks by the ponds. Much too heavy. The wheelbarrow, upside down. She pushed it up hard against the plank and tried again. The wheelbarrow started to slide away, but by hammering as lightly as she could, she managed to get the staples into the wood anyway. Her arm hurt, she could feel her foot. Cursing, she crawled back out of the shelter, wondering what in the name of God she was doing. She pulled the wheelbarrow out of the way, turned it upright and checked her handiwork. It seemed reasonably solid. Solid enough, she thought, to keep out a fox. A big bird definitely couldn’t get in. Now she just had tofigure out how to close off the last bit without nailing it shut permanently. She had about ten large