The Golden Flight Read Online Free PDF Page A

prophecy.
     
    I honour birch-bark
    The Island’s screen. Flies stinging
    The piece of the sun
     
    Or should it be A piece? Either way it still seemed to be a nonsense.
     
    Marguerite found Larch the Curious working with his sons, daughters and their youngsters, biting at the wood of a broken tree and she stood and looked in amazement at what they had created.
    The pine that had been broken off in the Great Storm had been chiselled by many teeth into the shape of a giant squirrel, staring out over the sea towards the Mainland. The face of the great animal scowled threateningly and it held a carved Woodstock diagonally across its chest.
    Larch saw her, came over and brushed whiskers. She waited for him to explain.
    ‘We got bored,’ he said, slightly embarrassed. ‘There is such a lot of food here, we don’t have to spend much time foraging and we don’t have to watch for predators, so we thought we’d make something. At least this should frighten any invaders away.’
    ‘Sun rule that no more come,’ Marguerite replied. ‘But this, this is…’ she struggled for a word, 'magnificent.’
    Larch stood proudly, his back to his creation.
    ‘Where’s Clover the Tagger?’ Marguerite asked, looking round for Larch’s life-mate.
    ‘She’s busy somewhere else. She doesn’t really approve of all this,’ he added, waving a paw at the huge stump outlined against the setting sun. She thinks it’s all a waste of time, but what is time anyway if you have plenty of it?’
    ‘A bite more off there,’ he called up to one of the busy youngsters, as Marguerite turned back along the shore towards the eastern end of the island.
     
     
     

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    Marguerite spent several days in the South Shore area eating and sleeping alone. Twice she returned to the screen of trees above Pottery Point and from a distance watched the shaping of the giant squirrel progressing, but did not make contact with the chisellers. Her mind was busy with a web of ideas, trying to untangle thoughts that were hopelessly intertwined.
    Early on the fifth morning, as the sun lifted over the eastern horizon and the tide surged in from Poole Bay, she knew, by the tingle in her whiskers, that the dolphins had come again. She went down to the low bank at the water’s edge and projected her thoughts across the rippled surface of the harbour.
    ‘I am here, my friends, I am here.’
    Three heads lifted above the wavelets in the quiet dawn-light and the two large ones surged in towards her, while the smaller dolphin moved slowly up and down the waterway farther out.
    Malin and Lundy rested in the shallows a few feet from Marguerite. She had never seen a dolphin at rest before and they looked huge, much bigger than a human.
    ‘Hello, squirrel-friend,’ they said together, followed a moment later by a shyer greeting from Finisterre as he swam in.
    ‘We promised to tell you what we learned from the fishing-men and we don’t have be back on patrol until tomorrow,’ Malin told her. ‘We decided to come early before any humans were about.’
    Lundy sent her thoughts up to Marguerite, ‘We told you that we often patrol just off the Chesil Bank and there are nearly always fishing-men on that beach trying to catch cod and conger eels. When we learned how to pick up their thoughts from the taut-lines, we were surprised to find that most are not even thinking about fish at all. Some come there just to get away from unhappy situations with their mates and others to relax and let their minds go blank. One was hiding his face behind a flimsy sheet of what they call paper, all day, and his mind seemed full of nothing but enormous mammary glands. Then he stared out to sea, as if expecting a dugong to swim by.’
    Marguerite wondered briefly what a dugong was, but suppressed the thought. She was having a little difficulty in understanding, but wanted to know more.
    ‘Why can’t you just know what they are thinking, like you do with me?’ she asked.
    ‘You