Free Shortest Day by Jane Langton Page B

the rest merged with the undergrowth.
    The goose was dead. Morgan bent down and turned it over. Its neck was bloody and broken. Its round black eye looked up at him blindly. And then he cursed. There was a green band on the bird’s left leg. It was his own band, the one he had fastened to the male of the nesting pair he had studied last spring. Shit!
    Morgan looked up, and was not surprised to see another bird circling above him, looking down, uttering plaintive cries. It was the female who had laid her clutch of eggs and tended them until they hatched, then guarded the four goslings all summer, paddling behind them while the male took the lead. The female too was banded. What would happen to her now?
    In a rage Morgan left the dead goose on the ground and hurried to his car. In a moment he was back with a little jar of dark paste and a table knife. The paste was something he kept in the trunk, a useful mixture of peanut butter and arsenate of lead.
    Bending over the goose, he dipped the knife in the jar and spread the dark stuff all over the injured neck. “Shoo!” he shouted at the hovering goose, which was still circling, landing nearby, and taking off again.
    Carefully and thoroughly Morgan pressed the poisoned knife deep into the open wound. When the fox came back to his kill, he would find a little surprise.
    Time now to look for the flock somewhere else. Morgan ran back to his car and returned the deadly jar to the padlocked toolbox in the trunk. As he drove away in the direction of White’s Pond, he understood why he felt so bereft. The two banded geese had been special birds. They were the very pair whose behavior he had recorded last spring with his video camera. The powerful action of the male was Morgan’s justification, his argument, his vindication, his defense. Its behavior under threat was written in the chromosome chains, emblazoned in the stars. It was the way of the world. It was normal.

CHAPTER 14
    Oh, good man and good wife, are you within?
    Pray lift the latch and let us come in .
    We see you a-sitting at the boot o’ the fire ,
    Not a-thinkin’ of us in the mud and the mire ,
    So it’s joy be to you and a jolly wassail!
    Kentucky wassail
    T he residents of Harvard Towers were a mixed lot. Palmer Nifto had gathered them up from all over, beginning with old friends he had met in shelters here and there.
    For reasons of public relations, his favorite was Gretchen Milligan. Gretchen was a slightly retarded nineteen-year-old girl with a plump childish face. She had given birth already to two children, and turned them over at once for adoption. She was about to have another. Gretchen knew that pregnancy was a useful condition for a homeless woman. When you got beyond the second trimester there were benefits, and you could stay at Bright Day House in Somerville, a home for unmarried pregnant teenagers. It was warm and comfortable at Bright Day, and the food was good.
    When her time came, she would certainly get herself right over there in a taxi. But for now she would stay at Harvard Towers to support the cause. Gretchen was really impressed by Palmer Nifto’s leadership. Harvard was going to give them apartments, that was what Palmer said. He said he had Harvard wrapped around his little finger.
    And she liked being right here in the middle of Harvard College. Gretchen had a taste for dignity and grandeur, for the finer things, for fancy doorways with white columns and iron gates with vases on top. She loved to trail along the streets in the elegant part of Cambridge and look at the beautiful houses—oh, not just on Brattle Street! Gretchen had made wonderful discoveries on some of the side streets. Nobody else knew about them, the little secret corners where the luckiest people lived.
    Somehow Harvard College and the big houses on Gretchen’s secret streets had something in common, a distinction, a kind of majesty. It was something she yearned for.
    Of course, the