Free Tipperary by Frank Delaney Page A

as the crow does.” In his younger days, he said, he had “hunted all over this barony” and soon, to the alarm of Nora Buckley but to the delight of Euclid and me, he decided, as he announced, to “go across country.” He steered Polly off the road and we swung down a cart track into someone's farm.
    Thus began the first truly exhilarating journey of my life across the Irish countryside—and that is how I began to form my taste for such travels, sitting beside my father in the ponytrap or, as now, behind him on the long car, swaying and rocking to the clop of a horse. That day, we traveled down rutted tracks, splashed across streams bright as tin, up hills almost too steep, and over grassy headland plateaus. Here and there, as we drove past, a farmer or his wife waved from a doorway, or an inquisitive child came out to look, and a dog to bark. My father knew all the sweetest ways, and we never felt imperiled by the roughness of the ground over which he took us.
    Birds flapped up from the long grass with a sudden clatter of wings. A deer, rare in those parts, cleared a low fence ahead of us and bounced away haughtily. We saw a fox, who walked astutely along a ridge and inspected us from a distance, its tail held out behind it like a bushy spar. Rabbits sat and twitched their noses, not at all bothered by this curious conveyance with the small, intensely frail, pale-faced boy wrapped in a rug in the front seat, who was counting the rabbits but looking for hares.
    I heard him ask Father, “And shall we see eagles?” and Father replied, as I expected he might, “If you want to, Euclid. If you want to.”
    One field remains in my mind like an encouraging dream. Father consulted his compass frequently and sometimes, directly after a reading, we found ourselves on or off a roadway. Now we trotted along a graveled avenue, at the end of which Father steered Polly into a wood with a broad pathway running through it. No branches overhung and we never slackened pace. We cleared the trees, climbed a hill, and ran along the top. Father drew Polly to a halt and said, “Now look back.”
    Below us, a long slope stretched away down the fields; two ribbons of roads from different directions intersected the patchwork of green; and in the distance shone a third and brighter ribbon—the river Shannon.
    “This is a good place to eat,” Father said, and we opened the boxes that Cally and Mrs. Ryan had supplied and packed under Mother's supervision. Eggs had been crushed and mixed with chopped ham and onion; we had chicken with onion; Father chose roast beef and some slices of onion. Nora Buckley, perilously with such teeth, elected to eat a soda-bread sandwich of onion and chopped egg; neither Euclid nor I dared look at each other as she ate. When she finished, she said to Euclid, “Somebody in your house must be famous for onions.”
    We drank mugs of milk poured from a tall, shining dairy-can, and we looked at the countryside for a long time. I would have sat there an hour and more had Father asked.
    “The battles fought over that land down there,” he said. “Troy didn't give as much trouble.”
    He pointed out the Silvermines—he called them “mountains,” although Euclid said that they seemed like hills to him, “because by geographical agreement a mountain needs to be over a thousand feet high.”
    Far away, across the fields, a tiny man herded thirty or more tiny cows up a patch of hill field and into another patch of pasture. We could hear his dog's distant excitement; and we sat for a little while longer in the glorious sunshine of the autumn, looking at the green and tawny and gold and brown patchwork quilt of fields.
    The Shannon, when we crossed it at Killaloe, thrilled us as much as the Tiber might, or the Mississippi. We liked its width, and its refusal to be hurried. Soon the stone walls of the west appeared and the sun went down, leaving the sky red as a blushing face.
    That night in the little town of Gort, as