Free Rook by Jane Rusbridge

settle again to walk the planted rows with their stiff-hipped swagger.
    ‘Eating the bugs,’ Harry says, tapping the book in his pocket.
    From a distant barn or outhouse comes the sudden echoing bark of enclosed dogs. Nora pushes the hair from her forehead, her skin claggy in the heat. She has a headache coming and wonders whether it’s because the hot, dry spell is about to break, if there will be thunder. When Harry described the place where rooks come in their hundreds at dusk to roost – a stand of trees on a slope of land in a remote spot on the Downs – Nora asked him to show her, with Rook. Now she regrets her suggestion. Judging by the barbed fence through which they have just clambered, this is private land. Farmers almost always own guns.        
    Harry has disappeared through a gap in the hedge skirting the maize field. Nora follows. Standing with her back pressed close to the hedge, she watches him jog, crouched low out of sight, across an open strip of grass towards a ditch which separates them from the wood. The ditch is too wide to step over and filled with stagnant water. She wants to go back.        
    ‘C’mon,’ Harry says, in an undertone, beckoning her over. ‘Cross here.’
    They are a long way from Harry’s van; she mustn’t lose track of time. She has a lesson later and they left the kitchen table at Creek House littered with various chopped foodstuffs and droppers containing milk and water. Harry wouldn’t let her stop to clear up the mess before they left, because Rook goes without food only for a short time, before waking, frantic with hunger, his head wavering on a scrawny neck barely able to hold up the weight of his gaping beak. At first it was impossible to get the bird to swallow even a morsel of food. ‘It’s going to die,’ Nora said. ‘We’re going to kill it.’ In the end, Harry balanced chopped egg on the end of his finger and pushed deep into the red throat. Nora held her breath. The bird seemed to choke, swallowing several times with a sound like a strangulated gargle, but then its beak flipped open again, ready for more.
    A plank, split and rotten, bridges the ditch. Harry takes swift strides over to the other side. ‘It’s fine,’ he says.
    In the wood, the ground is sodden. Some trees are leafless. They lean at an angle, propped on others, half-dying, bark smothered with lichen and trailing moss. Low-slung branches catch at Nora’s hair and water seeps through the stitching in her boots. Nora glances again over her shoulder towards the distant farm buildings, squat on the horizon, but the snarls and barking have stopped.
    ‘I don’t like this place, Harry.’
    ‘Humans don’t come here. That’s why the birds like it, in winter. Now, they’re at the rookeries. See this?’
    At their feet, and close to the fissured trunk of the tree, the ground is covered with bird excrement. Nora looks up. All she can see are fragments of blue sky beyond leaves backlit by the sun. No birds. The oppressive sense of absence, she realises, comes from the lack of birdsong.
    ‘So,’ Harry scratches his chin, ‘from what I can make out, they leave here in spring and return in autumn.’
    Nora’s socks are wet. She doesn’t like the dying atmosphere of this place but she doesn’t want to be left behind, alone, so when Harry strolls further into the wood, hands deep in his pockets, she follows. His voice rolls on in that way he has, a low mumble as if he’s talking to himself. ‘Best to come now . . . occupied elsewhere with their nests . . . not to disturb them at night.’
    Nora imagines the branches of these trees in winter crowded with rooks, the wood filled with the dry rustle of feathers as the birds shuffle for position. During the day, she carries Rook around with her wherever she can, in the willow basket, but at night he is alone in the kitchen, only the click of cooling pipes for company.
    ‘Can we come back here, in winter?’ she says. ‘And