They walked in silence. Father O’Hara held his gun carelessly poised, yet he was intent on every sign that the dog made. For all his weight, he moved in a predatory way which had its own grace. By comparison, Father Conroy looked awkward; his hat and heavy belted overcoat, which reached to his shins, gave him the appearance of a large black bird hiding a crippled wing. His leg, indeed, was giving him trouble as he scrambled through gaps in hedges and stumped over hardened hoofprints in gateways. But it was not that which ailed him (he was conscious of it as no more than a handicap which had to be overcome). What disturbed him was the sound of his father’s voice, heard suddenly after half a century. He could not remember when the words had been said, but he could hear quite clearly his father say, “Yes, driving in the cows, boy, across a field of white clover, before the world’s awake.”

He looked down at the frozen fields of Rosnagree and tried to remember what had gone before or after those words, but the countryside below gave him no help. Yet, he recognized every landmark, sharpened, magnified by the whiteness around it. He could even see in the distance, like the opening of a cave, the wood which sheltered the house where he was born. It was the countryside of his boyhood, and he was moving around its borders, shut out from it. So complete was it without him, so disembodied did he feel, that he expected any moment to see his own figure drift painfully across it, a black shape in hat and drooping coat.

He roused himself to fire the first shot. The dog had worked her way through a plot of kale, when a pheasant burst out into the headland, well out of range, and ran for the ditch. As it suddenly rose, he swung his gun and fired. The dog looked back at him in surprise, and Father O’Hara chuckled quietly as the bird volleyed away up into the sky. Yet, he was glad he had fired. He had been afraid of that landscape, which had its own existence apart from him, its own sequence of time, under the shifting light of sun and clouds. The shot had served to establish him again, to anchor him in the world of Father O’Hara and the dog.

“Easy, Tom, easy!” Father O’Hara was saying. “We’ll get our chances yet.”

The next bird rose out of the stubble; he watched Father O’Hara bring it down with ease. “See now!” said Father O’Hara as he thrust it into his bag and wiped his hand on the grass. “Easy does it!”