He listened to the sounds with small and natural awe whenever he stepped from truck: geese in flight, all around, appearing and dissolving again into low cloud fog and mist of sky.
It’d been years since they had been as this: hard freeze of the north in press and movement of the great flights south and then the thaw and opening again of the land of his home so that they stayed and remained, covering sky in sight and sound, everywhere—it seemed—beyond the winter veil. He saw them pass on high and, too, rise and sweep from near to further rest in fields as he fed amongst the pastures breaking up the pattern fallow and fields of wheat.
It reminded him of youth, of hunting as a boy in way to becoming man; an excitement for the field rarely felt since the hunting and taking of human lives in hides of different fields; but there was a rejuvenation back to youthful spirits in the gift of the winter flights.
He thought of his son near to age
when his love of wilds took to lasting root; and he thought of a day soon, should weather and winter flights remain, when they would live their own moments—make and save their own memories—hunting the same fields or family and its histories.