Read As Birds Bring Forth the Sun for Free Online

unbidden dreams. We jump when the phone rings after 10:00 p.m. and are then reassured by the distant voices.
    “First of all, there is nothing wrong,” they say. “Things are just the same.”
    Sometimes we make calls ourselves, even to the hospital in Halifax, and are surprised at the voices which answer.
    “I just got here this afternoon from Newfoundland. I’m going to try to stay a week. He seems better today. He’s sleeping now.”
    At other times we receive calls from farther west, from Edmonton and Calgary and Vancouver. People hoping to find objectivity in the most subjective of situations. Strung out in uncertainty across the time zones from British Columbia to Newfoundland.
    Within our present city, people move and consider possibilities:
    If he dies tonight we’ll leave right away. Can you come?
    We will have to drive as we’ll never get air reservations at this time
.
    I’m not sure if my car is good enough. I’m always afraid of the mountains near Cabano
.
    If we were stranded in Rivière du Loup we would be worse off than being here. It would be too far for anyone to come and get us
.
    My car will go but I’m not so sure I can drive it all the way. My eyes are not so good anymore, especially at night in drifting snow
.
    Perhaps there’ll be no drifting snow
.
    There’s always drifting snow
.
    We’ll take my car if you’ll drive it. We’ll have to drive straight through
.
    John phoned and said he’ll give us his car if we want it or he’ll drive – either his own car or someone else’s
.
    He drinks too heavily, especially for long-distance driving, and at this time of year. He’s been drinking ever since this news began
.
    He drinks because he cares. It’s just the way he is
.
    Not everybody drinks
.
    Not everybody cares, and if he gives you his word, he’ll never drink until he gets there. We all know that
.
    But so far nothing has happened. Things seem to remain the same.
    Through the window and out on the white plane of the snow, the silent, laughing children now appear. They move in their muffled clothes like mummers on the whitest of stages. They dance and gesture noiselessly, flopping their arms in parodies of heavy, happy, earthbound birds. They have been warned by the eldest to be aware of the sleeping neighbours so they cavort only in pantomime, sometimes raising mittened hands to their mouths to suppress their joyous laughter. They dance and prance in the moonlight, tossing snow in one another’s direction, tracing out various shapes and initials, forming lines which snake across the previously unmarkedwhiteness. All of it in silence, unknown and unseen and unheard to the neighbouring world. They seem unreal even to me, their father, standing at his darkened window. It is almost as if they have danced out of the world of folklore like happy elves who cavort and mimic and caper through the private hours of this whitened dark, only to vanish with the coming of the morning’s light and leaving only the signs of their activities behind. I am tempted to check the recently vacated beds to confirm what perhaps I think I know.
    Then out of the corner of my eye I see him. The golden collie-like dog. He appears almost as if from the wings of the stage or as a figure newly noticed in the lower corner of a winter painting. He sits quietly and watches the playful scene before him and then, as if responding to a silent invitation, bounds into its midst. The children chase him in frantic circles, falling and rolling as he doubles back and darts and dodges between their legs and through their outstretched arms. He seizes a mitt loosened from its owner’s hand, and tosses it happily in the air and then snatches it back into his jaws an instant before it reaches the ground and seconds before the tumbling bodies fall on the emptiness of its expected destination. He races to the edge of the scene and lies facing them, holding the mitt tantalizingly between his paws, and then as they dash towards