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What I wanted was a jackdaw, one of those little crows with a silvery neck and milky-blue eyes. Jackdaws are nice, and the noises they make, more than any crow or a rook, sound like human speech. Especially in the evening, when a whole colony of them would land in the chestnuts along Bleiburg and babble to each other, until it grew dark and all you heard was the occasional ka! when one of them fell off its branch. Besides, jackdaws are fairly tidy birds. You see them beside a puddle in the pasture sometimes, bending over to let the water run down their backs and wings for as long as it takes to get clean.
    I knew where a couple of them were. Each spring they nested in a group of half-dead trees down by the scour-hole, a pond left behind after the dyke there collapsed a long time ago. In the olden days a broken dyke used to be a huge disaster, with people drowning by bunches. The water would come roaring in and scour out a deep hole at the spot where the dyke had collapsed. When the dyke was rebuilt it had to cut around a hole like that, which is why some of the old ones have such sharp bends in them.

    The jackdaws liked to build their nests in the cracks and hollows of the trees around the pond, and late one Wednesday afternoon I got Sam to understand that I wanted him to pull a fledgling out of the nest for me.
    â€˜OK,’ Sam said.
    He walked behind me with one hand on the cart, talking non-stop about Sam-like idiocies. Sometimes I think he’s got brain damage.
    I looked out over the washlands. The river water had retreated behind the summer dykes. The trees out this way had dark rings around the trunk that showed how high the water had come that winter. Circling above them I could see little black dots. I was kind of excited. Another reason I wanted a jackdaw is because they’re faithful; a jackdaw couple stays together forever, and when you’ve had a jackdaw from the time it was little it becomes attached to you in the same way. But you have to catch them young.
    â€˜You really expect me to go down in there?’ Sam said once we were at the trees.
    He muttered about for a bit, but finally clambered down the side of the dyke on hands and knees. Close to a tree with low branches he stopped and looked up, until he saw a jackdaw entering its nest. Then he started climbing. The birds flew nervously around the branches, in the perfect knowledge that this spelled bad news. I felt cold; winter was still floating between the warmer layers of spring air. It was starting to grow dark and you had to look hard to pick out objects in the distance. The trees around the scour-hole looked poisoned, as good as dead; the bark on some of them had started slipping off, leaving them cold and naked. Sam had reached a branch about a third of the way up and was still climbing clumsily. When they passed out the smarts and agility, he definitely wasn’t standingat the front of the queue. In fact, he has only one real trait, which is that he’s quite kind . . . that is, if kindness is really a trait and not just the absence of that brand of cruelty that keeps people like Dirk up and running.
    Sam was only an arm’s length below the nest when he suddenly stopped moving. I squinted, but couldn’t make out what was wrong. After a while he started shouting, shouts that had lots of fuckingsonofabitches in them. He was panicking. It was an awfully bad place to start panicking. Situations like this made me furious. There he was, hanging motionless halfway between heaven and earth, and here I was, nailed to the road: all I could do was roll myself back to the village for help and hope that he could stick it out up there till I got back. I went as fast as I could. Till I was a long way off I could still hear the alarmed cries of the jackdaws circling around poor Sam.
    I took the route into the village that went down Achterom. Joe’s house was the first one in the street. The lights were on; in fact, the place was lit