Skein o' geese

The sky was lightening.  I pushed my hands deep into my pockets for warmth,
and watched a bloom over the burn swell and thicken to a mist.  The hills to
the west were indigo, the grass underfoot was wan as lichen, and a leafless
silver birch etched a silhouette against the lavender of fading night.

It was still too early for blackbirds to hop and scurry through fallen
leaves rimed with frost.  A silent drift of swans had settled in the reeds.
Here and there, untidy piles of freshly cut cedar sneddings laced the air
with pine, and in the quiet half-light the scent was as startling as a cry.

The lambency of daybreak broadened behind the Black Law, and it seemed the
ancient mountain bent more closely over the town it cradles.

But there's an agitation over the Law head - a twisting scribble in the
silvering light.  There's a whispering - a witching.

The scribble churns, becomes a helix, lengthens, blackens, unfurls its wings
and grows into a mighty chevron.  Heading south, the chevron shifts and
tilts. It curves, and in an undulating garland spans the sky.  It flexes,
yaws and breaks in two.

The sky is a clamour of geese - hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of geese.
They whiffle and gabble, they honk and yawp, they rise and fall.  They jink
from side to side.  Jostling, they deepen the garlands to wedges, surge
again and rickrack to a single swallow's tail.

The skein of geese flies over, trailing fraying threads of stragglers,
singing out its hauntings, till they vanish to a whisper in the silver grey
of dawn.