Omri had a moment of absolute horror. He knew magpies were scavenger birds — he’d seen them pecking at the remains of one of the fox-killed hens. What could be lying there, dead?
He rushed out of the house, his heart in his throat. The birds flapped unconcernedly away just as he reached them. Hardly able to bear his apprehension, Omri parted the grass and looked at the corpse.
It was a half-grown rabbit without a head.
The others, belatedly realizing what Omri had feared, trailed out after him.
“It’s not her, is it?” called his mother.
“It’s a dead rabbit,” said Omri.
“Yuck,” said Gillon. “Those magpies have eaten half of it.”
Their father bent down to look at it more closely.
“I don’t think the magpies killed it,” he said. “Too big for them. It would take a fox to kill that, and why would he have left it half eaten? Looks more like a cat’s work to me.”
Omri gazed at the dead half-rabbit with entirely new eyes.
“You mean - a cat could kill a thing that size? You mean maybe Kitsa could have hunted it?”
“It’s possible,” he said.
Omri’s heart did an upward lurch. The hope he had abandoned rushed back, painfully, like the blood coming back into a numbed limb.
“But if she’s around, why doesn’t she come home?”
“Maybe she’s gone feral,” said his father.
“Gone feral? What’s that?”
“Wild. Cats do. Mainly tomcats, but queens do as well sometimes, when they’re moved. I bet she’s around, Omri. Keep your eyes open for her, and keep putting out her milk.”
Omri put not milk but clotted cream out for her that night. In the morning it was gone.
“Probably a hedgehog,” said Gillon.
Omri wanted to hit him, but he felt too relieved. There was hope, after all.
The thatchers arrived to begin work, and chaos came again to the just-organized-after-moving household.
The garden, the hedge, the border of the lane, and all the paths vanished under masses of mouldy old thatch as the thatching team tore it off the roof beams. There was no point in clearing most of it till the job was done, but Omri was told to keep the route from the lane gate to the front of the house cleared. He did this after school. Every day for the first week it had to be done again. It was absolutely amazing how much old thatch there was - enough to make three or four haystacks. It kept piling up all around the house.
The thatchers expected regular cups of tea, and when the weather turned really hot at the end of September, relays of beer. They got chatty. In breaks, they sat out on the thatch-littered lawn and discussed their craft with anyone in the family who would join them.
One afternoon after school, Omri was drifting past and heard one of them say, “We ent found that oul’ bottle yet. Last chaps hid it thorough, seemingly.”
He paused. “What old bottle?”
The men grinned. “Don’ ee know about the thatchers’ bottle?”
“No?”
“We were tellin’ your dad. Right int’rested, he be. Wants to see un when we find un.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s like this here, see. Every time a roof gets thatched, which is about every thirty year, the thatchers all writes their names on a paper—”
“On’y in the olden days they’m put a cross instead—”
“And any details as is relevant to the job, and puts it in a bottle, along with the papers from the thatchers as done the last job, and the one afore that. And they hides it in the thatch, for the next ones to find, thirty year on.”
“That way,” put in another, “there’s a link, see, from one generation of thatchers to the next, down the line, maybe ‘undreds a years. This ’ouse now, it’s been standin’ not far short o’ three ’undred year, wouldn’t ee say, John?”
“Since 1704,” said Omri eagerly. “The plaque says.”
“Arh, the plaque, well, there you are then. Musta bin - let’s see - between seven and nine thatchin’s in that time, maybe more, so it’ll be a ruddy big oul’ bottle, I reckon, when we do find un.” They all laughed and drank down their lager.
Omri was intrigued about the bottle, and so was his father.
“A real link with the past,” he kept saying. “If they find it I’m going to make photocopies of all the papers, to keep, before they add their one and hide the bottle again.”
“Can we keep the old bottle, Dad?”
“No. They use the same one till it gets broken. That’s the custom. I love old country customs. I respect them. A real link with the past!”
“Yeah, Dad, you said that,” said Gillon, who found the whole thing a total turn-off.
That night Omri lay awake in his new room, under the denuded roof and bare eaves, with the window open.
The milk dish had been empty again this morning, and he’d wanted to keep watch all night, but of course his mother wouldn’t let him. It was hard to fall asleep anyway. He was so used to traffic going past all night, and London streetlamps lighting the room, he still wasn’t quite used to the darkness and quiet of the country.
Not that it was dark tonight. There was a full moon. It bathed the surrounding hills, fields, and woods, and shone down through a little tear in the roofers’ tarpaulin over his head. It was a bit like his old room where he’d slept on a platform under a skylight. It had felt like sleeping out under the sky.
Suddenly he sat up. He’d heard a cry. It sounded just like the cry of a cat in distress!
Without thinking, he jumped up and rushed through Gillon’s room (which he had to pass through to get to the stairs), and fumbled his way down and out into the soft-scented, unfamiliar, mildly scary country night, full of rustlings and creature noises that you never heard in London.
In bare feet and by the clear light of the moon, he kicked through the fallen thatch, crossed the sloping lawn, let himself out through a little picket gate, and started pushing through the overgrown grass in the paddock, calling softly, “Kitsa! Kitsa, come on, Kits!” and making shwsh-a-wisha noises that used to bring her running. His feet were stung with stinging nettles and pricked with thistles, but he kept going until he stepped in an old cowpat - that was too much!
“Bloody country!” he exploded, and turned back, but not before he’d had a long listen. He couldn’t hear her now. It must have been a bird or something. He scraped his foot on the damp grass to clean it. Then he picked his way back towards the front door.
It occurred to him, just as he was about to go in, to have a look to see if the milk had been drunk yet. Instead of walking in the front door and out again at the back, because of his mucky foot he decided to walk round the outside to the kitchen door, which he did, treading on layers of old thatch all the way. And while he was passing under the plaque on the gable end, he nearly twisted his ankle stepping on something lumpy and hard.
It didn’t feel like a stone, so he fumbled about in the thatch to see what it was — maybe it was ‘the oul’ bottle’! It would be fun if he could be the one to find it, not the thatchers at all!
The rotted reeds had all matted together and must have fallen off the roof in a clump, instead of in thousands of loose bits like most of it. It felt disgusting to his groping fingers, and the smell of mustiness