The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

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SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, he really should. That morning, even though it was a fine morning, coming up to high summer, the whole valley was singing with unease.

‘Oh bugger,’ Jeremy Berrows said to Danny. ‘You seen that?’

Up on Stanner Rocks, knobs of stone poked out like weathered gargoyles on an old church, or ancient skulls browned by the earth, half-buried, with scrubby trees in their eye sockets. From one side, you could sometimes see a whole body of rock that Danny reckoned looked like the remains of a dead giant thrown back into the greenery encrusting the cliff face.

But Jeremy wasn’t looking up at Stanner – likely he blamed the rocks for taking Mary Morson away, though in Danny’s view the rocks done him a favour on that one. He was staring instead at the smoky firs across the valley, the dark trees that said, This is Wales now, boy, make no mistake.

‘What?’ Danny said.

‘Big black crow. Hovering.’

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