All day and every day they hover throughout
it, as they search and wait and watch for carrion, throwing dim, gliding
shadows as they wheel and circle, or flashing sunshine from brown wings
by quick, sudden swoops, hovering and swooping throughout the sunshine,
or rising to melt into blue depths of the heavens, where other arching,
floating specks tell of myriads there, ready to swoop, and fall and gather
and feast wherever their lowest ranks drop earthwards with the crows.
Lazily we watched the floating movement, and as we watched, conversation
became spasmodic--not worth the energy required to sustain it--until
gradually we slipped into one of those sociable silences of the
bushfolk--silences that draw away all active thought from the mind,
leaving it a sensitive plate ready to absorb impressions and thoughts as
they flit about it, silences where every one is so in harmony with his
comrades and surroundings that the breaking of them rarely jars--spoken
words so often defining the half-absorbed thoughts.
Dimly conscious of each other, of the grazing cattle the Bromli kites,
the sweet scents and rustling sounds of the bush, of each other's
thoughts and that the last spoken thought among us had been
Sabbath-keeping, we rested, idly, NOT thinking, until Dan's voice crept
into the silence.
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