Welcome to the blog post challenge.

When the Rain Falls, Contd.

Chapter 3

The summer holidays stretched ahead like a sleepy cat. Every day, Joseph checked his snares and wandered the fields. Without him realising, the fields, trees and streams had quickly become more familiar than the bustling city streets and the grimy buildings that towered overhead. Unlike the city, the countryside was green with splotches of colour: the scarlet poppies, yellow gorse bushes that smelled of coconut and the purple foxgloves that swayed in the hedgerows. As the warm winds rippled through a field, shaking the corn like an animal’s coat, Joseph found a stillness he had never known before.

At night, he made his way into the woods where he played with Aphrodite. Sometimes they would sit in the darkness and stare out across the great sweep of the valley at Strawberry Banks. They would watch the moon and the stars and listen to the silence. Every so often, Aphrodite’s ears would perk up as she heard something rustling and she would be off, slinking low. Only later, to return with the gift of a rabbit or shrew. They got to know the great barn owl who flew like a silent ghost across the fields and the nightingales who still sang their mournful songs.

The one thing that worried Joseph was that someone might stumble across Aphrodite. In the daytime, she kept herself hidden inside the darker depths of Spinney’s Acre, sleeping in the thickest places where the bushes and brambles offered camouflage. At night, she wandered over many miles but given her dark fur, and shy nature, she was almost impossible to see.

It happened though. One night towards the end of August Joseph was making his way into the wood when he heard a scream coupled with a growl. He recognised Aphrodite’s call and rushed forwards, shoving through bushes until he came into a clearing. Aphrodite stood with her teeth bared and body tensed as if ready to leap. A few feet away, Billy Go-Lucky faced her, his ashen face twisted in terror. “J.. J… Jo…,” he stammered, taking a step back.

“Keep still,” hissed Joseph, catching Aphrodite’s eye. As he advanced, his hand held out, offering her a freshly caught rabbit, and talking to her in a low, soothing voice, Billy took his chances and fled. Joseph could hear him stumbling through the woods, shrieking as he went. Aphrodite seemed to shrug her coat, took the rabbit and slunk back into her lair. Heart thudding, Joseph made his way back through the woods, up Farm Lane and into the village. What now?

The secret that had been kept for so long was out. When he returned home, Joseph and Mrs Hill talked long into the night. Perhaps they could move Aphrodite. After all, there were five valleys that led away from the town of Stroud and each valley had wooded slopes where surely an animal like Aphrodite could live undisturbed.

©Pie Corbett 2022

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