Anna of Strathallan Read Free Page A

restless and beautiful, larkssoared in the sky, magpies swooped. So many English birds were here, many new to her. She must get a book on birds, be able to recognize them all, the natives and the exotic ones. She loved the New Zealand custom - a relatively new custom, she'd been told - of putting over bird-calls as signals on the radio just before the news. They were native birdcalls, with enchanting notes that chuckled and twanged and suggested cool forests, mossy-green underfoot, dappled with leaf-shadows.
    She had meant to ring Crannog from Dunedin, to announce the time of her arrival to her grandparents, but with her fingers in the toll slot, panic had seized her and she had stopped. What if her first sight of Strathallan daunted her? What if it was like that near-derelict house on the main road she had passed yesterday, long unpainted, with a rusting tin roof, cracked window-panes, a verandah lolling lopsidedly under its overgrown vines because the posts had rotted through? What if - well, she'd changed her mind?
    She had told her grandmother it might be ten days before she reached Dunedin because she was going to sight-see all the way. So she would put up, unannounced, at the Crannog pub listed in the directory, no doubt a relic of the gold- mining days, because it was called The Pan and Shovel, go out the next morning to drive past Strathallan, inspect it, drive back and ring her grandparents from the pub. If she found it too unattractive, she'd tell them, on the phone, that she could stay only a few days this time, that she had to be back in Auckland for a job. How odd that only now, nearing journey's end, she should feel this reluctance!
    She had little more than a hundred miles to go, so she hadn't left Dunedin early. Crannog was just past Roxburgh. She dawdled, taking a keen interest in every miners' monument among the hills and minor gorges on the way, stopping at small-town museums where, because it was a little early for many tourists yet, those in charge delayed her each time, warming to her evident interest.
    It was a pity, then, that just before she got to Miller's Flat, a truck with a load of stuff from some demolition job on board passed her, dropped a piece of four-by-two with some enormous nails in it and Anna ran over them with both offside tyres.
    Despite the fact there had been quite a lot of traffic passing till now, she had to wait nearly half an hour before someone came along and offered to send out a mechanic from the Flat, and even then it was an age before he arrived, jacked up her car, and took the tyres into the township to repair. He explained that they had had an incredible number of urgent jobs in, and he had had to finish one before coming out to her.
    'You'd better come in with me. You're going to get pretty cold waiting here at this time of day. No one'll pinch your car with two tyres off. Lock it up, though.'
    Now she did wish she had set off sooner and had not been decoyed into stopping. The early spring night was closing in fast and the hills to the west would soon shut off the sun that was already dropping low.
    By the time the mechanic returned her, and attached the tyres, the sky had a leaden look. He asked, 'How far are you going tonight? Not too far, I hope, that's a snowy sky.'
    'Is it?' She sounded surprised. She'd just taken it for the grey of twilight. Of course she'd never seen snow fall and had assumed it would be all over. 'I'm going to Crannog. It won't fall for some time, will it?'
    'Probably not, but waste no time. If your home's there you'll want to make it. But if you're just touring, I'd say put up at Roxburgh - but even if you go on to Crannog, at least you won't be going through the gorges. They're on beyond Alexandra, the Cromwell Gorge and the Kawarau Gorge.'
    She thanked him and was away. She was glad she'd had some coffee from her flask when waiting for a motorist to show up, because the temperature was falling rapidly. She switched the heater on.
    She turned a