By the next morning the sky was black and forbidding. The wind had got up again during the night and was roaring through the trees, and Algy could see that the weather in the wild west Highlands of Scotland was in a dark and fractious mood.
Hopping up onto the top of a tall tree stump, Algy endeavoured to keep his balance on the slippery surface while the angry south-westerly blasted his back and attempted to blow all his feathers out to sea… although without success, he was glad to say!
In the distance the clouds were descending upon the ridges that surrounded his home, gradually wiping out the view as though they held a giant eraser, and Algy guessed that before long he would be drenched once again. He knew that he ought to seek cover, and yet he felt strangely reluctant to leave his perch, for the dynamics of the tempestuous weather seemed to hold him spellbound. Although there was no longer any snow to be seen, and in fact it was supposedly the middle of the day, although he wouldn't have known it from the increasingly dim light, he was reminded of a poem by Emily Brontë, for he could not go…
The night is darkening round me, The wild winds coldly blow; But a tyrant spell has bound me And I cannot, cannot go. The giant trees are bending Their bare boughs weighed with snow. And the storm is fast descending, And yet I cannot go. Clouds beyond clouds above me, Wastes beyond wastes below; But nothing drear can move me; I will not, cannot go.
[Algy is thinking of the poem Spellbound by the early 19th century writer Emily Brontë.]
