Algy flew around the frosted garden, which despite the bright winter sunlight lay mainly in the shade, for the early January sun still travelled so low in the sky that the rocky hills which surrounded Algy's home prevented it from reaching much of the lower levels, and every tree and bush cast a deep black shadow many times as long as its height.
This also meant that if the winter sunshine did hold any heat at all, it failed to warm the ground, or the plants and creatures which dwelled upon it, and so the penetrating chill of the frost made Algy's tail feathers tingle every time that he stopped to rest.
But as he fluttered here and there, trying to keep warm, Algy suddenly noticed a bright green spark among the pale, frosted grasses, and notwithstanding the icy stinging in his nether parts, he paused for a while in wonder, for a tiny, fresh green spruce sapling was pushing its way up into the light as though it were a balmy day in spring and not the depths of the wild west Highland winter.
Of course it was growing in the wrong place, for once it grew to adulthood it would tower over everything in the vicinity, so Algy knew that when the weather improved his assistants would have to move it to a more suitable location. But for the moment he simply marvelled at its resilience and courage, and he lingered for a few moments longer to quote some lines of a poem he had remembered to the brave little tree, and provide it with some words of fluffy encouragement:
Our last connection with the mythic. My mother remembers the day as a girl she jumped across a little spruce that now overtops the sandstone house where still she lives; her face delights at the thought of her years translated into wood so tall, into so mighty a peer of the birds and the wind. Too, the old farmer still stout of step treads through the orchard he has outlasted but for some hollow-trunked much-lopped apples and Bartlett pears. The dogwood planted to mark my birth flowers each April, a soundless explosion. We tell its story time after time: the drizzling day, the fragile sapling that had to be staked.
[Algy is thinking of the first two stanzas of the poem Planting Trees by the 20th century American writer John Updike.]
