He never shot over a bird, and wild-fowlers were not welcome near his premises. He
was a friend to all things wild, and the wild things repaid him with their friendship.
Tamed in his enclosures were the geese that came winging down the coast from
Iceland and Spitzbergen each October, in great skeins that darkened the sky and filled the
air with the rushing noise of their passage - the brown-bodied pink-feet, white-breasted
barnacles, with their dark necks and clowns’ masks, the wild white fronts with blackbarred
breasts, and many species of wild ducks - widgeon, mallard, pintails, teal and
shovellers.
Some were pinioned, so that they would remain there as a sign and signal to the wild
ones that came down at each winter’s beginning that here were food and sanctuary.
Many hundreds came and remained with him all through the cold weather from
October to the early spring, when they migrated north again to their breeding-grounds
below the ice rim.
Rhayader was content in the knowledge that when storms blew, or it was bitter cold
and food was scarce, or the big punt guns of the distant bag hunters roared, his birds were
safe; that he had gathered to the sanctuary and security of his own arms and heart these
many wild and beautiful creatures who knew and trusted him.
They would answer the call of the north in the spring, but in the fall they would come
back, barking and whooping and honking in the autumn sky, to circle the landmark of the
old light and drop to earth near by to be his guests again - birds that he well remembered
and recognized from the previous year.
And this made Rhayader happy, because he knew that implanted somewhere in their
beings was the germ knowledge of his existence and his safe haven,, that this knowledge
had become a part of them and, with the coming of the grey skies and the winds from the
north, would send them unerringly back to him.
For the rest, his heart and soul went into the painting of the country in which he lived
and its creatures. There are not many Rhayaders extant. He hoarded them jealously,
piling them up in his lighthouse and the storerooms above by the hundreds. He was not
satisfied with them, because as an artist he was uncompromising.
But the few that have reached the market are masterpieces, filled with the glow and
colours of marsh-reflected light, the feel of flight, the push of birds breasting a morning
wind bending the tall flag reeds. He painted the loneliness and the smell of the salt-laden
cold, the eternity and agelessness of marshes, the wild, living creatures, dawn flights, and
frightened things taking to the air, and winged shadows at night hiding from the moon.
ONE November afternoon, three years after Rhayader had come to the Great Marsh, a
child approached the lighthouse studio by means of the sea wall. In her arms she carried a
burden.
She was no more than twelve, slender, dirty, nervous and timid as a bird, but beneath
the grime as eerily beautiful as a’ marsh faery. She was pure Saxon, large-boned, fair,
with a head to which her body was yet to grow, and deep-set, violet-coloured eyes.
She was desperately frightened of the ugly man she had come to see, for legend had
already begun to gather about Rhayader, and the native wild-fowlers hated him for
interfering with their sport.
But greater than her fear was the need of that which she bore. For locked in her child’s
heart was the knowledge, picked up somewhere in the swampland, that this ogre who
lived in the lighthouse had magic that could heal injured things.