Another Quote from "Small Beneath the Sky"

Here is another quote from Lorna Crozier's book "Small Beneath the Sky"...it is an excellent rendition of life in Swift Current at the time we were all in school. I expect you would find it an interesting and terrifically enjoyable read!



...One behind the other, we tromped a circle in the snow with our boots, turning the yard into a white meadow for geese to run in flapping their blunt wings, a fox in hot pursuit.

The most important word in the game was home. Home was the centre of the circle, and when you landed there, after whipping down one of the several spokes, you were safe. The fox couldn’t touch you. The problem was you were free from harm for only a moment: another goose fleeing for its life could force you out, back into the dangerous circumference pocked with our tracks like the face of the moon.

Racing through the cold, parkas undone, faces flushed, my friends and I would have thrown off our scarves by now. They’d be scattered outside the circle like the skins of long improbable snakes, yellow, blue, green, white with wide red stripes. The spots were our mouths had soaked the wool hardened into disks of ice as the sun slid lower in the sky.

As we skittered and slipped and darted to the centre, we lost who we were, lost our names and the names of our mothers who had sent us out to play. We were legs and lungs and big hearts pumping. We were geese; one of us, a fox. No one in the game broke the rules. We never called “Time out!” We never stepped from the circle to catch our breath. How essential was that form we had drawn with our boots, how perfect and invariable, how charged with frenzy and delicious dread.