As you read lines 140–179, underline language that describes how the father seems to be changing. Make notes in the margin in lines 140–150 about what hasn’t changed. Walking back down the length of the veranda, I peered through the windows of the rooms we’d stopped using, the dining room with its yellow wood table, the living room where my mother’s desk was still piled high with the field guides and books she’d used to identify unknown plants she’d come across. The outside light flickered on, and I found my father in the kitchen, heating up a tin of curry. We ate our dinner in silence, and then he read a book and I listened to the radio. I felt uncomfortable in the house and longed for the morning, when I could go racing through the veld with the dogs, go out looking for tracks and walk far into the sanctuary. At 10 p. m., as was custom, my father switched off the electricity generator and went to his study, where he slept.
The low hum now gone, I lay in bed and let the night overtake me, hungrily following the calls in the darkness. A jackal marking his territory, the rhythmic eruptions of spring bullfrogs, the steady breath of King at the foot of my bed. And then I heard another familiar sound, the creaking of the gate on the heron’s pen. Gently I felt my way down the hall and into my parents’ old bedroom. I hid behind the soft lace curtains, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the night, I saw my father move slowly across the compound carrying the heron gently under his arm, its long legs dangling at his side. The heron’s neck was liquid in the moonlight, curving and swaying, at times seeming to entwine my father. Its beak glinted like a dagger. One of my father’s hands followed the bird’s neck, lightly touching it at times, while the other was sunk deep into the heron’s soft breast, pale gray feathers around his wrist. My father slipped by with the heron, and I went back to bed and stared into the darkness. Later on, I heard a tremulous wail repeated several times. It came from the river. I knew it was the red-crested night heron, even though I’d never heard its call before, and I thought about my father in the darkness on the banks of the Modder River with the bird.
At breakfast the next morning, my father told me that a hyena had gotten the best of us, had finally broken into the heron’s pen, because the bird had disappeared. Under the blue gum tree, we examined a huge hole in the fence. “Yes, I think so, Dad,” I said, and nodded in agreement as we watched King and Blitz sniff inside the pen. He seemed lighter and chatted with me about school as I helped him dismantle the fence. “Hyena,” he had said with such authority. He told me that now he might even be able to come to an end-of-the-year recital at my school. That night I made fried bananas and ice cream for dessert, and we listened to a radio play together. At ten, just before he switched off the generator, I looked in the mirror and thought, I have his eyes.