Two black and grey feathers design

The winter the river froze to the bridge, the older boy, Tom, walked out to check the goose pond and found a black feather lying on the ice, long as a man's forearm and glossy as a wet slate. Beside it, half sunk in the rime, was a grey one, soft at the edges and torn where something had pulled it free. Neither came from any bird still living on the farm. He carried both home inside his coat and said nothing until supper.

Sam laughed at him, then went quiet, because he knew the grey one. It had come off the big white-breasted goose he had let through the gate the night their mother died, the goose she loved best. He had never owned up. Tom laid the two feathers side by side on the scrubbed table, and the lamp caught them so the black one shone and the grey one looked like frost. They leaned toward each other the way people do after standing too long apart.

Neither spoke. By morning the pond had a skin of new ice, and when they went down together the feathers were gone. In their place lay a single line of prints in the snow, two sets of boots walking side by side from the gate to the water's edge, and then turning back again, together.