"—and I said leave it, Callum, leave it where it is, but you never bloody listen."
That's Mam, hissing it across the mud while the headlamps swing between us. Gone eleven, and we're a mile out on the flats, further than Dad ever let us go before the accident took his knee. We're hunting the last good bed before the tide turns. Callum's found something in the net drag, snagged in the nylon with a clump of razor shells. Brass, green with age, shaped like a little bird with a slit for a mouth.
"It's a call," he says. "Wildfowlers used them. For bringing the ducks in."
We've done this ground since Nan's day. Cockling, out on the sands where the tide comes in faster than a man can run, faster than the tourists ever believe when the signs tell them so. Our family knows the channels, the gullies that fill first, the hour the water turns. Dad used to say his own father lost a dog out here once, a spaniel called Pepper that went after a curlew and never came back, though nobody's mentioned Pepper in years and I only remember the name because Nan kept its collar in a drawer. We know not to linger. That's the one rule that's never broken, whoever's boots are on the mud.
Callum puts the brass bird to his lips before anyone can stop him and blows it, just to hear it, the way a boy will.
It doesn't sound like a duck. The note comes out flat and a little cracked, and it runs on half a second longer than his breath should carry it, like something further off is finishing it for him.
Dad's headlamp finds his face. "Don't do that again."
"Why not?"
Dad doesn't answer. He never talks about what happened to his knee out here, or why he won't wear the old wading boots anymore, the ones Mam finally threw out last spring, still caked, she said, though nobody asked with what. We've stopped asking.
We work another twenty minutes. Forks going into the mud, sacks filling, the wind picking up off the bay the way it does before the tide comes properly in. Then Nessa, my sister, says, quiet, not looking up from her fork, "Who answered him, then."
Nobody laughs. Out past the last gully, low and even, something answers the brass bird a second time, though it's sitting in Callum's coat pocket and none of us have touched it since.
Dad's the one who moves first. He doesn't run. He picks up the sacks, both of them, his and Callum's, and starts walking toward the shore lights without saying a word, and we follow him because that's the only rule that's ever mattered out here, and because the water, when we look down, has already found the bootprints we came in on.
"Eurasian Curlew - (Numenius arquata)" by cazalegg is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.