As Birds Bring Forth the Sun

L.J. Rouse was a freelance writer in Toronto.

A Gaelic spirit broods over these tales of trial and endurance in a world where only death is certain. MacLeod tells of strong events: a miner, digging a brother’s grave, disturbs the decaying coffin of their father; a blind old woman is trapped in her blazing cottage surrounded by the animals who are her only companions; a grown son home for a family Christmas realizes he has come to say farewell to a dying father; a man is torn apart by the wild dog pack spawned by the great gray bitch he has saved from certain death. Life always consists of dangerous work, and of more dangerous tedium when that work is done.

All seven tales are told with a power that seems to be the Scottish storyteller’s legacy. This is a beautiful, haunting collection by a master of the short story, in which the untamed Canadian spirit is one with that of the displaced Highlanders who made a forbidding and empty wilderness a second motherland.