Rain drifted to the south in long columns. Then the sun came clear of the eastern horizon, reluctantly, as if its red light somehow adhered to the level earth. With full light a flock of great birds came up out of the valley of the Red River to the north, their calling noisy and joyful. Hundreds of sandhill cranes lifted from their feeding places out in the flooded bottoms, kiting in the updrafts with laborious upstrokes. Britt watched them, streaming overhead, towing their insubstantial shadows behind them, and he heard the low, flat call of their archaic voices as they sailed along some
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