Chilled back stiffly bent, wet breath feebly hacking at the smouldering twigs, the old islander patiently willed the flames to catch, the heat to spread. His fuel was nearly spent; just enough remaining now to last another night - perhaps two, and then what?
The small shovel in his left hand was ready loaded with the poor mix of lumps and damp coal dust and earth but the fire in his stove refused to draw and a choking haze of smoke began to fill the room prompting him to open the window.
From the corner of his eye he noticed movement on the shovel and looking more closely saw that the coal dust was alive with slaters; not just a few but dozens, scores even. Suddenly irritated, he moved as though to tip the lot onto the fire and then hesitated, torn between his desire for warmth and an absurd reluctance to destroy that struggling mass of life. He'd read somewhere that the common slater had hardly changed at all since the beginning of evolution - although it really didn't look much of a winning design to him.
With a slight shrug and with great care he then started to flick them, one by one, into an empty bucket nearby, counting aloud as he did so.
`7...18...26...38...43... 48 ... 49 - yes, 49! Amazing! All pointlessly rescued into the bucket. What idle stupidity!'
The smoke from the fire still relentlessly preferred the room to the chimney and, convinced now that the flue had become blocked, he leaned forward and pulled away the angle piece that led from the top of the stove to the flue. Yes, as he thought; blocked with a solid clod of soot which he knocked free into the back of the hearth.
The main flue seemed clear enough though - except that there now appeared, just a few inches from his face, a head, upsidedown, studying him with bright accusing eye. It was a starling; dirty and indignant but definitely a starling.
The old man, although startled, moved slowly back away from the flue so as not to further alarm the bird and the starling, not being slow to assess its options, burst out into the room with a flurry of soot and landed squarely on the slumbering house cat.
It took the cat a few moments to take stock of this unusual turn of events before it was able to make a sleepy lunge at the bird.
There followed a bizarre chase around the small room with the starling battering its soot-laden wings against the walls closely pursued by the cat and then the old man.
As luck would have it, the man tripped and fell on the cat which he immediately seized and quickly shut in a cupboard. The bird meanwhile had disappeared and the man rubbed his beard in puzzlement until he heard the sounds of tapping coming from the bucket; tap, tap, tap: 47 ... 48...49!
The starling hopped briefly onto the rim of the bucket before spotting the open window and, with a final flurry of soot, swooped up and out of sight for ever.
The old man, quite overcome by the obscurity of this manifest allegory, simply went back to bed (having first retrieved the cat) but he never removed the dark impressions of bird's wings from his walls - where they can be seen to this day.