Chapter 3

Chapter Three

Alexander

“ B loody hell.”

I dropped my binoculars from where I was watching for the arrival of the snow buntings on a particularly drizzly gray day at the beach in Kingsbarns. Icy wind buffeted me, bringing the salty sting of the sea with it, and angry clouds hugged the horizon. I was waiting for the telltale sign—the flash of white wings against a moody winter sky—as the first sign of the holiday season arriving. I’d always likened the snow bunting’s winter call to Christmas bells, a bit of nostalgia from my mother, I supposed, who’d dragged me to this beach year after year to look for these cute birds.

She’d loved Christmas, and even when the birds arrived some years as early as the end of September, she’d taken it as her cue to start decorating for the season. While I didn’t decorate, or carry on much with any traditions, really, I still went to look for the snow buntings. The males always arrived first to set up their territories before the females, and my mother would note how nice it was they’d care for their partners. Hearing their call reminded me of her laughter, both a gentle note on the wind, and it was my way of honoring her memory. But now, I had a bigger problem on my hands than my grief.

Across the wide expanse of damp sand, a puffin was struggling ashore, which was all sorts of wrong. He should be out to sea, not clambering onto the beach with one wing askew. This could only mean one thing: he was hurt and needed help to survive. Without an ability to dive for food, he stood little chance of survival. Racing to my car, I grabbed a soft towel and strode quickly back to where I’d seen the wee puffin fighting.

It squawked at me as I approached, hopping away with one wing bent, but I just tossed the towel lightly over it and scooped it up before it could struggle much more. I didn’t want the poor thing to be in more pain than necessary, and I made soothing noises as I held its body secure and made my way to the car.

Two hours and one vet visit later, my new puffin friend and I were eyeing each other in my back garden.

My friend Niall, a vet, had not been optimistic about the bird’s ability to return to the wild, but one could hope. Something had clipped the puffin’s wing, and time would tell if a good molting would change his future. Whether the puffin ever flew again was another matter entirely, but for now, the wee bird should be out of pain and was healthy enough.

He was young.

With just two grooves on his bill, he was likely just over four years old and nearing when he’d first start looking for a mate. Now, it looked like he’d be spending the winter in my backyard, unless I could find a bird rehabilitation center that could take him in. In the meantime, my heart quite simply couldn’t handle the alternative—to euthanize him—so he’d come home with me in a carrier and now we had to figure out what to do with each other.

The first of which was trying to build an enclosure that would keep the wee lad safe from any predators, as well as keep him from wandering away while I was out. The second? I’d need to make a stop at the fishmonger to make sure he was well fed.

I should name him.

The puffin eyed me, turning his head back and forth, and scraped one of his webbed feet on the bottom of the carrier.

Of course . They liked to burrow. I should try to make him a makeshift burrow and then maybe a pool of sorts so he could still be in the salt water. Luckily, I had the perfect back garden for this sort of thing. My house was set just behind the sand dunes that overlooked Kingsbarns Beach, and one of the selling points, at least for me, was that a low rocky cliff edge narrowed to a point where salt water trickled through craggy rock piles to form a wee wading pool of sorts. It was tiny, no more than three to four meters across both ways, but if I could figure out how to fully enclose it, the puffin could have a wee paddle about, maybe even catch a few minnows that snuck through when the tide was high.

The puffin rattled its bill at me, clearly wanting to be let out of the carrier.

“Not yet, lad. I have some work to do.”

Luckily, I had a shed full of miscellaneous building materials, as part of the cheap price on this seaside cottage had been its desperate need for repair. I’d spent the last three years shining it up, and it was almost finished. I hadn’t planned to basically become a builder in my downtime, but I had to admit, it suited me. I’d learned that I quite liked working with my hands, and every project had been a reason to expand my knowledge. Between YouTube videos and trips to the bookshop, I’d been well equipped with tools to teach myself how to build.

Except the bookshop had been closed for almost a year now, requiring me to stop at the shop in St. Andrews to source my materials, and I had to admit I missed my wander down to Two Sisters for a cup of coffee before my stop at Highland Hearts, our local bookshop in Kingsbarns. A frivolous name to be sure, but the owner, Moira, had been anything but staid.

“I’ve got a plan for you,” Moira had always singsonged to me when I’d seen her at the shop, swirling by in a swath of frilly skirts and bright jumpers, several reading glasses caught in her bird’s nest hair. She’d never gotten around to telling me what her plan was, and I supposed I should have expressed more interest at the time. Frankly, she’d intimidated me. She’d decorated the shop for every holiday, and it had been practically a social hour whenever I’d gone in there. At the very least, it had forced me to interact with people outside of my colleagues and my students, and slowly I’d grown to be on a first-name basis with many people in the small village. I tried to avoid the bookshop on Thursdays, when an equally terrifying group of women, the Book Bitches, descended upon the store wearing punny T-shirts and doling out life advice left and right.

I’d narrowly escaped their ruthless attempts at matchmaking, and it had taken me the year since the store had closed to recover from being questioned about if I would wall slam a woman or if I was more of a “take it slow” kind of lad. Even now, I flushed at the thought. I’d had to go home and look up wall slam to see if it had meant exactly what I’d thought it had meant and then had lost an hour of my time to some dirty videos on the internet that left me taking a cold shower and clearing my browser history.

And to answer the question, it appeared I was both.

Not that I’d ever tell the Book Bitches that.

They needed to stick to their book club, and not to matchmaking. The last thing I needed was a woman in my life. One divorce had been enough and at the ripe old age of thirty-four, I was happy for my space.

By the time I’d finished gathering materials to build a pen for the wee bird, made up of chicken wire, two-by-fours, and piles of rocks and fresh grass for a burrow next to the wading pool, I had just enough time to go get him some food from the fishmonger before they closed. Torn between leaving him in the carrier, or bringing him with me, I did what any logical bird-loving man would do. I took him with me. What if he wanted to pick out his own fish?

Right, I probably wasn’t allowed to take a bird into a fishmonger, what with health and safety rules, and maybe being a hermit was getting to me if I thought that was acceptable behavior. Either way, the bird sat in his kennel on the front seat and eyed me through the door.

“I promise, you’ll be happy with our next stop.”

The bird rattled at me, gnashing its beak together to likely tell me what a jerk I was, but that was probably due to hunger. There was no way he’d been diving for food with that clipped wing of his. Once at the fishmonger, a tiny shop outside Kingsbarns, I rolled the window down to let in the cool air.

“I’ll be just a minute. I promise.”

The puffin made that chattering sound again and I rushed inside, not wanting him to hurt himself more by going crazy in the wee kennel in my car.

“Hiya, Alexander, how’s it going then?”

“All right. So, I’ve rescued a puffin, and it looks like they eat herring. Do you have any I can feed him?”

The fishmonger nodded. “Sprat too. Their favorite are the sand eels, but we can’t get those. I’ll get you sorted.”

I liked this fishmonger. No long chats or intrusive questions about my life, he was all business. I was in and out in just a few minutes and happy for it as the puffin was making increasingly annoyed sounds from my car.

“I’m here. I’m here.” I held the bag up like the bird had any idea what I had. But at least it stopped its complaining. “All right, you’re probably starving. How about a wee snack to tide you over on the drive?” Digging in the bag, I unwrapped one of the packets marked herring, immediately berated myself for opening fish in the car as the smell filled the air, and the puffin danced closer to the door of the carrier.

“Here. Try this.” I slipped a fish through the door, and he snapped it up so fast I drew my finger back. “So you are hungry.”

I fed him a few more through the gaps in the cage door and then started the car, humming all the way home.

Next time the Book Bitches cornered me about my love life, I could tell them I had taken a bird home. Snorting, knowing that very few would find me funny, I glanced at the puffin who seemed to regard me with a much friendlier look in its eyes.

“Well, mate. Shall we find you a name?”