Above the whisk and prattle of my rake, we heard a sort of burbling, the dogs and I, as if somewhere, stones had been laid out, and over them, an oddly boisterous brook had begun to flow. 
     We looked upward, and westward, and saw that the noise came not from a brook, but from a flock of black birds heading in our direction. 
     ‘Oh,’ said Silky Josephine, for it was an enormous flock. 
     ‘Are we going to be okay?’ asked Peter Pan. And Harley, for whatever reasons, licked his lips. 
     'We are,’ I told Pete. But he drew close regardless, just as the first of the birds were directly overhead. 
      They flew as if inside of a great undulating tube ...their chatter filling the clear blue sky .... a tube, which at one point in our watching, seemed to reach both horizons, its beginning and end lost to sight. 
    Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes maybe, we watched in silence, in reverence. 
     ‘This morning I dreamed I found one hundred dog bones in my bowl,’ Silky said when finally the last of the birds had passed over and again it was quiet. Her eyes were still intent on the place where the flock had disappeared. 
     ‘I thought that would be the luckiest thing ever,’ she said and then turned to me. ‘But now I don’t think I’m a wake-up-and-find-one-hundred-dog-bones-in-my-bowl, kind of lucky.’ 
     ‘I think I’m more of a ten-million-birds kind of girl,’ she said, and stretched out in the warm December sun, where the whisk and prattle of my rake could carry her off into sleep and the odd luck of dreams. 
     ‘Ten million birds,’ Silky said, and slowly closed her eyes.