Summary

Masson sits in the yard and attempts to focus on his recordings, but finds himself distracted by the thought of Lloyd. He overhears Mairéad listening to the radio, where two men are discussing the violence in Northern Ireland. Bean Uí Néill shuts the radio off and the women begin discussing Lloyd’s hermitage instead. The sounds of birds remind Masson of his childhood, when his mother would struggle to understand the dialect his father and grandmother spoke to one another because she was not a native French speaker, and was brought back to France by Masson’s father from Algeria. Masson’s father resented her lack of fluency.

Lloyd awakens in the hut to a bitterly cold and rainy day and makes himself a meager breakfast over a small fire. He draws several sketches of birds. As he cooks some eggs...