Sometimes I would see the Cloud Hunters leave port, in the cool breath of early morning. It was hard for me to make my steps continue on their way to school after that. They were all I could see, all I could think of. And to me, right there, right then, there could be no finer life, no greater excitement than to be sailing aloft in search of the great, soft, cotton-wool clouds.
But I was just a school student, and my father and mother were administrators and office workers. They wore smart clothes and suits and kept regular hours. They could never have been Cloud Hunters in a million years. For the Cloud Hunters were like gypsies and renegades, with earrings and jewels, hennaed hands and tattoos, bracelets and bands of gold, and with dark, mysterious looks.
They were outcasts and adventurers, and I longed to be one of them, the way that a volunteer, knowing nothing of war, might long to be a soldier. The reality of war, its pain and fear, its terror and discomfort and deprivation meant nothing. All the naive onlooker and would-be recruit could perceive was war’s romance.
Yes, I wanted to go with them, wanted to fly away, to chase the clouds, to sail above the sun and into the far reaches of the upper air.
I knew I would never get to go, never, not in a week or a month or a year of Sundays, or any days at all.
But then my chance came, and I took it, and just for a little while I became a Cloud Hunter too.
So that was what happened.
That was my good luck.
And this is my story.