Snipe

Snipe are glimpsed above the rushes on the small farm the narrator later makes his home. Their brief appearance ties the birds to the particular landscape of the fields, while the phrase used to describe the farm reveals a sharp difference between the narrator’s attachment to it and his father’s judgment of its worth.

Place and Habitat

The farm is described as a low hill between two lakes, with poor soil. The narrator’s father calls it a “snipe run,” locating the birds in the rushy ground around the fields. Later, as the narrator recalls settling there, he sees snipe zigzagging above the rushes. The text offers no further account of their behaviour; their movement is a precise, fleeting detail in a landscape defined by water, rough ground, and small fields.

The Farm in the Father’s View

The father’s phrase makes the birds part of his dismissive appraisal of the property. To him, the farm represents a step down from the world of civil servants, teachers, doctors, nurses, policemen, and tillage inspectors to which he belonged. Its proximity to the mother’s relatives and to the place where the narrator had grown up, as well as the disreputable name of the nearby Ivy Leaf Ballroom, would have deepened his disapproval. The snipe are not themselves criticized; their presence is folded into a description that reduces the farm to an unprestigious tract of land.

Return and Narrative Significance

When the narrator and his wife buy the farm, the Ivy Leaf is already a ruin and its builder, Patsy Conboy, has gone blind. Against that diminished local scene, the snipe still move above the rushes. The narrator says that he and his wife settled there happily, and that his connection with these lanes and fields reached back to the beginning of his life. The birds therefore mark the land as the same place viewed through opposing judgments: a poor investment in the father’s social hierarchy, but a landscape of lasting personal attachment for the narrator.