About 4 minutes to read aloud.

The robin was awake long before the house was, sitting on the top rail of the garden fence with his feathers puffed out against the cold. Below him the garden was white and stiff with frost, and none of it looked like breakfast.

He had a system for cold mornings like this one. He would watch the kitchen window until the curtain moved, because that usually meant someone was up, and someone up usually meant crumbs on the step before long. So he waited, turning his head this way and that, and while he waited he noticed things.

He noticed that the fox from three gardens along had crossed the lawn in the night, walking a straight line from the shed to the gap in the hedge, its prints already softening at the edges. He noticed the blackbird two doors down complaining about something, as blackbirds do. He noticed a small yellow light come on upstairs, behind a curtain, and go off again almost at once, and thought: a child, checking.

Then he noticed the marks on the roof.

They ran along the ridge tiles and down past the chimney, two long lines pressed into the frost as though something heavy had rested there and then gone. A robin sees a great many marks on a great many roofs each winter and mostly forgets them, because a roof is not somewhere he thinks about very often. But these did not lead anywhere sensible. They stopped at the chimney and did not carry on down the other side, and there was no bird large enough, and no cat light enough, to have made them.

He tipped his head at them for a while. Then the kitchen curtain moved, a door opened, and a boy in slippers came out with a plate of crusts, which settled the matter of what came first.

The crusts were good ones, properly buttered, and the robin ate without hurrying, because the boy stood and watched rather than shooing him off, which some children did and some did not. While he ate, the sun cleared the hedge and touched the roof, and the two long marks on the ridge tiles thinned, and then went, the way frost always does once the sun means it.

By the time the boy had gone back inside, calling out that the robin had come again, there was nothing left on the roof to show anyone, and no way at all of explaining to a boy in slippers what his own chimney had been holding an hour before.

The robin finished the last crust, shook the crumbs from his beak, and flew on to the next garden, where there would be other crumbs, and other roofs, and, if he happened to look up in time, other marks worth noting before the sun caught up with them too.