The Snow Falcon (36 page)

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If he showed her he could do something right, if he gave her the money and said she should do what she thought best with it, and if he told her he wasn’t going to drink anymore, well, that would change things, wouldn’t it?

STANDING ON THE PORCH OUTSIDE THE

house, Michael felt a shift in the air. It wasn’t getting so cold at night, and the days were getting longer. Though there was still plenty of snow on the ground, no more had fallen for several days. The weather reports said that in the south, spring had arrived early. Around Little River spring was still a month or so away, but there was a feeling of expectation in the air. Beneath the snow and the ice, in the frozen ground, a stirring of new life had begun, a gathering of energy, buds getting ready to break out when the time was right. When the snow melted, the high tundra would be the home of purple fleabane, red Indian paintbrush plants, and yellow ragwort.

The day had dawned with a clear sky. There was warmth in the sun, and in the woods around the clearing, snow melted and dripped from the branches of trees.

High up on the road toward Falls Pass where he would drive later with Jamie, it was colder, the breeze still carrying a sharp winter bite. Cully had flown to the lure for a week, and now she could make a dozen or more passes before her wing started to show signs of tiring. The course of antibiotics was finished, and now there was nothing more Tom Waters could do. He’d examined her again and said he thought the infection had cleared, but maybe the injury had left her permanently weakened. He didn’t know if she retained the strength and agility to survive in the wild.

Later, as Michael and Jamie crossed the snowfield toward the ridge, Michael was thinking about what lay ahead, and he was worried.

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Cully had to prove that she was capable of hunting before he could contemplate releasing her, and before that test he had to persuade her to do what the books called “stooping.” Jamie had picked up on his mood and cast him anxious glances as they prepared to fly her.

“We’re going to try something a little different today,” Michael explained. He described that what they’d been doing so far, having Cully chase the lure at relatively low levels, wasn’t always the way she would hunt in the wild. “Sometimes she’ll ride the thermals high up, waiting for an opportunity. When she dives, that’s the stoop; she’ll close her wings up like this.” He made a V shape with his hands. “When she comes down, it’ll be fast. That’s what we have to get her to do today.”

Jamie listened, but his expression remained puzzled. Michael hesitated, unsure of how much he should explain, but he reasoned that Jamie had come this far with him and had a right to know what risk this entailed for Cully. “I don’t know if her wing will stand it,” he went on. “Do you know what G force is, Jamie? It’s the gravitational effect a jet fighter pilot experiences.”

Michael saw that Jamie had some idea of what he meant but was trying to understand what this had to do with Cully. Michael tried to explain, repeating what Frank had told him, that the G force effect a falcon experiences in a full stoop, at speeds of over a hundred miles an hour, would kill a man. The final part of her training entailed hiding the lure as she came by after the first pass, the idea being that she would then rise and circle, waiting for her meal. He had to keep the lure hidden while she gained height. She might find a perch on the cliffs half a mile away, or just land in confusion on the snow, but if she did either of these things, he had to try again until eventually she got the hang of it, following her natural instincts. When she was high enough, he had to show her the lure and call her; then she would stoop, imitating the way she would hunt in the wild, eventually throwing out her wings as she neared the ground to suddenly change direction and catch the lure. That was the moment when the pressure on her wing would be at its greatest and, in Cully’s case, the most dangerous. In falconry terms, this was known as training a bird to “wait on.”

Cully’s survival depended on this.

She gave no sign this was anything but a normal day’s training for her. When Jamie had her on his fist, she bit impatiently at the

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glove and roused her feathers, eager for her meal. Michael made sure Jamie had hold of her jesses tightly before he took off the leash and swivel. He’d explained a dozen times how important it was that she didn’t take off trailing her leash. All Jamie had to do now was quickly thread the jesses through their eyelets.

“Ready?”

Jamie stared at him, hesitant, unsure.

“She has to be able to do this,” Michael said.

Jamie looked fearful, understanding what was at stake, and he took a step backward, half turning as if to shield Cully.

“Look at her, Jamie,” Michael urged.

Cully stood square-footed and turned into the breeze, her wings held partly open, fluttering from her body.

“She’s ready,” he said, and they could see that she was. Her eyes were fixed on the sky and on distant points of the landscape. Her fate was her own, and they could only be spectators. Michael was her custodian but he didn’t own her—that was how it had always been. He tested her hunger one more time with a scrap of meat that she snatched eagerly, then he started to walk away.

At forty yards or so he turned and swung the lure, and as he did so, he called her. She came to him, making a halfhearted feint at the lure, knowing she wouldn’t be allowed it yet, and then began to rise. She started to turn, but he had coiled the lure and put it away in the bag at his side. She came around and, having nothing to pursue, settled into a glide, passing overhead, waiting.

HIGH IN THE air, the breeze is stronger, and it makes a crisp streamlined sound as it passes across Cully’s feathers. She is aware of the sound and of the power that she can tap into with a subtle shift in the angle at which she holds her wings. There is some instinctive recognition of its feel and texture that is pleasurable to her. With each sweeping wing stroke she feels the stretch and contraction of the large powerful muscles across her back and breast, and as she rises, she tucks her feet beneath her tail.

When she turns, the figures below are as clear to her as if they were close enough to touch. She is able to resolve detail ten times more clearly than a man. She’s already at 150 feet, but she can see the color of their eyes, the rhythm of muscle movement beneath the

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exposed skin of hand and face. For a moment she falters, unsure what to do when she can’t see her meal. To save energy, she hangs on the air, letting the updraft carry her while she waits to see what will happen. The thermal she has found carries her higher, and she turns in a circle to stay within its light grasp. When she feels its effect lessening, she flies until she feels the upward lift of another current, then she circles again, allowing herself to be carried aloft.

Beneath her, the broad white slope is punctuated only by the two stationary figures she has come to know. She trusts them, and has come to accept the strange world of sights and sounds she has lived in. Sometimes when she is in the air she feels the call of old instincts, and now, as she circles, she looks northward across a landscape of valleys and mountains toward distant peaks. Something pulls her in that direction, but then, too, there is a pull earthward. She feels a bond with the tall figure now far below and half a mile distant. His face is turned toward her, pale against the dark of his body. She is above the cliffs now, at fifteen hundred feet, and as she passes over the ridge, thermals rising from the valley carry her higher and farther afield.

She turns her head, surveying the landscape, and looks back to the figures on the ground. She is hungry.

MICHAEL WATCHED WHILE she drifted higher and farther away. A tight ball of apprehension had settled in his stomach. Jamie had come closer, his face pinched and white. He kept looking from Michael to Cully as she drew away from them, becoming just a dark speck against the clear sky, and Michael could feel the boy’s silent plea for him to call her back.

There was a temptation not to. He could just watch her while she drifted far across the valley. Hunger would distract her; she’d see a rabbit or a pigeon and vanish, and he’d never know what happened to her. He could convince himself that she survived, and whenever he thought of her afterward, he could imagine her flying free somewhere high above the mountains. It was a momentary fantasy, fueled by the fear of witnessing what might happen next.

When she had drifted above the valley and was two thousand feet in the air, barely visible if he took his eyes from her for a moment, he produced the lure and called her. He could feel his heartbeat, the

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rushing of blood coursing through his veins, the tightness in his throat. He was afraid he’d left it too long, that she wouldn’t hear him, wouldn’t see the lure, wouldn’t want to return. He had lived with her too long to lose her now. Though he was afraid for her, he had a greater fear, he realized; that of never knowing her final fate. Her success would be his as well, and if her wing gave out under the pressure, though he felt sick at the possibility, that, too, he would share. He felt such a powerful swelling of emotion, such a long-forgotten feeling, that it took him a moment to understand what it was. It was the opening up of his heart and soul to another creature. While he watched and sent a silent prayer out to her, she folded back her wings and dropped.

SHE IS THE perfection of aerodynamics as she hurtles earthward. The sound of rushing air builds to a low whistle. Her path is straight and true, her direction faultless, as she gathers speed so quickly that she is a blur in the sky. In her wing there is a tremor where there has been an injury, a faint stiffness that she feels at times, but if she senses there is a risk to herself, she pays it no heed because this is how she lives. There is no possibility of compromise. She is a gyr falcon, without peer in the air, and her life is marked out in absolutes. She will survive as nature designed her, in full beauty and grace, or she will perish unbowed. She gives no quarter when she homes in on her target, and she expects none. Below her, the small dark figures rush closer.

As SHE STOOPED, a portent of disaster clung in Michael’s mind: the horror that her wing would snap, that it would flutter uselessly, whipping in the wind as she corkscrewed earthward. He could see an imperfection in her flight, a slight twisting out of alignment.

She altered the angle of her dive at a hundred feet, swooping in a perfect crescent, and on cue he released the lure so that it spun into the air. At the apex of its upward momentum Cully seized it, and with half a dozen strokes she carried it to the ground and landed in a soft swirl of snow. She stood erect, her beak open, panting and recovering her breath, then mantled her wings protectively and began tearing at her meal.

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Michael exhaled, a long slow release of pent-up tension. When he could trust his voice, he turned to Jamie, his eyes stinging. “I told you there was nothing to worry about, didn’t I?” he said. Jamie broke into a wide smile. “I guess that’s about how I feel, too,” Michael said.

DRIVING HOME, HE was thoughtful. “You know,” he said to Jamie eventually, “I thought about just letting her go for a little while up there.” He wasn’t sure how exactly to phrase what he wanted to say. He had Jamie’s attention, but the boy was wearing the perplexed frown that was becoming familiar as a sign he didn’t fully understand something. “I mean, I was afraid of calling her back because of what might happen. It felt like it would be easier to just let her go, to pretend everything was okay. I don’t think that would have been the right thing to do, though, do you?”

A silence ensued, and then after a while Michael said, “I guess sometimes we just have to make the hard choices, no matter what that means we have to face.”

Jamie turned away and looked out the windshield, and Michael wondered if there wasn’t a lesson out of this day for himself.

ELLIS PARKED HIS truck in the trees off the road where it wouldn’t be seen and made his way down the track toward the house. There was a moon to light the way, casting shadows across the clearing. He stopped above the house and listened. There was no sound, no lights; everything was still. All he had to do was go around to the woodshed. He was wearing gloves to protect himself from the falcon, but he figured it would be sleepy and that if he was quick enough, he ought to be able to grab hold of it and just break its neck nice and cleanly. There wouldn’t even be a gunshot wound for Tusker to worry about.

Ellis hesitated, a hint of misgiving arising to trouble his mind. He didn’t know exactly why he felt the way he did, except that maybe it had something to do with Rachel coming by the yard again that afternoon.

“I think we should talk,” she’d announced, standing suddenly in the doorway.

At the time he’d had his feet up on the desk; since there was little

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else he had to do, he’d been taking a nap. By then his headache had subsided, and though he still generally felt like shit, he was buoyed by his call to Tusker. It had surprised the hell out of him seeing Rachel there, and following right after his surprise had come something else when he saw the expression on her face. It was because she’d been watching him sleeping, and when he’d sensed her presence and opened his eyes, he’d caught her off guard. She’d been looking at him like he was some stinking old dog that couldn’t control itself any longer, couldn’t rouse itself to go outside, and was asleep by the fire. Like she was facing up to the fact that it would be kinder to call the vet to come over and put it to sleep, or to just take it into the woods with a rifle. It had shocked him, to understand what she thought of him.