Hunter's Choice
Authors: A.J. Downey
Hunter’s Choice
by A.J. Downey
Text copyright
© 2014 A.J. Downey
All Rights Reserved
To my wonderful and loving fiancé. You give me inspiration
daily, I don’t know what I would do without you.
Hunter
Sharp grinding pain caused my eyes to water. My left leg
and wing were useless to me. I was trapped. Unable to do anything for myself,
too weak to make anything other than a piteous call that would likely go
unheeded.
I closed my eyes and lay still and waited for death.
Thousands of years of living and this is how I would go. In the middle of a
stretch of asphalt, the cold rain pattering down on me while heartless humans
passed me by in their nice warm cars, tsking under their breath at the poor
bundle of floundering feathers in the road.
Idiot.
I was an idiot, pure and simple.
I wailed my frustration as my heart pounded against my
delicate ribs. Each beat sending a fresh lance of pain through my broken wing,
a sympathetic sharp pang echoing in my leg.
Who would have thought I would die like this? It was
shameful. Ridiculous even.
A sharp sound, footsteps, I swiveled my head to take in a
pair of worn brown work boots jogging across the highway. Gentle hands in thick
leather closed around me and I screeched. In as much pain as I was in, I
couldn’t help it. I was turned and as I was I looked into the most beautiful
eyes, deep and soulful, the color of the sea meeting a storm swept horizon.
They were surrounded by pale milky skin and wisps of hair I swore was spun
copper.
For a moment I thought it may be B
ébinn, come to fetch me to Annwn, but the pain she wrought when she
plucked me from the grit of the modern highway told me otherwise. I fought her,
I couldn’t help myself, but she took me from the road and got into a vehicle
and that was all I could remember for some time…
Jessamine
“You name this one yet?” Charlie asked me, and I shook my
head.
The Barred Owl had been under my care for a couple of months,
his left wing and left leg had been broken, thankfully both had been simple
fractures. He was on the mend and due for release as soon as I could get his
atrophied muscles built back up.
I couldn’t bear to name him, it wasn’t so simple… he wasn’t
like the other owls under my care. He was different somehow. Big for a Barred
Owl for one, and the way he watched me move through the old barn we used as an
Aerie, well it bespoke an intelligence far beyond any ordinary owl.
No, I just couldn’t name this one.
“Well now, maybe that just means you’re finally growing up
Jessamine!” He winked at me and I gave an indelicate snort, wrinkling my nose
in distaste I shook my head violently, strawberry blonde bangs flopping into my
eyes, pony tail dragging against the rugged green canvas material of my
Carhartt jacket.
“N…n…n…n…nnnnever!” My stutter was horrible but I forced the
word out through it anyways. Most of the time I chose to remain silent. I
carried a notepad and pen on a string around my neck for when communication was
absolutely required.
Charlie had fashioned a cover out of leather so that I could
replace the note pad in it whenever I needed to. He’d spent so much time on it.
Tooling a Barn Owl into its medium brown leather surface by hand. The loop that
held the pen was sturdy and once he’d gifted it to me, I’d worn it every day
since.
That had been when I was eighteen, it was a parting gift
when I’d gone off to veterinary college. I’d lived here with my aunt and uncle,
well my Mom’s aunt and uncle, she didn’t have any siblings, since the time I
was seven. Charlie was as old as my aunt and uncle who had recently retired to
Arizona and a warmer climate. Not Charlie though. Nope, he would live and die
around these parts and his tribe. The Quilleute of the Olympic Peninsula in
Washington State.
I went around the large open interior of the old barn,
cleaning cages, feeding my charges and checking on the newer birds. I worked
full time at a veterinary hospital in Port Angeles about thirty minutes from my
aunt and uncle’s property.
It was my property now, for all intents and purposes, just
not in name. They wanted it to be, but I had refused such a generous gift. They
had it in their wills it would go to me, but even then, I’m not sure if I would
be ready to really own it, even though I had been operating it for years.
Moonchild Owl’s Haven started when I was nine, with a sick Spotted
Owl my uncle and I had found while mushroom hunting. We had no idea what we
were doing, but we couldn’t just leave the poor thing. So we took it to the
vet, and insisted on learning.
A local bird sanctuary, The Northwest Raptor and Wildlife
center took us on as volunteers. We had done things almost all wrong with the
Spotted Owl, who by the grace of some higher power and Jaye Moore, the director
of the Raptor Center had lived. Despite having bungled the initial care of
Hootie back then, I had fallen in love with the cause almost instantly and my
uncle and I had been willing pupils under Jaye. We had learned everything there
was to learn about caring for all types of birds from her, but for me, it had
always been about the owls. I’m not sure why.
When I was thirteen, my uncle and I applied for the
necessary permits to become a wildlife rehabilitation facility. My uncle and I
had spent every summer renovating the old barn on the property from the age of
nine to thirteen to get it ready to house any injured owls. We won the permits
and had rehabilitated quite a few owls from then until now. Only three in that
time had become fixtures. Their injuries necessitating a permanent residency
under my care.
I went to the back wall of the barn and looked up at the
almost life sized tree artfully burned into its raw wood surface. Leaves
bearing the burned in name of every owl we had ever helped hung on brass hooks
from the many branches. It was a project my uncle and I had started from day
one.
“What’re you going to put on his tag if you don’t name him?”
Charlie asked as I looked over the tree. I shrugged my shoulder and turned, he
was watching the bird with a curious look on his face, the bird though; he was
watching me.
He was more brown than white, his patterning dappled and
streaked in such a way as to remind me of the light falling through the trees.
His beak was the color of bone, not yellow like a lot of the Barred Owls
around. His eyes though, they were limpid pools of darkness, large and oddly
expressive, and followed me as a man’s would. Drinking me in as I moved about
the barn. There was something there, something I couldn’t place, but he, he was
like no other owl; be it Barred, Barn, Spotted or any other species I had
housed under my roof.
“Odd feller ain’tcha?” Charlie asked absently. The bird
turned and looked Charlie in the eye and Charlie shuddered as if he’d gotten a
sudden chill. I clapped twice and Charlie looked at me.
Throughout my childhood, Charlie, my Uncle and I had
developed a series of hand signals for me to let them know what I was up to. My
Aunt had never grasped it, but it was like our own sign language. I signed out
that I was cleaning up and calling it a day out here and that he should do the
same.
I had never bothered learning ASL, American Sign Language,
what was the point out here where my world was as small as it was? Where no one
else spoke it? I didn’t venture to the city very often and my note pad and
pointing sufficed more often than not.
Was I lonely?
Yes, sometimes, but that was my lot in life. Besides, I had
Charlie, and my owls. They were like my feathered children and I loved each
one, choosing a name, growing attached and crying with a sense of loss at every
release. Some would call me masochistic, and to some degree I suppose that was
true, but you can’t do what I do and not feel. That would simply be barbaric.
I stopped in front of my unnamed Barred Owl’s cage, Charlie
ducked out of the barn and into the ever present light drizzle outside. I considered
the owl who cooed softly at me, another odd occurrence. I sighed and looked
around to make sure that Charlie was good and gone from hearing range.
“W-what’s your n-n-n-n-ame fella?” I asked softly.
When it was just me and the owls, away from human judgment,
my stutter was much less. Psychogenic they called it, as opposed to neurogenic.
It meant that there was nothing neurologically wrong with me or my brain to
cause the stutter. No, mine was all in my head on a psychological level due to
trauma. Not something I liked to think about or talk about.
The owl cocked its head almost all the way ‘round upside
down like they do sometimes and considered me. It gave a familiar broken call
and I smiled. That was where my initial love of owls had come from.
When my Aunt and Uncle had plucked me out of the temporary
State custody I’d been in, I’d already been self-conscious of my speech by
then. Aunt Margie and Uncle Dave were a childless couple by fate, not design.
So when Uncle Dave’s niece, my mom had gotten into… trouble, and could no
longer handle taking care of me, Aunt Margie had insisted that she and Uncle
Dave come to the rescue. It was the kind of people they were and I loved them
for it.
Unfortunately for me, going from life in the city to life
here on the Olympic Peninsula was a lesson in culture shock. It was so
quiet
here at night, and the animal sounds from out there in the dark, terrifying at
first. That was, until Uncle Dave told me the broken hooting I was hearing was
an Owl, and he pointed out a ghost of a bird in one of our trees.
He told me that there was nothing to be afraid of, that the
owl was just saying ‘Welcome to the neighborhood,’ that she just had a stutter
like me. I think it was his attempt at telling me not to let my stutter get me
down, that the animals didn’t but I was way beyond a small pep talk at that
point.
The big Barred Owl hooted at me questioningly and I smiled.
He was just so
odd
. It made me wonder about him even more. I pursed my
lips in thought and rejected the notion of going into his enclosure for now. As
human as his mannerisms were, he was still a bird of prey and as such pretty
dangerous and unpredictable. I smiled at him and backed away. He ruffled his
feathers and hunkered down on his perch, blinked and watched me go. He would be
ready for release just as soon as I could get him back into flying form, so a
month or more down the road.
I slipped out into the mist like rain, shutting and securing
the old barn door behind me. I looked out over my small side yard at the two
story Cedar shake sided house that had been lovingly built by my uncle for my
aunt. I had taken over the master bedroom on the second story when they had
cleared out. A small deck jutted out from the floor to ceiling windows to
either side of the French doors.
I traipsed across the gravel drive and mounted the steps to
the small deck two at a time. I wiped my boots carefully on the mat before
letting myself in to my bedroom.
I took off my boots just inside the doors on the slate entryway
before it transitioned into carpet. I took pains to keep the outdoors where
they belonged and not in my house. I stepped into my rubber soled sheepskin
slippers and padded across the floor to the bedroom door. My bedroom was technically
on the side of the house, rather than the back or front. I took off my coat as
I went down the stairs, hanging it carelessly on the banister as I passed into
the kitchen. I set about making myself and Charlie some dinner, boiling water
for hot tea.
After a time, he came in through the back door. I scowled
and pointed at his boots. He laughed and took them off. I scowled again at his
holey sock where his big toe poked through as he took a seat at the marble
kitchen counter.
“That big, barred bastard, is about ready to go into an
aviary,” he grunted, and I smiled. The Barred Owl wasn’t exactly native to the
Pacific Northwest and was forcing out the much rarer and endangered Northern
Spotted Owl, both by killing the slightly smaller owl and by interbreeding with
it. To quote the villain of the movie Braveheart, “If we can’t get them out,
we’ll breed them out.”
In Charlie’s world Barred Owls were interlopers, forcing the
native Spotted Owls from their rightful territory. I’d imagine, being Quilleute,
hell, being Native, gave Charlie a stronger opinion than most about the
subject, and rightfully so. Still, Charlie was like me, a firm believer that
every creature great and small deserved to live with as pain free an existence
as possible. The world was harsh enough without us adding to it.
That’s not to say we were vegetarians or anything close. We
did have a deep respect for what we ate and as I dished up the salmon steaks
and green beans we bowed our heads in a moment of silence, paying our respects
to the creature we were about to consume.
“Gotta mend the south aviary tomorrow if you’re gonna start
working that big Barred, getting’ him ready to fly.” He spoke around a mouthful
of food and I rolled my eyes while simultaneously giving him a thumbs up. He
laughed, knowing exactly what it was I meant. He didn’t apologize for talking
with his mouth full, he just shoveled more into his maw and chewed with gusto.
I cooked, he cleaned. That was the deal around here. I
poured us some steaming mugs of blackberry tea and added a generous amount of
honey to both while he rinsed dishes and loaded the dishwasher. He’d be heading
home in his big old Ford pickup soon. I’d told him he should just move into the
downstairs room but he’d have none of it. Swearing he’d live on the res and die
on the res which was a good forty minutes away.
I sighed and went into the living room, adding logs to the
ravenous potbellied stove in the corner.
“Well Jessa-my-girl, it’s time for me to haul my old bones
back to the res.” Charlie stretched and dropped into one of the seats at the
little dining nook. He laboriously began pulling on his old boots.
“You going into town tomorrow?” he asked. I swiped across my
neck once, our sign for no. It was my day off, but he already knew that.
“All right then sweet heart, you going to help an old man
get that aviary up and running?” I shrugged and raised three fingers and pumped
my fist up and down twice, holding imaginary jesses. He raised an eyebrow.
Right now we had five birds, three of which needed exercise which is what I’d
just told him.
“Well when you’re done you know where to find me at.” He
grumbled and I smiled sweetly. I went over and gave him a hug. He went out the
back door and around the house, boots crunching on the gravel drive. I closed
the door and a moment later I heard his old Ford grumble to life.
I sighed and doused the lights on the first floor after
setting the coffee pot for the morning.
Sometimes there weren’t enough hours in a day. Today had
been no exception. Still, the birds and Charlie were fed and tomorrow was a new
day. I shuffled up the stairs, leaving my coat behind and put myself squarely
into a hot shower. As I climbed into bed I could hear the big Barred Owl all
the way from the barn, his call clear and loud. Scientists call it the “Who
cooks for you! Who cooks for you all?” which I thought was funny. It didn’t
sound like that to me. To me it sounded like all was right in my world.