The Snow Falcon (30 page)

“This is it,” he said.

He’d remembered this place when Frank had told him he’d need somewhere open, away from trees, to fly Cully to the lure. If they crossed the slope, they’d be surrounded by pristine snow, the treeline behind them, the cliffs ahead, a ridge to the north, beyond which lay an ocean of winter-blue sky.

He fetched Cully from the back of the Nissan and they crossed a rock-strewn patch of ground close to the road. Beyond it their feet sank a little, but the snow was frozen and crisp and the going wasn’t too hard. Ahead of them, sunlight hit the cliffs, bouncing back dazzling reflections from ice sheets that must have formed from water seepage high up somewhere. In places, great areas were thrown deep into shadow by the contours of the rock face, and these were like massive dark holes.

The air stung their cheeks, and each breath was like inhaling icy needles. Their steps made a sound like splintering glass. Half a mile from the road they stopped, and Michael took off Cully’s hood. She

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stood erect on his fist, looking all around at this unfamiliar vista through gleaming eyes, her breast pushed out, reared to her full height. She flicked out her wings, testing the faint breeze. The clean smell of high air and bare rock, the unfiltered sunlight and the closeness of the sky, awakened her instincts.

In his free hand, Michael was carrying a spiked block perch, made from a wooden log, which he thrust into the snow. His plan had been to leave Cully on it while he prepared the lure, but now he had a better idea. For the moment he set her down; then he took his glove off and held it out to Jamie.

“How’d you like to help out?” he said. “I need you to hold Cully on your fist.”

Jamie’s eyes grew wide, and he took a wary step backward.

“Listen,” Michael said. “You’ve been watching her for long enough. Don’t you want to get a little closer?” His motive was twofold. He thought it would be nice for Jamie to get more involved, but he also thought this might help to break down his reserve a little bit. A kid shouldn’t be so locked up in himself, he thought.

He crouched down to Jamie’s level. “Come on, she won’t hurt you,” he said. “Look, she’s not even worried. She knows who you are.”

They stayed like that for a few seconds. Then at last, hesitantly, Jamie nodded and reached out. He looked nervously at Cully. Michael helped him pull the glove on, then brought his hand down behind the perch. “All you have to do is just press against the back of her legs and she’ll step back onto your fist, okay? Just hold your arm steady, then thread the jesses and leash through your fingers like this.” He guided Jamie’s movements as he spoke. “Good. Now stand up.”

When they were standing, Jamie’s expression slowly changed. The nervousness went as he saw that Cully wasn’t going to suddenly attack him. Michael smiled to himself, watching the light grow in the boy’s eyes. “Just let her get used to you, that’s it.” Cully shifted her feet, looked at the glove and then at Jamie, nipped at her jesses, then roused her feathers, shaking her tail and settling contentedly. ‘She turned her attention back to the landscape. “See, she’s fine.”

After a minute or two, Michael showed Jamie how he could stroke her breast feathers, which Jamie did tentatively, drawing back quickly when she arched her neck to watch his finger. Michael had read in one of his books that if a falcon nipped at a finger, the correct thing

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to do was to hold still and wait until she released it. He’d been on the receiving end of Cully’s nips now and then when she didn’t want to be stroked, and he thought maybe it was a good idea to take things slowly.

“Okay, we’re going to fly her now,” he said. “What I want you to do is just stay like this, okay? Just let Cully stand there while I walk back over there; then I’ll call her. Think you can you do that?” Jamie met his eye directly. A second went by, then he gave a slight nod. “Okay. Good boy.”

Michael removed Cully’s leash and jesses. “Just stay right there.” He knew it wouldn’t take long for Jamie to feel the strain of the weight he was carrying, and he walked quickly away, taking the lure out of his bag as he went. Cully’s bell sounded as she shifted restlessly. The strange flat note it made carried clearly in the air, and he imagined someone could hear it from the cliffs half a mile distant.

The next step in her training was to induce her to chase the lure instead of just coming to it held in his fist. He’d read the description in Frank’s book of how this was meant to happen, and on the phone Frank had run him through it. He’d practiced spinning the lure like a lasso at his side in front of the house, imagining Cully flying around in a high wide circle around him the way Frank had assured him she would, then coming in as he called her. The aim was to swing the lure in an arc in front of his body, timing it so that Cully was just behind, then whisking it away at the last moment so that she flew on and came around again.

“A falcon will do this a dozen or more times until she tires, then you let her catch it,” Frank had said. He’d promised it would quickly build her strength.

Michael felt as nervous as he had the first time about flying her free. At least then the only thing different from what she’d been doing without fail was that she wasn’t encumbered by the creance. Otherwise, she’d simply had to fly to his fist. This time he was going to do something totally unexpected and she was supposed to understand what was being asked of her. To him it seemed like a big ask, but he’d prepared himself for the moment.

At fifty yards he took a breath, turned, and called her. Her wings opened immediately. Jamie ducked as feathers brushed his face, then his arm dipped and she was away. When she was three quarters of the way toward him, Michael followed Frank’s instructions and tossed

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the lure onto the ground. For a second Cully faltered, and Michael was gripped by a quick flash of panic as he imagined her soaring past, rising and rising while he called futilely after her. But her eyesight was ten times clearer than a man’s, and the meat on the lure was what she’d been watching. It was like a beacon, and as she approached, she threw back her wings and landed as if she’d been doing this forever. She mantled her prize protectively, then after checking around, she began tearing at the meat. A falcon prefers to carry her prey to a safe spot nearby if she can—a ledge on a rock face, perhaps—but if forced to eat on the ground, where she is vulnerable, she eats quickly.

Elated at their success, Michael returned to Jamie. “Let’s give her a minute, then we’ll do it again. Okay?” Jamie wore a slightly puzzled frown, not understanding the reason for this change in Cully’s training. “You’ll see,” Michael told him. He was nervous as hell about what he planned to do next, and couldn’t bring himself to describe it in case it all went horribly wrong. If it worked out the way it was supposed to, however, they were really going to see Cully fly. The mixture of nervousness and excitement left him feeling tense and wired.

The second time he called her from Jamie’s fist, Michael threw the lure down as he had before; but now he was supposed to pull it away just before she reached it. Frank had said she’d be confused and would fly past, rising as she went, and then he was supposed to call her and swing the lure.

“Don’t panic,” he’d said. “She’ll come around for another pass at it.”

At that point he was supposed to throw it to the ground and let her take it. That was the theory.

She came quickly as before, swooping from Jamie’s fist to a glide and then flying a foot or so above the snow. He waited until the very last moment before he pulled the lure away, and even as he yanked on the cord, he knew he’d waited too long. She was already poised to land, feet reaching out, tail fanned to act as a brake, and to his consternation she didn’t fly past but instead came down in the snow, looking startled and annoyed. The lure, snatched virtually from her grasp, landed ten feet away, and before Michael could react, she started to run after it. She had a waddling gait, odd-looking with her wings folded, like somebody without arms, half hopping and half

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walking. For a second he didn’t know what to do, then impulsively he jerked the lure away from her again. She stopped, bewildered now, and again she ran after it. He was dismayed; this wasn’t the soaring flight he’d imagined.

He finally had the presence of mind to let her catch it, at which she seemed pleased with herself. Jamie was watching with a look of astonishment, as if wondering if this was really the way to train a falcon. Up until now everything had gone well, and Cully had looked every inch the graceful predator she was. Suddenly Michael felt he’d reduced her to farce, making her hop about in the snow like a flightless chicken.

He let her eat, then pulled his sleeve over his hand and took her back to try again. A part of him knew that he should leave it for another day, but another part wouldn’t let him finish on this note. He was determined to put his mistake right. He put her back on Jamie’s fist, and after offering her a scrap of meat to check that she was still hungry, he walked away again and called her.

This time he got the timing right, and pulled the lure when she was still several feet away. She flew past, rising rapidly as she headed away from them. Michael was stunned by the sight. He was suddenly certain she wouldn’t respond to his call, that she would simply keep going, getting smaller and smaller until she became just a speck in the blue. It struck him that he was seeing the last of her, and it felt like something grabbing and twisting at his insides.

Her bow-shaped wings beat rapidly and evenly, the sun catching her pale color at the apex of her upward stroke, just before she started the downward movement. Michael glanced at Jamie, who was watching anxiously, waiting for him to do something. Abruptly he came to, and remembering what he was supposed to do, he found his voice.

“Cully!”

His voice carried across the snow and echoed faintly off the cliffs, but she continued to rise. He called again, swinging the lure at his side. He thought she was too far away to hear him and cursed himself for waiting too long. She was beyond the ridge now, high above the valley that lay out of their sight beyond. One last time he called her, summoning all he could to shout her name. And at last she turned.

He kept calling her all the way back while his heart beat a rapid tattoo. He was convinced she’d sheer off, change her mind at the last moment, but she didn’t. As she drew near, he threw the lure up and

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it fell to the ground trailing the line behind it. Cully threw back her wings and seized it. She mantled her wings protectively; then, flicking the points back across her tail, she bent to eat.

After that he called it a day.

All the way back, Jamie sat turned around in his seat, his eyes still gleaming with excitement, fastened on Cully. Michael’s own feelings of elation were tempered by a disturbing memory of her flight. On her turn there had been an unmistakable waver in her stroke, as if she’d been buffeted by a massive gust of wind. Then, as she’d flown back toward them, she’d appeared unbalanced, as if she were favoring her good wing and compensating for the shift in her aerodynamics.

He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that even as she stood on her perch, the injured wing was occasionally drooping and she’d have to flick it back into place. As he drove, his frown deepened into worried lines.

TOM WATERS LOOKED up from writing a note for his nurse, Rose, who at the moment was off work with a heavy cold. He’d spoken to her earlier, and she’d said she would try to make it in the next morning. Tom had told her not to worry about it; things were quiet anyway, he said, and he was spending half his time with his feet up, catching up on his reading. The note asked her to get some ear drops around to Sonny Davies, whose dog had an infection.

There was a whole pile of similar notes, all asking her to take care of things Tom hadn’t been able to do because he didn’t know where things were kept anymore. When the office door opened, he looked up with the face of a man harassed.

“Is this a bad time?” Michael asked.

“Right now, anytime’s a bad time,” Tom replied. “You hire somebody just to take care of appointments and keep a check on invoices, and the next thing you know, she turns out to be a paragon of organization. She changes everything around and invents systems you remain ignorant of, and before you know it, she’s taken over your whole professional life. Take my advice and beware of women like that. One day they’re going to rule the world.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“My nurse is off with a cold, in other words,” Tom said. “I’ve just discovered I can’t cope without her. To make matters worse, this has

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been the busiest week I can remember. Murphy’s law applies: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

He waved a hand in careless dismissal. “It’s my own fault, I guess. I should’ve kept an eye on that side of things. Now I can never fire her, no matter what she does wrong. It’s a feminist plot.”

“My guess is you wouldn’t think of it,” Michael said.

Tom grinned. “You’re right. Rose is the best nurse I could wish for. That’s probably why I married her ten years ago. Now what’s the problem?”

“It’s Cully’s wing,” Michael said. He’d brought her in on his fist, hooded. She shifted position, her bell making a small sound.

Tom looked at him over the top of the reading glasses perched on his nose. “Still giving her trouble?”

“I got a good look at her flight yesterday,” he explained, then described what he’d seen.

“Okay, let’s take a look at her.” Tom probed around the site of the fracture, feeling gently at the joints on either side, his brow furrowed in concentration. “No sign of grating,” he observed. “The callus is still there.” He felt around the edge of her wing. “And I can’t feel any sign of inflammation.” He let her go, and watched while Cully flicked the wing back into position. He repeated this a couple of times.