The Snow Falcon (31 page)

“What are you looking for?”

“Any sign that she’s uncomfortable. Does she ever carry this wing lazily when she’s at rest?”

“She did after I flew her,” Michael said. “Why?”

“It can be an indication there’s something wrong, but she seems fine right now. How long were you flying her?”

“Just a few minutes.”

“Okay, I can’t tell much more from my exam,” Tom said. “Let me take some X rays.”

He and Cully were gone for fifteen minutes, and when they came back, Tom put the film up against a light box to examine it. There was a smudge of darkness against the skeleton of Cully’s wing where the fracture had healed, and he frowned.

“Looks like a very slight infection there,” he said, pointing at the ulna.

“What does that mean?”

“Maybe nothing much. We’ll try her on a course of antibiotics.

206

Keep the wing rested for a few days and see how she does. What you saw might just be some residual stiffness, but we’ll take the cautious view, I think. When you start exercising her again, do it gently, and if there’s any sign of her being in serious pain, bring her back.”

Michael stroked Cully’s breast to soothe her, talking quietly. She was nervous and tense after being handled for the X ray. After a few moments she started to relax a little at the familiar feel of the glove and the sound of his voice.

Michael had detected a note, a certain reserve, in Tom’s tone. “If she’s in pain, and I bring her back, what happens then? Will you operate?”

Tom took off his glasses and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “I hate having to say this, but if the antibiotics don’t do the trick, I don’t think we have many options left. There’s no operation I can do that’ll help.”

Michael considered this while Tom found something he needed to brush from his coat. “You’re saying she’d have to be put down?”

Tom gave Michael a sympathetic look. “I could amputate, but I don’t think you’d want that. I’m sorry, but all I can tell you is a bird like that wasn’t born to spend her life crippled in a cage. It’s not like you or me losing a leg. For her, flying is her life. It’s what nature designed her for. I wish I could tell you something else.”

Michael nodded vaguely, absorbing the truth of what Tom was saying. He just didn’t want to accept that it might come to that. He took the antibiotics and drove home, thinking all the way that she would be fine, that she was a fighter. He couldn’t envisage that in the end she would suffer an ignominious end, injected with some lethal potion.

When he arrived back at the house, he took Cully into the woodshed and fed her, then waited for Jamie to arrive so he could tell him her training was called off for a few days.

FORTY MINUTES OUT OF LITTLE RIVER heading up into the Cariboo Mountains, the country road passes through a valley. A man from Victoria had bought some of the land around the small lake there twenty years earlier and had built a cabin that he used occasionally for fishing. When the man died, his brother had wanted to sell the cabin and the land. He’d had the idea of selling building plots around the shores of the lake, and every now and again a lawyer acting for him would send up somebody he’d managed to get interested in the scheme.

The latest was John Softly, an American taking a vacation from his hometown of Seattle, who’d looked up the lawyer because he was the brother of a good friend. They’d had dinner together, and Softly had remarked in passing how it would be nice to have a place up in the mountains where he could get away for a little peace and quiet sometimes; one thing had led to another, and before he knew it, he had an appointment to meet a real-estate agent in some town called Little River Rend.

Susan pulled over at the side of Falls Pass Road just before it crested the brow of a hill. They’d been climbing steadily for fifteen minutes, the road hemmed in by forest on either side, so there wasn’t much to see. Whenever she brought prospective clients here, she always stopped at this same spot to give them their first view of the valley.

Softly looked about him with slight bewilderment. “What are we stopping for? Is this the place?”

208

“No, we’re almost there. I just thought there’s something here you’d like to see.”

She sensed the American’s reluctance. He was in his late fifties, soft and fat, and she guessed he wasn’t relishing the notion of a long walk. “It’s just a little way, over there by that tree,” she assured him, pointing to a lone cedar at the edge of a clearing that went up to the brow of the hill. The tree was framed against a clear blue sky, which she knew would make the stop all the more worthwhile.

“Well, okay, then, I guess I can make it that far,” Softly conceded, and hauled himself out. He was wheezing by the time they reached it. His chest rose and fell, sounding like an old bellows.

“This is it,” she announced.

Below them the valley spread out, turning to the north at the bottom end. Much of its slopes were covered with forest, but down on the valley floor there were great areas alongside the narrow river that were open meadows. At this time of year the ground was covered with snow, but Susan described how it looked in the spring, when the snow was melting. The meadows would be rich with cotton grass, lit with flares of orange hawkweed, yellow goldenrod, and the bluebell-shaped flowers of Jacob’s ladder. The lake itself was quite small, reflecting the sky.

“Wow,” Softly commented after he’d taken a moment to absorb the view. “This really is something, isn’t it?”

Susan pointed to the eastern shores of the lake, where forest gave way to lightly wooded ground. “You can see some cabins that have been built already. The people who own them come up here maybe two or three times a year.”

She thought that Softly was imagining himself on the porch of his own cabin down there in the wilderness, drinking a beer on a summer’s evening as the sun went down. Maybe he would get to know some of his neighbors, and they would meet up to go fishing or hunting sometimes, and later they would have a friendly barbecue at the edge of the lake.

“Shall we go down?” she suggested.

They went back to her car and drove down into the valley, where she pulled over by the side of the road close to the lake. Softly looked around and breathed in deeply.

“You know, I think it’d be really something to have a place up here. Somewhere to get away to.”

209

She brought lots of people here who were taken with the quiet solitude. It was hard not to be, given the surroundings, and invariably she found them musing about the house they would build, picturing themselves and their families taking vacations. Usually they were from Vancouver, though one plot had been bought by an American from San Diego. What they had in common was that their lives were firmly centered in the city and they were affluent enough to be able to consider a place in the mountains they could escape to. They liked the idea of the wilderness setting, breathing clean air, fishing for their breakfast, communing with nature—so long as they had their microwave ovens and a supermarket within driving distance where they could stock up on beer and pizza.

When Softly had seen enough, she drove him back to the turnoff where they’d left his car, since he was heading back toward Williams Lake. On the way she saw what she thought was Michael Somers’s Nissan, but she couldn’t see anybody around.

Softly took a brochure with pricing details and said he’d give it some thought; if he decided he was interested, he’d get in touch with the lawyer in Victoria when he got home. He thanked her for taking the time to drive him up here, and as he drove away, she made a bet with herself she wouldn’t see him again. Nine out of ten people she took to the valley went away and never came back. The lack of facilities deterred most of them in the end, once they’d had a chance to get back to their hotels. There were no restaurants or shops or golf courses or, in fact, any of the things most people wanted from a vacation spot. They simply decided that the wilderness was a nice place to look at on the way to somewhere else.

She checked the time and thought she ought to be getting back to town. Jamie would be back from school, and though Linda had said she’d meet him, Susan didn’t want to be too late. On the way she passed the Nissan again, and on impulse she stopped and got out.

The snow-covered ground rose gently in a broad sweep toward a far ridge above the valley where towering rock cliffs rose vertically up the mountain. Michael was coming across the snow toward her, his falcon on his fist, and as he got closer, she raised a hand. He made a gesture back that might have been a wave, and she waited until he reached the roadside.

“I saw the car,” she explained. “I thought it was yours.”

210

a

“You just missed seeing her fly,” Michael said. “I waited for Jamie, but he didn’t come over.”

“My fault. I had a client to see.” She grimaced. “He’s not going to be happy I made him miss seeing Cully.” Michael smiled. “So how’s her training going?”

The falcon was beautiful, she thought. It watched her intently with intelligent eyes, and she could understand why Jamie was so fascinated by her. Michael stroked her breast feathers with a gentle caress, then adjusted the straps on her legs. As he tended to her, Susan watched his expression, his eyes clear, a faint shadow of a smile around the corners of his mouth. She couldn’t imagine how this man could ever have hurt anyone, and she knew suddenly that whatever had happened, it must have been an aberration.

“She’s coming along,” he said in answer to her question.

“What happens when you finish?”

“I’ll release her.”

He looked away from her, back toward the ridge in the distance, where the smooth white of the snow ended in a line against the sky. She had the feeling he was thinking of her flying up there again, and she detected a kind of wistful note in his voice.

“Today’s the first time I’ve flown her since I was up here with Jamie on the weekend. Vet’s orders. Her wing was giving her a little trouble.” He frowned as he spoke, the lines around his eyes creasing.

“She’s okay, though?”

“I hope so.”

“Tom Waters is a good vet,” she assured him, and he looked into her eyes, his frown smoothing away. “Listen, I feel like I should repay you. You’ve been good to Jamie. How about letting me cook you supper one evening?”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“I know,” Susan said. “But I’d like to. How about tomorrow?” She sensed his hesitation. “I promise I’m not a bad cook.”

“Okay, thanks.”

She smiled. “That’s great. Come by around seven?” She looked at her watch and said she had to be going. “I’m late already. See you then.”

“Okay.”

He raised a hand as she drove away.

211

WHEN SHE GOT back to town, the school bus had come and gone, so she went over to the diner to pick Jamie up.

“How’d it go?” Linda asked.

Susan put her thumb down. “By the time I’ve sold those plots, if it ever happens, I’ll be a hundred years old.” She looked around for Jamie.

“He’s with Coop,” Linda said. “He came in earlier, and I said you’d taken some guy to the valley, so he offered to pick Jamie up.” She noted Susan’s expression. “That’s okay, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is,” Susan said. “I always get nervous when I think of those two together, that’s all.”

“They’ll be fine. You worry about Jamie too much.”

Susan made a wry face. “It’s not Jamie I’m worried about. Listen, I better go and rescue one of them. I’ll see you later.”

Coop’s cruiser was parked outside the station house. As she approached, Ben Miller came out the door.

“Hi, Ben, is Jamie inside?” she asked.

He nodded. “Coop brought him in about half an hour ago, Mrs. Baker.”

“How are they getting along?”

“Well, it’s sort of strained, I’d say.”

Susan sighed. “Well, say hi to your wife for me.”

“I will. Bye, Mrs. Baker.”

She went inside, and when they both looked over, she could tell Jamie was relieved to see her. He got up and started getting his things together. Coop’s smile looked a little pained.

“Hi there,” she said brightly. “Thanks for this, Coop. You didn’t have to.”

“I thought he might prefer to wait here instead of the diner,” he said.

He got up from behind his desk, which was strewn with an array of stuff that should have been just about guaranteed to capture any kid’s interest. There were some crime sheets faxed over from Williams Lake and some wanted posters that had arrived in the mail, along with a set of handcuffs and a nightstick. Jamie didn’t give any of it a second glance.

“How’d the sale go?” Coop asked as he began putting things away.

“It didn’t,” she said. She told him about the guy from Seattle.

212

Without thinking, she added, to Jamie, “I saw Michael with Cully. He said you could go over tomorrow after school.”

The boy’s eyes lit up. Then she saw the tightening ridge of muscle in Coop’s jaw, the hurt in his eyes that he couldn’t hide. She cursed her own big mouth, wondering how she could have been so thoughtless. At the door, she told Jamie to go ahead to the car.

“How was he, really?” she asked, though she had already imagined the scene before she’d arrived: Jamie impassive while Coop searched for something to engage him.

“He was okay.”

She felt a tender sympathy for him. All his patient efforts were rebuffed. “I know how you feel,” she said, laying her hand briefly against his arm. “He doesn’t mean it personally.”

“It’s no big deal.”

He walked her out, and she had the impression he was thinking about something. They stopped across from her car, and Coop watched Jamie getting in.

“Maybe we should go fishing or something,” he said suddenly.

“Fishing?”

“Yeah, I know a guy who’s got a cabin up around Quesnel, on the lake. I could get it for next weekend, I think. It might make a difference, you know, if it was just me and Jamie together for a couple of days. What do you think?”