The Summer of the Falcon (16 page)

But the color was heavenly and she opened the bag wide on the way home to see how sunny the yellow was. Suddenly she said, “What did
you
want in the department store? We got so excited about the organdy that we forgot what you went for.”

“Oh, I can get it next week,” her mother replied. “It isn’t important.”

“Are you trying to make me forget Zander?” she asked.

“No! No, I’m not. It’s just that a formal dress follows sixteen the way three follows two.”

June helped unpack the car and put away the foods, all but a cupcake which she sneaked to the porch to eat. As she bit into it she looked up to see Zander on his perch! “Oh, bird!” she cried and ran to him.

“That settles it!” she told him, “no more freedom for you. It’s unfair to let a pet who trusts mankind fly free among men who want to kill him.”

She snapped the swivel in the jesses, “There!” Her mind was made up. She wanted her falcon.

For a week Elizabeth Pritchard made tiny French hems in the yellow dress, and June watched her hands flash and dip as she took dainty stitches. June did not offer to help, for she was angry at the whole idea. Toward the end of the week Charles senior picked up the gown and held it awkwardly before him.

“Hmmm, it’s nice,” he said.

June turned her back and walked to Zander’s perch. She threw him a maple key. He snagged it with his orange-yellow feet and bit it playfully.

“You must not go away,” she said. “And I won’t either —even though I feel a hand on my back.”

That night Rod taught June some of the constellations. He had studied his subject well, and June found it thrilling to bend her neck and look up and out and out into the sky. The no-limit of it, the endlessness of the speeding universe, made the top of her head open and she knew what it was to be outside herself.

As she leaped off the earth, she said to Rod, “Can you really think that there is no end out there?”

“I can think it,” he answered, “but I can’t visualize it.”

“It’s crazy,” she said, “stars beyond stars beyond stars forever with no end. It’s impossible to even
think
it’s true...except, I guess, for those people who make new languages.”

He chuckled in the darkness and pointed out the Corona Borealis. “You liked that language, didn’t you?”

“I still do,” she answered.

Each day June fed the tethered Zander a sparrow—until the goldenrod yellowed the roadside, and the twins wrote that they were on their way home. And each day she wandered and moved aimlessly, wondering what she was all about and what life would bring her.

And then came the morning her mother called her to fit the dress. June resented having to try it on, but her mother had worked hard on it, so she obeyed.

“Oh, well, I’ll try it on...I’ll never wear it, so why worry,” she said to herself.

Elizabeth Pritchard was a seamstress with a flair. She loved to sew. At the fitting she put the dress on inside out, took a tuck here, let out a dart there, and then pulled the whole thing off.

“Do you like it?” she asked.

“I guess so; but it’s full of pins and seams and it’s hard to tell.” June hated herself for her petulance, but she could not control it. The beautiful dress and its adult world frightened her.

The next afternoon was sunny and bright. June took a book to the creek to read, but stopped on the way at Zander’s perch. He looked so beautiful—his rusty back, blue wings, black eye patches—that she wanted to be near this exquisite bit of art she owned. She stretched out on her stomach and opened her book.

Three pages later she unsnapped the falcon’s leash. He was free. She held up her hand. She whistled. Zander flew to her. She put him back on his perch, held up her hand, whistled. He flew again, skimmed her fingers and winged into the ash tree. She leaned on her elbows and called. Zander lifted his head and killied, killied—a fierce bird. Then he dove up into the air and feather-landed on the chimney.

He was back on his perch at suppertime.

She brought him in for the night and in the morning opened her screen to let him fly out. “I’ll leave it open, so you can come and go as Bobu did,? she said, more to herself than the bird who was becoming so independent.

At noon Zander alighted on her head as she came home from the fields with falcon food. She put him on her fist and said to him, “I really like you to be free. You know the rules. Just don’t abuse your freedom. I want you near.”

She threw him into the air, listened to his wings rustle, and was glad as the light flashed from his white undercover feathers.

At lunch there was a letter from the boys. “And then at a carnival in Catchem, Wyoming (of all places), two men came up to us and said, ‘Please help us out, and change our luck by putting our last fifty-cent piece on a number.’ We felt sorry for them because they explained that they had been betting all night and had lost. They added that they would split the money with us if they won. Don put the fifty cents on black twelve...and won!...two dollars. We didn’t want half, but they insisted and said, ‘Well, why don’t you fellows bet it?’ We did. And before we knew it we had lost ten dollars, at which time we realized they owned the concession and had really taken us in!”

June was horrified. “Is that what people do to young men out in the world?” she asked, and Elizabeth said with a chuckle, “Well, they learned a lesson—and a cheap one at that.”

“What did they learn?”

“To judge people a little better,” she said smiling, glad that the world had not juggled them too hard—just enough.

That afternoon Zander came fluttering over June’s head.

She jumped, snatched his jesses in the air, and tethered him. She did not know why.

The following day Emily ran into the house, brown-legged and smiling. June was making a fish casserole for supper. The table was set and it was time to feed the falcons. Emily’s hair was wet from swimming and she sparkled.

“Junie, there’ll be a school band concert tomorrow night. My sister and brother and two friends of his are coming. That leaves an extra boy...would you come too? It will be fun with rides and booths and tenpins to knock down.”

Emily’s sparkle shone on June. “I’d like to,” she said brightly, “but don’t let anyone give you a free throw.” And she told Emily about her brothers out in the West.

The Band Concert was gay and pleasant, and the next morning while she fed Zander she unsnapped the leash to remove a kink from it and the falcon pulled out of her hand and flew to the roof of the house. She whistled once, then left him, for Emily ran into the yard to talk over the exciting moments and people of the evening before.

Zander was gone for three days.

The fourth day he came back to the yard, but did not fly to her hand, just sat in a tree above her and waited until she climbed to him. Then, just as she reached him, her foot slipped; she spun on the limb, scared Zander, and he winged to the rooftop.

He was gone all day and all night.

The next morning from her window June saw him in the sycamore by the creek and called, “Come back, Zander.” She whistled. He did not fly toward her so she started down the back steps to climb the tree and get him.

She was at the head of the stairs when she heard her mother call, “Junie, the yellow dress is finished! Come try it on.”

With one foot on a step she started to say, “Just a minute.” But the words didn’t come out. Instead, she turned and walked into her mother’s room where the thread was being ended in the last mile of hem. Her mother shook the dress and held it up. It was cool spring, white slippers, waltzes, stars.

June fought down her desire for it.

Then hesitatingly she took the dress and held it to her. It smelled new. Her head ached on the very top, as, hugging the dress, she ran into her room where the wardrobe mirror hung. She thought of the white dining rooms at the Bunkers’, of glittering candlelight in Belgium, and of laughing, whirling people.

She pressed the dress against her body and looked at her golden reflection. As she did, she saw Zander in the mirror. He had winged into the willow tree that grew beside her roof. She needed only to reach out the window and she would have him. She would do that.

But first she turned slowly before the glass admiring the dress for its yellow beauty, afraid of what it meant, hating its inevitableness, and yet living its breathlessness. When she had completed the circle the falcon was gone.

She ran to the window, threw up the sash, and leaned far out. The beautiful, beautiful sparrow hawk was circling the chimney. His eyes were focused on a far spot in the sky. He arced over the slate roof, tilted his brilliant wings like signals in the sky...and waited on. June made no move. She made no call, no whistle.

Zander circled the yard, the stream, the fields. His course widened. He faced east, dipped his wings in steady rhythm...and was gone.

She turned from the window and clamped her fingers over her face. She would never see her falcon again. Into her curled hands she whispered, “Good-bye, Zander, goodbye. How different the winds will be that carry us.” She waited for the tears to break and fall upon the yellow organdy.

But no tears came.

Born in Washington, DC, on July 2, 1919, Jean Craighead George loved nature from an early age. Her parents, aunts, and uncles, all naturalists, encouraged her interest in the world around her, and she has drawn from that passion in her more than one hundred books for children and young adults.

In the 1940s, after graduating from Pennsylvania State University with degrees in science and literature, George joined the White House Press Corps. She married John Lothar George in 1944 and moved to Michigan, where John was attending graduate school. Her husband shared her love of nature, and they lived for a time in a tent in the forest. They began to write novels together, with Jean providing illustrations. Their first novel,
Vulpes, the Red Fox
, was published in 1948.

Following the birth of their first child, the Georges relocated to New York, living first in Poughkeepsie, then in Chappaqua. The family welcomed wild animals into their backyard, to stay for as long as they wished, but the creatures always remained free to return to the wild. Many of these temporary pets became characters in the stories George wrote with her husband.

After winning the Aurianne Award, the American Library Association’s prize for outstanding nature writing, for
Dipper of Copper Creek
(1956), George began to write on her own, at first continuing to illustrate the books herself. She won a Newbery Honor for her third novel,
My Side of the Mountain
(1959), which tells the story of Sam Gribley, a young boy who runs away from home in New York City to live in the Catskill Mountains in Delaware County, New York. The book was adapted into a film by the same name in 1969.

In 1963, divorced from her husband, George and her three children, Twig, Craig, and Luke, began to travel around the country, visiting parks and preserves to learn about the plants and animals that thrived there. These experiences were the inspiration for many of George’s novels, including what is perhaps her best-known work,
Julie of the Wolves
(1972).

In the summer of 1970, George and her youngest son, Luke, visited the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory near Barrow, Alaska, one of the northernmost cities in the world. In preparation for a
Reader’s Digest
article, George studied the wolves living on the tundra nearby, learning about the animals’ social structures and intricate methods of communicating through sound, sight, posture, and scent. One day, George saw a very young girl crossing the tundra alone. The image remained with her as she began to write
Julie of the Wolves
, the story of an Inuit girl who escapes her abusive husband and survives in the wild by joining a wolf pack.

Julie of the Wolves
was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1973. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, and it was selected by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) as one of the ten best American children’s books of the previous two centuries. A film adaptation was released in 1987, and George later wrote two sequels about her Eskimo heroine,
Julie
(1994) and
Julie’s Wolf Pack
(1997), and shorter illustrated stories about the wolves,
Nutik, the Wolf Pup
(2001) and
Nutik and Amaroq Play Ball
(2001).

George also wrote sequels to her first award-winning novel,
My Side of the Mountain. The Far Side of the Mountain
(1990) and
Frightful’s Mountain
(1999), along with the picture books
Frightful’s Daughter
(2002) and
Frightful’s Daughter Meets the Baron Weasel
(2007), relate the further adventures of Sam Gribley and his peregrine falcon, Frightful, as they live off the land in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. George and her daughter, Twig, published their
Pocket Guide to the Outdoors
(2009), a practical companion volume to the books.

George has written more than one hundred books in the last five decades, including the Thirteen Moons series (1967–69), comprised of illustrated chapter books about wild animals in their natural habitats through the seasons of the year. Most recently, she has collaborated with illustrator Wendell Minor on more than a dozen picture books for younger readers, including the Outdoor Adventures series.

In addition to this extensive list of fiction for children and young adults, George published an autobiography,
Journey Inward
(1982), in which she reflects on her life as a writer, naturalist, and single mother. George still lives and writes in Chappaqua, New York.