The Apprentice

by Jana Barkley

  Hank kissed her soundly and led her into the house.

  “Hank,” she whispered later in the dark, after they had spent themselves loving each other and lay with arms and legs entwined.

  “What is it, baby girl?”

  “Have you ever flown a goshawk?”

  He started and pulled his head back to look at her, laughing from deep within his chest.

  “Yes, baby, several—and about anything else you can think of that’s legal to fly. Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’m playing with ideas. Like what it would be like to fly one. Or a Coopers hawk. Now that would be something, don’t you think?”

  Hank held her close as she rattled on—something she couldn’t help doing when she was happy—and she could feel him laughing. And when she had spent her excitement and could hear the steady rhythm of his breathing, she knew he was asleep.

  Sam lay back and listened in the dark. In the yard a great horned owl called and was answered by another owl in a tree behind the house. Summer was over, and young red tails would be migrating south by now. Last year it had been Chance’s first migration—and what a change had come to his world when she had caught him. He was a superb hunter and would continue to grow stronger and better in the field each year they hunted together. Maybe not this season—she didn’t know when—but it would come. That amber eye of his would look skyward with a restless longing to go she would not ignore. It was his due for he was, after all, a wild thing. And she would give him back to the sky and the wide-open places—as was his birthright. He had always been and would always be free.

  A word about the author...

  Jana Barkley is a master falconer and educator for the West Coast Falconry Center, in Marysville, California. She has served as a director for the California Hawking Club—California's oldest falconry organization, and has worked with the California Foundation for Birds of Prey, which rescues, rehabilitates and releases injured raptors back to the wild by using falconry-based techniques.

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  this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.