The stiffness seemed to have eased a little in the last few days but Michael was still concerned that Cully’s injury was bothering her.
‘I can’t feel anything obvious,’ Tom said.
‘Watch this.’ Michael walked back into the clearing, unraveling the line tied to Cully’s swivel as he went. His feet sank half-way up his shin with each step. He went as far as the line allowed, a good twenty yards more than she’d flown before so that Tom would have a chance to observe her properly. He kept his body turned away from Cully so she wouldn’t leave her perch too soon, but as he took the lure out of the bag at his side he knew she was watching him, waiting for him to call her. The air was cold and quiet. He shifted position, breaking the crust on new snow, the sound like crumpled cellophane. His breath came in frozen clouds, the fingers on his unprotected hand already numbing from the cold. As always he experienced a slight thrill of anticipation, a degree of nervous expectation.
Today there was an added element having a spectator. He wanted Tom to see. It was partly because he was proud of Cully, but it was also because he wanted to share an experience that never failed to move him. If he wanted for anything it was for the pleasure of this sharing, a very human trait he thought.
Holding the lure in his gloved fist he turned. Cully was fifty yards away, perched where he’d left her on the rail, standing square-footed, leaning toward him slightly, her dark eyes fixed on his fist. To one side Tom looked on, muffled in his thick coat with his hands in his pockets. Michael called her and instantly Cully launched herself from the rail with a flick of her wings. With rapid beats she skimmed across the snow towards him. He loved this moment. He knew she was coming for food and without that incentive she would probably have ignored him, but he still had the sense they were working together. They were bound in a common purpose and it was her choice to co-operate.
She looked much bigger in the air, and her coloring appeared darker because of the grey tips of her wings and tail in contrast to the white of the snow beneath her. She was fast, her entire shape flowing to an aerodynamic point across her head to the sharp beak. Her legs and feet were tucked back beneath her tail and her eyes were fixed unerringly on her target. As she left the porch the bell around her leg made a small, clean sound as the tiny clapper dropped, then there was only the soft rush of air across her feathers.
There was an unmistakable imperfection in her flight, however, and it was this that Michael wanted Tom Waters to see. Her injured wing appeared to flutter at the beginning and end of each stroke, and though she flew the distance to his fist in just a few seconds it was clearly visible. The effect was to produce a slight instability in her flight. Ten feet away from him Cully swept her wings back and rose. Her tail fanned to act as a brake, and she reached with her feet to grab for his fist. She stumbled, flapping and scrabbling in an ungainly manner before she gained a hold. The impact knocked his arm back. She fixed her eye on his then instinctively looked all around to check for danger before mantling her wings protectively and tearing at the meat.
Michael allowed her to feed before walking back to the house.
‘She’s really something,’ Tom said.
‘Yes, she is.’ Michael stroked her breast with one finger. ‘What about her wing?’
‘It didn’t seem too bad, it could be residual stiffness. Don’t forget that she’s still out of condition.’
Cully cleaned her beak, wiping it against the glove, then daintily picked scraps from between her toes.
‘You don’t think it’s serious then?’
‘I don’t think we need to worry too much about it yet,’ Tom said. ‘Give it a few more days and we’ll see how she is. This kind of exercise is going to help get that muscle back in shape. How often do you fly her?’
‘Five or six times a day.’
‘She seems to have got the hang of it.’
‘She’s smart,’ Michael agreed.
‘So what happens next?’
Michael held up the lure. ‘She has to learn to chase this for her food. It’ll be a lot harder for her. It’s meant to simulate hunting.’
‘So the line has to come off for that, right?’
Michael nodded. Frank’s manual said a falcon ought to be flying free to the fist within ten days and chasing the lure within a few more. After that it was just a question of exercise and practice before a bird would be ready to hunt. The skills of the trainer and the disposition of the falcon made prediction difficult, but that point could be reached in anywhere from three to six weeks.
Tom examined Cully’s wing again. ‘It feels fine. Keep exercising her but don’t push it too hard. I’ll come back in a week.’ A movement in the woods caught his eye. ‘I see you have an audience,’ he observed.
Back in the trees, half concealed though not hiding, Jamie Baker was watching them, his expression impassive.
Tom raised a hand in greeting. ‘Hello Jamie.’ He got no response. ‘How long has he been coming over here?’
‘This is the first time as far as I know. He’s a strange kid. He never says a word.’
Tom raised an eyebrow. ‘You’ve met him then. How about his mother?’
‘A couple of times,’ Michael said neutrally.
‘Obviously she didn’t tell you about him though.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘The reason Jamie doesn’t speak is that he can’t. Or maybe he won’t. His dad, Susan’s husband, was killed in a hunting accident a year and a half ago. Jamie hasn’t spoken a word since it happened. Some kind of shock reaction I think. He’s kind of a loner too.’
As they watched, Jamie turned around and melted back into the trees as if he knew they were discussing him, though he was too far away to have heard.
Tom looked at his watch. ‘I guess he’s got school today. And I better be going myself.’
Michael walked with him to his car.
‘I didn’t ask how everything’s going?’ Tom said. ‘Settling in okay?’
‘As well as I could expect.’
Tom nodded. ‘Don’t judge us all because of a few.’
Michael watched him leave. Silence settled over the clearing again except for the faint tone of Cully’s bell as she shifted her feet.
***
From high up the slope across the river, Ellis watched the figures in the clearing through his glasses. The Jeep emerged at the top of the track and turned toward town. Outside the house, Somers walked back across the snow and the falcon flew to him from the porch rail the way he’d watched it do earlier. It was a long way off, but Ellis could see the trail the line smoothed across the surface of the snow.
He lowered his glasses and lit a cigarette. It made him cough and he turned and spat into the snow. His truck was a couple of miles away where he’d left it at the start of Falls Pass Road. There were a lot of stories going around about Somers. People said he’d shot a guy and killed him for screwing around with his wife, and then he’d tried to shoot her and their kid too. They said he was locked up in prison for a while before he got sent to some hospital for crazy people.
What he should do, Ellis reasoned was go down there and ask the guy what the fuck he was doing? That falcon was the one Ellis shot, no question about that, which made it his bird whichever way you looked at it. He knew it must’ve been Somers he saw up in the mountains that time. The sonofabitch spoiled his shot and now it turned out he’d gone and stolen the falcon from right out under his nose. What Ellis felt like doing was just going down there and taking back what was his. He would’ve too, but you never knew how somebody like that was going to react. The guy was nuts just like his crazy-ass mother was, though at least she never shot anyone. Best thing would be to think this through, Ellis decided. No sense in doing something stupid, and by the look of it the falcon wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.
He was still turning it over in his mind when he got back to the lumber yard. When he drove through the gate Rachel’s battered Honda was parked outside the old rail car that he used as
an office. It came as a surprise since he couldn’t remember the last time she’d been to the yard. Back in the day, when the kids were young, she used to bring him lunch and the kids would play outside, chasing each other around the log piles while Rachel did the books and they planned a bright future together. He wondered what happened to that.
She was sitting at his desk when he went inside, huddled up inside her coat looking over the invoices he’d sent out that month. She looked tired. Her face was pale, emphasizing faint smudges beneath her eyes. Despite that he was struck by how beautiful she was, and still after all their years together he experienced a faint echo of surprise that they were married.
‘Hey.’ He went over to the pot belly in the corner and threw another log inside, raking up the embers to get some flames going.
‘Where were you?’
‘I had to see somebody about an order,’ he lied.
He knew that wasn’t what she meant, and he didn’t even know why he’d said it except that he hoped it might divert her.
‘I was talking about last night. You didn’t come home.’
‘I was here.’ He sat down heavily, avoiding her eyes. ‘Where the hell else would I be?’
‘You tell me.’
He took off his boots and massaged his toes. Rachel had this way of just looking at him without saying a word. She knew he couldn’t stand the pressure of her silence. Sometimes he wished she would just yell and throw things, and then maybe that would clear the air. That would be better than the expression of disappointment he saw in her eyes.
‘Listen, I got drunk if you want to know,’ he said, snapping at her because he wished she would say something. He reached out with a foot and kicked over the trash bucket and an empty bottle of Wild Turkey rolled out across the floor.
They had a fight before he left the house the day before, and in the middle of it he just turned around and walked out, slamming the door behind him with such force the entire jamb shook like it would fall out. Things had been tense between them for weeks. What set them off was a letter from the bank to say they’d missed another mortgage payment on the house, on top of being overdrawn against their limit. Rachel waited until after the kids had left the house and then she showed it to him without saying a word.
He had lost it then. It wasn’t the first time Rachel had seen him get mad and it wasn’t the first time they’d argued over money, but Ellis knew he’d crossed a line. It was the look of reproach she’d worn. It was the same look his mother had worn most of her life and as the years went by it morphed into dull and weary resignation. Ellis remembered yelling at Rachel, telling her she ought to stop nagging the hell out of him. He overturned the kitchen table, and when that felt like a kind of release he went to the cupboard and began taking stuff out and hurling it at the wall. The sound of smashing jars and crockery was music to his ears. With every explosion of glass he felt like he was relieving a piece of the pressure that had built up inside him, and the whole time he was yelling at Rachel and cursing and she just shrunk away into the corner.
It was a first. She was the strongest woman he’d ever known. She had kept the family together over the last few years and he knew it, but seeing her like that had confused him. It felt good in a way, but at the same time he knew it was all wrong. He’d come to the yard and opened a bottle he bought on the way, and for the rest of the day and the night that was all she wrote.
The bottle rolled across the floor and stopped against the leg of the desk where it made a flat clunking sound. He put another log on the fire, which had caught now and was emitting a feeble heat.
‘You been here long?’ he said.
‘No,’ she said quietly. She brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. She still looked great after two kids. He tried to recall the last time he’d seen her in a dress instead of jeans, when had they last gone out together somewhere, just the two of them? He couldn’t think. It had been a long time ago.
‘So what about the order?’
He looked at her uncomprehendingly. ‘What order?’
‘You said you went to see somebody.’
‘Oh, yeah. He said maybe next month.’
He waited for her to ask him who it was, and then he’d have to lie and he started to try and think of a name. For some reason Michael Somers came to mind. If it wasn’t for Somers he wouldn’t be having this fucking conversation.
But Rachel didn’t ask who it was. He supposed she knew he was lying. She flicked through the invoices.
‘Things are pretty slow,’ she said.
‘It’ll pick up. This is just a bad patch. There’s a lot coming in soon. I’ve been seeing a lot of people.’
He listened to himself, and it was like hearing somebody else talk. Running off a lot of stuff they both knew was bullshit.
‘Pete,’ Rachel said.
Something in her voice alarmed him. It was like the fight had gone out of her
‘What are we going to do?’ she said despairingly, but he didn’t think she was only talking about the yard.
CHAPTER 18
A week had passed since Tom Waters had come by to take a look at Cully’s wing. It was mid-March, and winter continued without let up, snow falling most days, the temperature at night dropping to a frigid ten below. Cully was flying to the fist four times a day, fifty yards without hesitation, but the line was still attached. One evening Michael called Frank for advice.
‘I feel like she’s ready to fly free, without the line,’ he explained.
‘From what you’ve told me I’d agree,’ Frank said. ‘As a matter of fact I’d say she’s been ready for about a week. So what’s the problem?’
The problem, Michael thought, was that he was afraid to take the step. There was a paragraph in Frank’s manual that covered this part of training a falcon.
‘If training has proceeded as described, your falcon is now ready to fly free. On the chosen day, don’t vary the routine, be sure to check carefully that she is sharp set and take off that line.’
That was it, nothing more. It must have been a long time since Frank had flown a falcon of his own free for the first time, because he made no mention of the feeling of dread that Michael experienced every time he thought about it. He had spent so long patiently getting her used to him, coaxing her to eat, and then to come to his fist - first an inch and then a foot and then a yard - and all the time he watched her and worried about whether when the time came, she would survive again in the wild. What if he did something wrong? What if he took the line off and when he called her she rose above the clearing, sensing her freedom and he never saw her again? In The Goshawk, after the author lost his hawk, he was plagued by his imagination and guilt, never knowing for sure what became of the bird, but always imagining the worst.
He tried to explain all of this.
‘I understand how you feel,’ Frank said. ‘I think what you have to remember, is that falcon is a wild creature. She isn’t a pet like a dog. She’s learned to trust you because you respect her, and so long as she’s hungry when you fly her she’ll stay with you because it’s easier than hunting her own food. But sometimes it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes you do everything exactly the way you always have, and for no reason a bird simply decides not to come back - and that’s it. There’s really nothing you can do about it, and you have to accept it as part of the game. But my guess is that Cully won’t take off. She’s injured and she knows you have food. These birds aren’t stupid. I think you just have to trust that.’
Frank was right. When he thought about it later, Michael wondered if his fear of losing Cully was more complicated than the thought of what might happen to her. Perhaps he was also thinking of what would become of him.
***
His days were spent working at the store. The power had been restored and the windows re-covered with newspaper so that he could work without having people walking by staring in at him. During the first week he pulled the old fixtures apart using a heavy claw hammer, and dragged the piece
s out to the back where there was a small service yard. Then he attacked the old counter, ripping off the front to expose the dusty shelves where once there had been containers of screws and bolts, brass hinges and all kinds of miscellaneous inventory. He brought in an old heater from the house, which did an inadequate job of raising the temperature, but the physical work he was doing kept him warm. It was good to be busy. Sometimes he would sense he wasn’t alone, and he would turn around from what he was doing, but there would be nobody there.
He worked hard, and in the evenings he’d cook himself a simple meal and try to read for a while, but often he found himself thinking about the past.
He had a picture of Holly when she was very young. He sometimes studied it, trying to imagine what she looked like now. He remembered coming home from work when she was beginning to stand up by herself. She would shuffle across the floor and haul herself up his leg, her face alight with pure childish innocence, and she would try to say ‘Daddy’. He wondered if his daughter remembered him. A few years ago a letter arrived from Louise along with divorce papers. She’d met somebody and wanted to remarry. She also suggested that when he was released he should get in touch and they could talk about Holly. She promised when Holly was old enough she would tell her about him. He signed the papers and returned them with a note telling her it was best for Holly not to think about him. Let her have a father who could be there for her. Louise sent letters after that, and by the feel of them he knew they contained photographs, but he always returned them unopened.
One evening, after a long day at the store, he finished his meal and sat at the table for an hour deep in thought. He had bought a laptop so that he could find information on the internet. He typed in the name of the doctor Louise had married in Boston, and eventually came up with a phone number. It occurred to him that his daughter might be using Facebook, even though she wasn’t really old enough, but he didn’t know anything about social media. He typed in her name and nothing came up.
Snow Falcon Page 13