Snow Falcon

by Harrison, Stuart

  Later in the afternoon Jamie turned up and knocked on the door, and while Michael finished the new counter top, Jamie sat on a box sketching Cully, who was perched on top of one of the fixtures.

  ‘This was my dad’s store,’ Michael said, wondering if Jamie knew that. Jamie glanced at him, a flicker of interest in his eyes. ‘I used to work here after school,’ he went on. ‘I’d sit on a stool at the end of the counter over there. My dad would be fiddling around with stuff, serving customers, writing himself reminder notes, and I’d be doing school-work, or sometimes I’d unpack a delivery or something.’ He paused, lost in reflection.

  ‘He used to talk to me while he worked.’ Michael had forgotten that until now. His dad would carry on this one-sided monologue about who’d been in that day, what they’d bought, stuff they talked about. Michael had pretended he wasn’t paying attention, but actually he listened to every word. ‘I didn’t know him very well. But I didn’t realize that until he died.’

  Michael looked at Jamie again. He was working on his drawing and probably hadn’t heard a word. Or maybe he had. Michael put down his tools. ‘I think I’m done here for today. Let’s go.’

  ***

  They pulled over high up on the road to Falls Pass. Michael took Cully out of the back of the Nissan, and with his free hand he crushed one of the pills Tom Waters had given him and sprinkled the powder on to a piece of meat. She seized it and swallowed it whole.

  ‘Antibiotics,’ he explained to Jamie.

  He stroked Cully’s legs, gently brushing her toes. She arched her neck and peered with interest at his finger, then decided she would tolerate him. She was more interested in the wide open landscape and the sky, turning her head to watch a duck fly toward the ridge in the distance. Another approached and passed overhead, and they watched until it disappeared beyond the bluff, where it dropped down to the valley below where there was a lake.

  Cully roused her feathers, then turned her head to tug at her tail feathers.

  ‘You know what she’s doing?’ Michael said. ‘She’s preening herself. She has an oily coating on her feathers to repel water so when it rains she doesn’t get wet, it just runs away. That’s why we only stroke her breast, never on her back or wings so we don’t wipe it off.’

  She worked methodically, running her beak along the shafts of each wing and tail feather, spreading oil from a gland at the base. The action also worked like a zip, straightening and aligning the filaments so that in flight the air streamed across their surface to provide lift. Each feather was a masterpiece of natural design; light, yet incredibly strong.

  Michael took off the gauntlet, which he passed to Jamie. ‘Same as last time, okay?’

  While he tied a piece of meat to the lure, Jamie took Cully up from the perch. She stepped back and found her footing, and then when she saw the lure her plumage flattened and she opened her wings.

  ‘Take her jesses off as I walk away,’ Michael said, holding the lure in front of his body so that it was out of Cully’s line of sight. The snow was unblemished, a field of white stretching to the distant cliffs. With each step the frozen surface crunched under his weight. After fifty yards he stopped.

  ‘Ready?’

  There was no reply, and realizing his mistake Michael looked back over his shoulder. Jamie looked small with Cully on his fist, her head level with his. As he turned, Michael called her and at the same time started swinging the lure. Her wings brushed Jamie’s face, and then she was in the air, skimming the snow with her wing tips. As she drew close Michael swung the lure smoothly in front of her, parallel to the ground, and when she was almost in range to strike he yanked it from her and she rose into the clear, cold air. The sunlight caught her pale back against the vast ocean of sky. He called her and she began to turn, still gaining height.

  When she was above him she folded her wings into a V shape and dived. There was no sign of the corkscrew effect this time. He let go of the lure and she caught it in mid-air and carried it down to the snow.

  After Cully had eaten her reward they walked to the ridge and looked out on the view beyond. The ground fell away steeply, and far below forested slopes met the valley floor where a river fed a small lake. In the distance a hawk rode a thermal in high lazy turns and issued a plaintive cry. Cully cocked her head and watched with bright interest.

  When they flew her a second time she made two passes at the lure before Michael let it go. It looped high into the air and as Cully turned to catch it she seemed to waver as if a gust of wind had caught her, and the lure passed an inch from her grasp so she had to come around and land on the ground. Was she simply out of practice, or was she hampered by her injury?

  ‘We’re going to do it one more time,’ Michael said. What they’d been doing so far, having Cully chase the lure at relatively low levels, wasn’t always the way she would hunt in the wild. ‘Sometimes she’ll ride the thermals high up, waiting for an opportunity. When she dives from up there she’ll come down fast. That’s what we have to get her to do now.’

  Michael hesitated, unsure of how much he should explain, but he reasoned that Jamie deserved to know there was a risk. ‘I don’t know if her wing will stand it,’ he went on.

  He didn’t add that if it didn’t, then her wing could re-fracture.

  When he was ready, Michael offered Cully a small piece of meat to check that she was hungry. She seized it eagerly. He made sure Jamie had a tight grip on her jesses before he took off the leash and swivel. He’d explained a dozen times how important it was she didn’t take off trailing her leash. All Jamie had to do now was quickly thread the jesses through their eyelets.

  ‘Ready?’

  Jamie stared at him from wide, fearful eyes, and Michael knew what he was thinking

  ‘She has to be able to do this. Look at her, Jamie.’

  Cully stood square-footed, turned into the breeze, her wings held partly open.

  ‘She’s ready,’ he said.

  Her eyes were fixed on the sky. He began to walk away, and at forty yards he turned and swung the lure as he called her. She flew the distance quickly and made a half-hearted feint at the lure, knowing she wouldn’t be allowed it yet, and then she began to rise. As she began to turn Michael hid the lure and kept his hands at his side. She came around and having nothing to pursue she settled into a glide, passing overhead, waiting.

  ***

  In the air the breeze is stronger. The falcon maneuvers with a subtle shift in the angle at which she holds her wings. With each sweeping wing-stroke the large powerful muscles across her back and breast stretch and contract, and as she rises she tucks her feet back beneath her tail which reduces drag.

  When she turns, the figures below are as clear to her as if they were close enough to touch. She is able to resolve detail ten times more clearly than man. She’s already at a hundred and fifty feet, but she can see the whites of their eyes and the rhythm of muscle movement beneath the exposed skin of hand and face. For a moment she falters, unsure of what to do when she can’t see her meal. To save energy she hangs on the air and the updraft carries her aloft. She finds a thermal which carries her higher and she turns in a circle to stay within its light grasp. When she feels its effect lessening, she beats her wings until she feels the upward lift of another, then she circles again, all the time gaining more height.

  Beneath her the broad, white slope is punctuated only by the two stationary figures she has come to know. She trusts them, and has come to accept the strange world of sights and sounds that she has lived in. She feels the call of familiar instincts, and as she circles she looks northward across a landscape of valleys and mountains toward far distant peaks. Something pulls her in that direction. She is above the cliffs now at fifteen hundred feet, and as she passes over the ridge thermals rising from the valley below carry her higher and further afield.

  She turns her head, surveying the landscape, looks back to the figures on the ground. She is hungry.

  ***

  Michael watched
while she drifted higher and further away. A tight knot of apprehension formed in his stomach. Jamie came nearer, his face pinched and white. He kept looking from Michael to Cully. She was becoming no more than a dark speck against the clear sky and Michael sensed Jamie’s anxiousness.

  Michael was tempted not to call her back. He could just watch her while she drifted far across the valley. Hunger would distract her. She’d see a rabbit or a pigeon and vanish, and he’d never know what happened to her. He could convince himself that she survived, and whenever he thought of her he could imagine her flying free somewhere high above the mountains. Better that than to witness disaster if her wing gave out. But he would never know. Sometimes the truth carried a high price.

  When she had drifted above the valley and was two thousand feet in the air, he produced the lure and called her. His heart thudded. His throat was dry. He was afraid he’d left it too long, that she wouldn’t hear him or wouldn’t see the lure. Then, at last, she turned and began to fly towards them, and when she was still a speck overhead she folded back her wings and dropped.

  ***

  She is the perfection of aerodynamics as she hurtles earthwards. The sound of rushing air builds to a low whistle. Her path is straight and true, her direction faultless as she gathers speed so quickly that she is a blur in the sky. In her wing there is a tremor where there has been an injury, a faint stiffness that she feels at times, but if she senses there is a risk to herself she pays it no heed because this is how she lives. There is no possibility of compromise. She is without peer in the air and her life is marked out in absolutes. She will survive as nature designed her, in full beauty and grace, or she will perish unbowed. She gives no quarter when she homes in on her target, and she expects none. Below her, the small dark figures rush closer.

  ***

  On the ground Michael watched her intently, looking for the telling sign of a fatal flaw in her wing. At a hundred feet she altered the angle of her dive, to swoop in a perfect crescent as he released the lure so that it spun into the air. At the apex of its upward momentum Cully seized it, and with half a dozen strokes she carried it to the ground and landed in a soft swirl of snow. She stood erect, her beak open as she recovered from the exertion, then mantled her wings protectively and began tearing at her meal.

  Michael exhaled. A long slow release of pent-up tension.

  CHAPTER 26

  Ellis parked his truck in the trees off the road where it wouldn’t be seen and made his way down the track toward the house. There was a moon to light the way, casting shadows across the clearing. There was no sound, no lights, everything still. All he had to do was go around to the woodstore where he knew Somers kept the falcon. He would break its neck nice and cleanly. There wouldn’t even be a gunshot wound for Tusker to worry about.

  A shadow of misgiving arose to trouble Ellis’s plan. He had a feeling that if he went ahead with what he was planning he was crossing a line, and he would have to live with whatever happened as a result. It had nothing to do with Somers. Ellis didn’t owe him anything, that was for sure, and if what he was about to do ever came out nobody was going to worry too much about it, not even Coop. He still couldn’t make the idea sit easy in his mind though. He kept thinking about Rachel and what she’d say. He felt like he was caught between a rock and a hard place. Somehow he had to get the money he’d told her about, and he was damned if he could think of any other way. If she ever found out what he’d done he’d just have to explain that he did it for her, for their marriage. He wasn’t certain she would understand, but this was his last chance. At the bottom of the track he crept around the back of the house.

  ***

  In a dream, Michael was speaking with his dad. Michael was showing him around the store now that it was almost restored to the way it had once been, and then they were looking out of a window together. Across the snow, they watched a man and a boy flying a falcon. Michael was telling his dad how he’d found the falcon and about the boy and his mother who lived in the house through the woods. All the time he talked he was watching as his dad looked out at the man and the boy. Then his dad turned towards him and smiled.

  He woke with the bedclothes twisted into knots around his legs and sat up in bed. The dream that had been so vivid just moments before, receded and became vague, the emotions he’d felt so clearly retreating into his subconscious mind. He got out of bed and went to the window, aware that something outside had woken him. Across the clearing, darkness chased the grey light of the moon across the snow as clouds gathered overhead. There was nothing there, and yet he was uneasy and he went downstairs and out onto the porch. He heard the creak of rusty hinges and knew it was the door to the woodstore. As he ran down the steps a rising wind rattled the bones of trees and the moon appeared through thin cloud. Outside the woodstore he glimpsed a movement in the deep-cut shadows and he called out.

  ‘Hey, who’s there?’

  The moon vanished again and there was only darkness, but he heard somebody moving at the rear of the house. He hesitated, torn between pursuit and checking the woodstore, but driven by dread and the need to know he chose the latter. The door was half open. He reached inside feeling for the light switch on the wall, filled with imaginings of an empty room, a deserted perch or something worse; a limp bundle of bloody feathers. Dim light filled the room and Cully was on her perch, a pale shape blinking sleepily. From outside he heard the sound of an engine start, and then it became fainter until it was gone, leaving only the rustle of the wind in the trees.

  Michael decided that from then on Cully would stay in the kitchen with the door locked, and he took her with him to rig up a perch.

  It wasn’t until the morning that he found tracks in the snow. By their size and depth, he pictured a heavyset man.

  CHAPTER 27

  ‘Hey,’ Susan said, and reached over to mock-thump Jamie’s arm, ‘you look like you’re going to a funeral.’

  She rolled her eyes thinking it was a terrible choice of phrase, though Jamie didn’t appear to notice. She wondered if he’d even heard her. Since she’d told him that Coop was taking him fishing he’d shut down on her.

  ‘Come on, it’s just for a couple of days,’ she’d said. ‘You’ll have a good time.’

  Evidently he hadn’t seen it that way. He mooched around the house, moody and uncommunicative. It startled her to think how quickly she’d been able to forget what he could be like. The other day he’d come home excited after going with Michael to fly the falcon again. She’d allowed herself to nurture a seed of hope, daydreaming that one of these days she would come through the door and say hi, and Jamie would look over and say hi back, but she wouldn’t realize what happened until she reached the kitchen. Then it would hit her and she’d stop dead in her tracks, her heart thumping. She’d turn around and Jamie would be grinning at her and she’d sweep him laughing and crying at the same time into her arms and ... and life would be a fairy tale. Which it never was.

  When they arrived in town she pulled up outside her office. They were a couple of minutes early and Coop wasn’t there yet. She smoothed Jamie’s hair, which he responded to by irritably brushing her hand away.

  ‘Listen, I want you to be nice to Coop,’ she said. ‘He really thought you’d have a good time. He’s doing this for you.’ She lapsed into silence, uncertain who she was trying to convince. ‘Cully will still be there when you get back.’

  She looked at her watch. Where was Coop? Down the street two men were hanging decorations for the winter festival. It was hard to believe a year had gone by since the last festival, the first they’d spent without David. It was a difficult time for her. Now her primary feeling was one of mild panic. What had changed in a year? Where would they be next year?

  When Coop arrived he got out of his truck and came to her window. ‘Hey. Everything okay?’

  ‘Sure.’ She got out so Jamie wouldn’t hear her. ‘Listen, Coop, I hope you know what you’re doing here. I’ll understand if you want to change your mind.’


  Coop smiled. ‘It’ll be fine, Susan.’

  She was less certain of that than he was. ‘He’s not in what I’d call a terrific mood.’

  ‘Maybe he’s worried about my cooking.’

  She tried to smile. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘He’ll be okay once we get going.’

  Coop went around to Jamie’s door and opened it up. ‘Let’s go, buddy. We’ve got a lot of driving to do if we’re having fish for supper.’

  Susan fetched Jamie’s things out of the car and transferred them into the back of Coop’s truck. She kissed Jamie goodbye, and as they pulled away she raised her hand, but he didn’t respond. He watched her from the window, his expression sullen and reproachful. When they turned the corner she felt suddenly alone.

  ***

  The house where Rachel and Pete Ellis lived was a two-storey weatherboard place with a garden and a garage. Once Rachel had loved it. Much of her spare time was spent planting the garden or scraping and painting, planning how it would look when the rotted railings on the porch were replaced, the place re-blocked and all the windows and doors rehung. To begin with they had lived in one room and the kitchen, the rest of the house being uninhabitable. They’d carried out the worst of the repair work room by room, before the baby arrived and slowed progress down. Rachel hadn’t minded, though. Finishing the house became a dream she could hang on to, a vision she could take out and look at now and then when the lumber yard and the kids took up less of her time.