The Snow Falcon (23 page)

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, her dark eyes fixed on his fist. Tom stood at the bottom of the porch looking on, muffled in his thick coat with his hands in his pockets. Michael raised his arm and called the falcon’s name. Almost instantly her wings flicked open and she glided from the porch rail; then, with rapid beats, she was skimming across the snow toward him. He loved this moment, when he had a few seconds to admire her flight. He loved the feeling he got when she responded to his call, and though he knew she was coming for food, and that without this incentive she would probably have ignored him, he still had the sense of them working together. They were still bound in a common purpose, Cully choosing to cooperate from free will. She seemed much bigger in the air, and from this angle, with him looking down at her, her coloring appeared darker because of the way the gray tips of her wings and tail contrasted with the sharp white of the snow beneath her. She was fast, her wing strokes rapid, the whole shape of her flowing to an aerodynamic point across her head to the sharp beak. Her legs and feet were held up, tucked back beneath her tail, her eyes unerringly fixed on her target. As she left her perch, the bell attached to her leg made a small, clean sound as the tiny clapper dropped, then there was only the soft rush of air across her feathers. He hardly breathed, mesmerized by the sight of her.

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There was an imperfection in her flight, however, and it was this that he 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, the flaw was clearly visible. It made her passage slightly out of kilter, and the effect was to create a slight wobble. Ten feet away from him, Cully swept back her wings and rose, and as her tail fanned to act as a brake, she reached with her feet to grab for his fist. She stumbled, just slightly, 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, mantling her wings protectively about her prize, checking for danger before bending to eat.

Michael allowed her to feed, then walked back toward the house with her perched on his fist.

“She’s really something,” Tom said.

“She is, isn’t she,” Michael said with pride. He stroked her breast with one finger. “Did you see what I meant about her wing?”

“It didn’t seem too bad; it could still 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 just don’t think we need to worry too much about it yet,” Tom said. “Give it a few more days, we’ll see how she is. This kind of exercise is going to be good for her, it’ll help get that muscle back in shape. How often do you fly her?”

“Five or six times a day, for small amounts.”

“She seems to have got the hang of it.”

“She’s smart,” Michael said.

“So what happens next?”

Michael held up the lure. “She has to learn to chase this for her food. It’ll be a little harder for her than simply coming to the fist. She’s going to have to really work for her reward. It’s meant to simulate hunting.”

“So the line has to come off for that, right?”

Michael nodded. The book Frank had lent him said that 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. Frank had told him to count on the high side of that estimate and not to rush anything.

Tom examined Cully’s wing, quickly feeling along the damaged bone. “It still feels fine. Keep exercising her, but don’t push it too hard. I’ll come back in a week.” Something in the woods caught his eye, and he looked beyond Michael to the edge of the clearing. “I see you have an audience,” he observed.

Puzzled, Michael followed his look. In among the trees, half concealed though not hiding, was Jamie Baker. The boy was watching them wordlessly, his pale face peering out from the hood of his coat.

“It’s the boy from next door,” Michael said.

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.”

They waited to see if Jamie would come closer. When he didn’t, Michael called out to him that it was okay if he wanted to. “He’s a strange kid,” he commented when Jamie didn’t move. “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.

“The reason Jamie doesn’t speak is that he can’t. Or maybe he won’t. His dad, Susan’s husband, was a guy called Dave Baker. A year and a half ago he was killed in a hunting accident. He would have been around your age. Do you remember him?”

Michael didn’t.

“Jamie hasn’t spoken a word since it happened. Some kind of shock reaction, I hear. 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. Remember, keep up with the exercise, but don’t push her too hard.”

Michael walked Tom to his car. “I didn’t ask how everything’s going,” Tom said. “Settling in okay?”

“As well as could be hoped.”

Tom nodded. “Don’t judge us all because of a few.”

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Michael watched him go and raised a hand. Then silence settled over the clearing again, except for the faint tone of Cully’s bell as she shifted her feet.

FROM HIGH UP on the mountain across the river, Ellis watched the figures far below through his glasses. They were like tiny stick people moving about in a scene of white snow and tiny model trees surrounding the clearing, the house with a trail of painted smoke coming from the chimney. Except they were real; everything was real. The dark green Jeep that backed around and vanished into the trees emerged at the top of the track and turned toward town. He’d recognized Tom Waters; now he watched as outside the house the Somers guy went back to where he’d been standing before 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 way the line the bird had fixed to something around its legs smoothed a trail across the surface of the snow.

“Shit,” he said under his breath and lowered his glasses. Without them he couldn’t make out Somers except as a dark smudge and he couldn’t see the falcon at all, but he’d seen enough anyway. He lit a cigarette and coughed, then 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. To get there he’d had to drive past the track that led down to Somers’s house, and he’d been tempted to go on down and see what Somers had to say. On the other hand, there were a lot of stories going around about Somers. People said he’d shot a guy for screwing around with his wife, and then he’d tried to shoot her and their kid, too, only the cops had shot him instead. It sounded like a lot of bullshit, since Somers was supposed to have just got out of prison and this had happened only five or six years ago. If it was all true, wouldn’t Somers have been inside for longer than that?

Whatever the case, Ellis had decided that first he’d find out if what he’d heard about the falcon was true. There was no point to him just charging down there and starting something that might get out of control. So he’d driven on a few miles, then left his truck, circled around the woods, and climbed up to the place where he was now sitting. The climb had been hard going and his chest was still

wheezing from the effort, but at least he knew now that Somers really did have a falcon he was training. And Ellis knew it wasn’t just any falcon. The question now, he thought, was what did he plan to do about it?

He was still turning it over in his mind when he got back to the lumberyard he ran on Creek Road. When he drove though the gate, he found the battered Honda that Rachel drove parked outside the old rail car he used as an office. This came as a surprise, since he couldn’t remember the last time she’d been to the yard. He was transported back to a time when their children had been young and Rachel would come down most days to bring him lunch. The kids would play outside, chasing each other around the log piles, while inside Rachel did the accounts and they planned a bright future together.

She was sitting at his old desk when he went inside, huddled up inside her coat and looking at the invoices he’d written that month. Ellis paused. She looked up at him, her eyes dark and somber. She looked tired, he thought, the pallor of her face emphasizing faint smudges beneath her eyes. Despite that, her skin was still smooth and, for a woman in her thirties, unlined. Even now he was struck by how beautiful she looked, and still after all their years together he experienced a faint echo of surprise that they were married.

“Hey,” he said. He went over to the potbelly 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 lumber they might want to 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,” she added needlessly, as if to make sure he wouldn’t try to avoid the subject.

“I was here,” he said, sitting down heavily. He saw the disbelieving way she was looking at him and threw out his hands. “Where the hell else would I be?”

“You tell me.” She waited for him to explain, and in the silence he took off his boots and massaged his toes. He avoided looking at her. Rachel had this way of just dragging something out when she wanted to, and she knew him well enough to know how to make

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him squirm. He couldn’t stand the pressure of her silence. Sometimes he wished she was the kind of woman who would just yell and throw things and then maybe that would clear the air, but instead she had the knack of making him feel as if he were weighed down with a burden of guilt. That was a lot worse.

“Listen, I just 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 basket; an empty bottle of Wild Turkey rolled across the floor.

They’d had a fight the day before, and in the middle of it he’d gone outside and slammed the door behind him. It had been brewing for weeks, and the knowledge it was coming had made him ill-tempered. A letter had arrived from the bank saying they’d missed a mortgage payment on the house, on top of being two hundred bucks overdrawn against their limit. He knew she’d already been in there just a couple of days before to smooth things over, and now there was this. She’d waited until the kids had left the house and then she’d showed it to him and hadn’t said a damn word, but her face had been grim.

“Dammit!” he’d shouted, gripping the edge of the table. Overcome with rage, he had lifted it up and slammed it hard against the floor. It had scared the hell out of her, and she’d jumped away from him.

The look on her face had made him feel worse. He didn’t even know why exactly, except it was the same look of apprehension his mother had worn most of her life, especially when his old man was drunk or just in a mean mood—which was most of the time. Ellis had started throwing stuff around and shouting that she ought to stop nagging the hell out of him, and Rachel had shrunk away into the corner. This 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. In a way it felt good, like a surge of something from his balls right up through his head, but at the same time he’d known it wasn’t a good thing, this feeling. Maybe that was why he hadn’t gone home.

The bottle rolled into a corner, where it made a flat clunking sound against the wall.

Then there was silence, dragging on. Rachel said nothing, just

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watched him. He got up and went to put another log on the fire, which had caught now and was emitting a feeble heat.

“You been here long?” he said.

She shook her head, then brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. She still looked great after two kids. She was thirty-three, but when she was dressed up, she could pass for a lot younger. He tried to recall the last time he’d seen her in a dress instead of Levi’s. When had they last gone out together somewhere, just the two of them? He couldn’t think when. It had been a long time ago.

“So what about the order?”

He looked at her, uncomprehending. “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. He knew he’d have to lie, and he started to try and come up with a name. For some reason Michael Somers’s name sprung to mind, and he thought, wouldn’t it be funny if he said that’s who he’d been to see? It had a kind of roundness to it when he considered it. If it wasn’t for Somers, he wouldn’t be having this fucking conversation. He knew it was Somers who’d stopped him from shooting that falcon the day he’d skirted through the woods, scaring it away from the damn rock where he could have picked it off nice and clean. He didn’t understand how it came to be that Somers had been on the mountain again a few days later, when he had finally shot it, but somehow it’d been him all right. Now Somers had his falcon. It was like stealing, as if Somers had taken two thousand bucks right out of his hand.