The Snow Falcon (25 page)

That night he’d stopped by the door and heard his mother say, “He’s a child and he’s our responsibility. We have to do what’s right for Michael.”

She spoke in a clipped tone, snipping off the ends of words like dead flowers, but underneath it there was a quiver of desperation. It was hearing his name that had struck him most.

“Who says this is right? That’s what I want to know.” His dad’s voice, not raised but with a kind of weary patience. It was also blurry at the edges, like words on blotting paper, a sign he’d been in his den drinking.

165

“I don’t know how you could even think it,” his mother had said, her voice rising with a slight hysterical edge. “He’s your son.”

There was a real import to the way she had said this last piece, which he didn’t understand except to realize that somehow his dad was planning something that affected him. That was the implication.

“You think this is doing him any good?” his dad had said.

“You’d have him grow up without a father?”

“Did I say that?”

“And what about me? How would I manage? You know I’m not strong. Did you ever think of that, or do you only care about yourself ?”

It was a strange argument, a lot of questions thrown like daggers back and forth, nobody ever answering. He understood that the conversation was about him, and it seemed that his mother was trying to protect him.

“This is getting us nowhere,” his dad had said impatiently.

Footsteps had approached the door, and Michael had scooted to the kitchen, where he’d waited until it was quiet, then crept back toward his bedroom. On his way past the living room door he’d heard his mother crying, and farther on, a bar of light spilled out from beneath the closed door of the den. He’d gone to bed troubled by it all.

Sometime after that—whether it was days or weeks he didn’t know—his mother had told him quietly, whispering it like a secret and making him swear not to say anything, that she’d stopped his father from leaving them.

“He doesn’t want us anymore,” she’d said.

Even then he’d known his parents didn’t get on, but it still came as a blow that his dad should want to leave. He remembered feeling something like shock, and after that there was a seed of doubt in him that undermined everything. His mother turned out to be a diligent gardener, and every day she watered what she’d planted. She complained of his dad’s drinking and how he didn’t really love either of them, and most of all she never let Michael forget that she’d stopped his dad when he had wanted to abandon them.

“We have to be nice to him or he’ll leave us,” she used to say. “Especially you, Michael. You have to be nice to him or he’ll go away forever.”

As he grew up, it became like a conspiracy between him and his

166

mother. They stuck together, united against his father, and to please her, he did as she asked. By the time he realized that she was sick, something that was a gradual unfolding rather than any kind of sudden illumination, his feelings toward both his parents were a mess of contradictions. Some things, he thought, don’t easily go away.

Memories whispered in his mind and faded until there was just the quiet empty room. Michael closed the door behind him and went back to his bed.

IN THE MORNING, Jamie was waiting in the trees when Michael brought Cully out. He weighed her, and noted her down at three and a half pounds on the button. When he offered a tiny shred of meat, she lunged forward to seize it with such haste that she had to use her wings to keep balance. He took Cully on his fist and walked over toward the woods, and as he got closer, Jamie took a step back. Michael stopped.

“It’s okay.” He stroked Cully’s breast, at which she arched her neck indignantly, while Jamie looked on warily. “She doesn’t like me doing this,” Michael explained. “See, she’s annoyed. It’s because she’s hungry and she wants me to get on with it.”

He was thinking that this could be the last time she stood on his fist like this, that in a few minutes she might rise over the trees and fly from sight while he watched helplessly. He knew she wasn’t strong enough to catch her own food, and the idea that she might starve to death rather than remain here terrified him. He recalled, however, what Frank had told him: that it had to be her choice, that until this point Cully had essentially been his captive. The time for delay was past, and in preparation he took a deep breath and exhaled slowly to quiet his fiercely beating heart.

To Jamie he said, “I’m going to fly her without the line today. Don’t do anything to startle her. Just stay where you are.”

There was a flicker of understanding and apprehension in Jamie’s expression, as if he knew what was at risk here. Michael wondered how much of The Goshawk Jamie had read. T. . White had described very well the risk of flying a bird free and how the prospect of losing his own hawk had felt. Michael started back toward the house, removing Cully’s leash and swivel, then unthreading her jesses as he went. She examined her legs and feet and bit testingly at her

167

leather anklets when he lowered his fist to the rail to let her step on. She faced the house, then turned around and roused her feathers. Her eyes, glistening black and eager, were fixed on him; then she looked curiously at her legs as if she understood that now she was free. Her bell issued its clear tone across the snow, a tiny but distinct note that carried in the still air. If she flicked open her wings and soared away now, he knew he would spend the next days and perhaps weeks scouring the mountains, listening for the tone of that bell, hoping to find her alive and coax her back.

He began to walk away, his throat tight from fear of losing her. His feet crunched in the snow, sank and lifted, crunched again. His breathing seemed loud in his ears, clouds issuing before him. From his spot in the trees Jamie looked on, shoulders hunched and rigid, sharing the tension. Michael met the boy’s eye briefly and tried to smile encouragingly, though he doubted it came across that way. Jamie’s look flicked back toward Cully as her bell sounded again. For a moment Michael was afraid she’d left the rail, but he thought that if she had, he would have read it in Jamie’s expression. He was grateful then for the boy’s presence. He didn’t want to look back and make her come too soon, before he was ready. He felt for the lure, keeping it hidden from her in front of his body.

At fifty yards he turned, the lure in his fist, and raised his arm.

“Cully,” he called. His voice sounded strangely hoarse. His throat was dry, and he called again.

Ordinarily she would have left the railing as his fist rose, but now she hesitated. She felt something different, sensing currents of tension. She looked skyward at a crow that flapped like an ungainly black doll above the trees, and its call seemed to mock her. She felt an impulse to rise, and knew suddenly that she could do so unrestrained. Then she flicked open her wings, and in a quick movement she was in the air.

In the half second before she responded, Michael knew that if she left now it would affect him more deeply than he’d admitted. He was bound up with her in ways he didn’t understand except that it was beyond its mere outward appearance. She had given his days a purpose when otherwise he might by now have abandoned this house and the town and all the bitter memories they held for him. A part of him felt with her the tug of the wide sky, the inexorable pull of the mountains beyond the river, the high wide-open spaces where

168

u a

a

the snow lay undisturbed by human tracks. In the same instant he held his breath and willed her to come. She left the rail, her eye fixed on his fist as she swooped low and skimmed above the ground, and he knew with a massive rush of relief that she had made her choice. She rose and reached for his fist, landing with force, knocking his arm backward. He felt the tightening of her talons through the glove; then she settled, her wings held slightly open, quivering, her gaze fixed on his face, a captive no longer.

Relief flooded over him, and a feeling that made him want to shout out at the top of his voice. Cully bent to eat, and when he looked across to Jamie, they grinned at each other.

BUSINESS WAS SLOW, BUT WITH SPRING NOT

too far around the corner, Susan was preparing for the busy period. She was working on her advertising for a monthly real-estate magazine that covered an area around Williams Lake that took in Little River Bend. Susan always took a page, though the magazine was a full-color glossy affair and was costly enough that she’d worked out that at best she broke even in terms of the revenue it created for her business. But she had other reasons for maintaining her presence: Keeping a high profile discouraged Realty World and the other networks from opening a branch in town. She knew that some of them had considered it over the years and probably concluded there wasn’t enough business to support two firms, but if they ever thought she was getting lax in her marketing and they could see an opening, she was sure things could change. This was “strategic marketing,” a term she liked because it made her feel that she was using the skills she’d learned years ago and wasn’t just puttering around in some smalltown backwater.

When she and David had moved to Little River, the business had been her lifeline. Without it she wasn’t sure she could have made the transition from the ebb and flow of the city. Since he’d died, it was the business that had kept her sane, given her focus instead of allowing her mind to drift inward.

She scanned into her computer the last of the house shots she was using this month and typed up the accompanying text. She was using a desktop publishing program that allowed her to prepare her page,

a

complete with images, description, and her company banner, then send the complete file electronically via modem to the magazine publisher, who then organized the final compilation for the printer. Though she wasn’t a techno geek, she liked the control technology had given her over certain aspects of her business. She liked that she could mess around on screen with the presentation of her ads, trying out different ideas without having to explain to somebody else what she wanted and then hope they understood. When she finished preparing her page, she was pleased with the result. What she tried to achieve was a look that set her apart from the other advertisers, something that caught the eye. She thought it must work, because other agencies weren’t above imitating her ideas. It was annoying, but it was also flattering.

Once she’d dialed into the publisher’s system and sent off her work, she checked the time and closed up the office. The bus was just pulling in as she reached the stop, and in a moment Jamie stepped down from the bus and looked around for her. She waved out the window and watched him as he came toward her. These last few days, there was something different about him, she decided. It struck her now as he sauntered toward her with his bag thrown over his shoulder. It wasn’t anything dramatic—just a spring in his step, maybe, a different light in his eye. She had a pretty good idea it had everything to do with Michael Somers’s falcon. She knew Jamie had been going over there, though exactly what he was doing she wasn’t

sure.

“Hi,” she said as he got in, throwing his bag on the floor. “Good day?” He shrugged and smiled. “How about hot dogs for dinner?” She knew he never turned down that kind of suggestion, and just for a treat she decided that maybe she would join him. The hell with watching her diet for one day.

At home, Jamie got out and ran inside. A few minutes later, she heard him running down the stairs. She caught up with him at the door.

“Hey, slow down there a second.” She grabbed his shoulder. “Listen, you’re not getting in the way of anything over there, are you?” He shook his head. “You’re sure? Well, what goes on over there, anyway?”

Jamie looked at the door and then back at her impatiently, and

71

she knew he wanted to get going. It occurred to her that she could just play dumb, keep him there while she asked him questions. Maybe he’d get frustrated and forget himself. She decided she would be wasting her time; he would know what she was doing. “Okay, okay,” she said, standing back so he could get out. Bob came through from the kitchen, wagging his tail expectantly.

“Can’t you take Bob with you?” she called out, but he paused and shook his head. “But you’ll take him out later, right?” She held Bob’s collar while Jamie ran off through the trees, and stood watching even after he’d gone from her sight, wondering again what he was doing over there.

Closing the door, Susan went upstairs to change. Out her bedroom window she could see the roof of the house across the other side of the trees. A tiny nagging worry about Jamie being over there tugged at a corner of her mind. She was sure there was nothing for her to be concerned about, but all the same, maybe she ought to just go over and at least make sure that Michael didn’t mind Jamie being there. She hesitated, reluctant in case she might give the impression that she was checking up—which she definitely wasn’t. On the other hand, what harm could it do? It was a natural enough concern for any parent. So why did she feel uncertain?

She went into Jamie’s room and started picking up clothes he’d thrown on the floor. Under a T-shirt on his bed was a paperback book with a drawing of some kind of hawk on the cover; she picked it up and flicked through it. She guessed where it must have come from, and reading through a page here and there she was surprised that Jamie would read it. The style of writing was restrained and almost poetic in places, in a slightly dated, mannered fashion. Not the kind of thing somebody who plays Doom Baider might want to spend time over, especially at the age of ten. She also found a sketch pad filled with pencil drawings of what was obviously a falcon in flight. Intrigued, Susan flipped through the pages; then, reaching a decision, she went downstairs and pulled on her boots and coat.