The Snow Falcon (19 page)

Michael had read about these different methods. It sounded as if training Cully would be difficult, and he wasn’t sure he could do it. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “I’ve never done this before. Can I train a wild gyr falcon?”

“Sure. If you know how, it’s not hard. Like I said, they’re intelligent birds. All you need is patience, and I guess you’ve got to respect them—love them, even.”

It sounded incongruous in a way to hear this big man, a working-man who looked as if he’d spent his entire life outdoors, who was hardened and pragmatic about the natural world, talking about love for a hawk. But it was also clear in the tender way he looked at Florence, and from the way he handled her, that love her he did.

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“You can’t force her to do what you want,” Frank went on. “She’ll die before she’ll submit to mistreatment. How’s her wing coming along?”

“Tom Waters thinks she has a fractured ulna.”

Frank frowned. “That can be bad. Sometimes they don’t heal properly, the bone gets infected. You can give them antibiotics, but they don’t always work.”

“How will I know that?” Michael asked.

“You’ll be able to tell when she’s flying free after a lure. That puts a lot of stress on the wing, which is natural. An injury that won’t heal is always going to show up then. That’s why it’s best to train any injured wild bird before releasing her. It’s the only way you can see for sure if she can survive.”

“What happens if the injury doesn’t heal?”

“That’s a tough call, but with a wing fracture where the bone’s infected, there’s only one thing you can do, and that’s amputate. If it was me, though, I can’t see how that’s doing a bird any favors. Better to just do the right thing.”

“You mean, put her down.”

Frank nodded. “It’s hard, but it’s right. That’s my belief, anyway.” He replaced Florence’s jesses and returned her to her perch. “Now let’s get your falcon fitted with some new jesses.”

MICHAEL SPENT THE rest of the afternoon with Frank, leaving as it was beginning to get dark. By then he had a much better understanding of what he’d let himself in for. Frank answered his questions and gave him some of the things he was going to need to train Cully, and showed him how to make others. He’d also said that anytime Michael needed help, all he had to do was call. The last thing he’d done was to wish Michael luck, and to tell him that if somehow it went wrong and he changed his mind, then he could bring the gyr over and Frank would take over.

Michael was sure he wasn’t going to do that. He was gripped with excitement. Watching Frank’s Harris hawk fly had made it possible to visualize the moment when he’d be able to do the same with Cully, when she’d come to his fist and then, later, to a lure. It stirred feelings in him that were hard to define, but had partly to do with the sense that he was embarking on something worthwhile, something that

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would not only return Cully to freedom but would also return something he himself had lost: a sense of purpose.

He stopped in Williams Lake on the way home to buy a set of balancing scales at the local junk shop. When he got home, he removed the measuring pan and replaced it with a perch that he made from a piece of wood, so he was able to weigh Cully. Over the following few days he kept a record of her weight, noting it down every morning along with the amount of food she ate every day. He also began the first stage of her training, noting how responsive she was. In a few days he’d established that when her weight was within a few ounces of three and a half pounds, she was hungry and cooperative, or “keen set,” to use the falconry term. But if he allowed her to eat too much and her weight increased beyond that, she was sluggish and slow to respond.

She learned to eat while standing on his fist, balancing square-footed and tearing at a rabbit leg held firmly beneath her talons. At first she picked tentatively, but her trust in him grew noticeably each day. When he wasn’t feeding her, he was carrying her on his fist, which he now protected with a leather gauntlet that extended along his forearm. It was made from doeskin and was soft and comfortable to wear; the sections covering the wrist, the meat of the thumb, and the first two fingers—where Cully stood—were reinforced with extra stitched layers.

He loved walking with her. He spent long hours in the woods along the riverbank carrying her around so that she got used to him, his mind empty of everything except a kind of bemused wonder at finding himself with a powerful and beautiful falcon standing on his fist. She carried herself stiffly erect, arching herself away from him, shifting uncertainly on her feet, constantly throwing out her good wing for balance. Her eyes never wavered from his, though he avoided returning her stare, as he’d read that in the wild this is a signal that presages attack. He talked soothingly; when he ran out of things to say that meant anything, he’d recite lines of poetry or snatches of song lyrics, anything to put her at ease. She heard the words to the Cowboy Junkies’ track “Bea’s Song” over and over while he listened to the melody in his head. It was a mournful tale of a woman reflecting on her life and the things that she had let go, and its theme of regret touched a chord in him.

During this time he drank in the details of her form, from the

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bright yellow skin—called cere—around her beak and nostrils, which was the same color as her legs and feet, to the gunmetal blue gray of her razor-sharp beak. Her beak was designed for tearing strips of meat from prey, and for breaking bones. He learned from his reading that in the wild she would kill with her feet, primarily with her long back toes, which were used like bayonets at impact, piercing her victim and often breaking the neck. Though her coloring was overall a dusky cream, with dark flecks across her powerful breast, he noticed now that these flecks broadened underneath to bars across her feathered thighs and the underside of her tail. Her head was primarily of a softer brown gray color that was a mixture of the chocolate and cream that predominated elsewhere, and it was to this color that her long wing primaries and secondaries faded.

As she became used to him, she relaxed her posture a little and spent less of her time on the fist watching him, more time taking note of her surroundings. She missed nothing and took an avid interest in everything. She would watch a beetle crawling across the bark of a tree with the same keen interest with which she observed squirrels dashing across the uppermost limbs of gray winter trees. In the forest, where the smell of pine resin sharpened the air and the snow lay unevenly in drifts where it had penetrated the close-needled canopy overhead, she watched small birds flitting in the half-light.

He avoided crossing the river and heading up to the high ground where he’d found her. He still wondered about the identity of the hunter who’d shot her, reasoning that whoever it was might be determined enough to try more than once. It occurred to him that the hunter must have worked out that somebody had found the falcon, and might even know it was Michael.

Sometimes Cully’s feet gripped the glove and she tensed, her good wing flicking open as if she planned to take to the air. In those moments, whatever illusions Michael had been building about the nature of the bond between them quickly evaporated. He couldn’t think of her as a pet. Without the brail on her injured wing, she would have launched herself from his fist, and without the leash and jesses to restrain her, she would have left him. This reminded him that she was wild, and what his purpose with her was. She would bite at her restraints and glare at him, as if she blamed him for holding her captive, but then, five minutes later, it would be as if she understood their pact, and she’d be quite settled again.

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When she was completely relaxed, she would bob her head up and down, an endearing gesture that transformed her from a sleek predator to something much less threatening. Then she would rouse her plumage and shake herself vigorously from head to tail and sometimes stay that way, puffed out like a ball, one leg raised with the foot clenched to her breast, at rest. At those times she became utterly benign and seemed incapable of delivering swift death, as indeed she had been designed for by nature. He discovered that she liked to play with windblown leaves or small twigs. He made a perch for her that he’d leave outside the house just off the porch in the clearing, and she would jump down from it and step daintily around in the snow to the limit of her leash, then hop back to it awkwardly, propelled by her one good wing, grasping some stick she’d discovered, which she’d dance around with as if amusing herself. He guessed there was more to it, that her games practiced her skills at grabbing with her feet, and that some future victim would suffer the consequences.

The first part of her training was to encourage her to step from her perch to his fist for food, which after a hesitant start she would readily do. In a couple of days she was jumping the length of her leash, and that was as far as Michael could go with it until her brail was removed. The rest of the time, if he wasn’t walking with her, he was getting her used to a hood that Frank had given him, which he said he’d made especially after Michael had first called. The hood was constructed of three pieces of leather formed into a shape that roughly approximated the shape of Cully’s head, with the sides that covered her eyes being slightly bulbous. Its purpose was to keep her in the dark (from where the term “hoodwinked” originated, he discovered from his reading) so that she would stay calm and not be startled by strange sights if he was, for example, taking her somewhere in the car. It was a beautifully constructed thing, the side panels made of red leather, the middle section light tan, and the long leather drawstrings used to tighten it a contrasting black. On top, an ornate spray of feathers transformed it from something merely practical to a small work of art.

He’d discovered that the hood, like many other things used in falconry, was cleverly designed for one-handed use, as a falconer often has to accomplish certain tasks while carrying a falcon on his left fist. There was, for instance, a special falconer’s knot used to attach a leash to a perch that could be tied and released with one hand; Michael

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practiced this endlessly, to perfection. Similarly, the design of the jesses meant that they could be taken on and off the swivel one-handed. For Michael, there was a certain pleasure in becoming accomplished at these things: It was all part of training a falcon and meant he was moving closer to the time when Cully would fly free again.

A week after his visit to Frank, Michael called Tom Waters and told him he thought the brail was ready to come off. Tom promised to come over the next evening.

“That wing is going to be stiff,” Tom warned after he’d examined her. “We’ll take the brail off, but just go easy on her for a while. I’ll come back in a few days and see how she’s doing. Don’t let her get excited and overdo it.”

“What about the fracture?” Michael asked.

“I can feel a callus, so that’s good, but we won’t know for sure until we see how she is with that wing.”

They were in the woodshed. It was dark, and Cully was sleepy and hardly seemed to notice that she was no longer restrained. Michael decided to leave her inside for a few days while she got used to the idea.

The next morning, when he brought her food, she was standing on her perch, flexing both wings, flapping them while she gripped tightly with her feet. He hung back at the door, startled at how large she was with her full wingspan exposed, feeling the air she disturbed flow across his face. He was worried that she would aggravate her injury, but after a moment she settled again, panting from exertion.

Relieved that she appeared to be able to use her wing, he fed her and retreated. He would give her a few days, and then her training would begin in earnest.

12

FOR THREE WEEKS MICHAEL HAD AVOIDED going into town, even to the point of driving all the way to Williams Lake for his groceries, but with Cully temporarily confined, he had time on his hands again, and his thoughts turned to the need to make some kind of living. He knew the money he had in the bank wasn’t going to last forever.

One day, while he was contemplating his options, which seemed few, he was startled by the phone; this was the first time anybody had called since he’d been in the house. He picked it up, wondering who it could be.

“Just thought I’d see how everything is going.” Carl Jeffrey’s voice came through the line, like a friend just keeping in touch.

“Everything’s fine,” Michael said cautiously, wondering what the lawyer wanted. “What can I do for you, Carl?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking. It seems like we got off on the wrong foot. Why don’t we bury the hatchet and get together sometime soon?”

Michael hesitated, unconvinced by this apparent change of heart. “Is this an invitation to come over for dinner, Carl?”

“That’s a great idea. Tell you what, I’ll talk to Karen, and we’ll let you know when.” There was a pause. “But if you’re coming into town sometime soon, why don’t you stop by for a cup of coffee?”

“You called to ask me to have a cup of coffee?”

“Well, why not? Like I said, I think we just got off on the wrong foot. I want to make sure things are okay with you, that’s all. I mean, they are, aren’t they?”

“About as well as I could expect, I guess,” Michael said, wondering if Carl was planning on getting to the point.

Carl hesitated before continuing. “Look, this is probably none of my business, but what about financially? I mean, are you getting by okay in that department?”

“You’re right,” Michael said. “It isn’t any of your business.”

Carl chuckled as if this were a joke between friends. Then his tone became conciliatory. “I guess you’ve a right to be mad with me,” he said. “Look, I was just trying to give you good advice when we talked. You can see that, can’t you?”