The Snow Falcon (47 page)

“Pete talked to Ted Hanson, that’s all I know. Then he started going nuts. He wouldn’t say what the hell happened.”

It took a moment, and then she knew. She pictured Hanson outside the Red Rooster and realized he must have seen her as she’d left with Michael, and with that thought another occurred to her. She hung up the phone, stunned. Suddenly it wasn’t Pete she was worried about. She ran outside and got in her car.

SUSAN WAS GETTING ready to go over to her house, thinking that Wendy would be worried because she’d been out all night. She heard

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a car coming down the track and thought it must be Michael returning. They’d been gone only fifteen minutes, but maybe he’d forgotten something—or else they might have come back because of Jamie. She was worried about him, what he was thinking, and she wasn’t sure she should have let them go off together.

She went outside as an old Honda skidded down the track and stopped in a flurry of snow and dirt. The driver’s door flew open, and Susan recognized Rachel Ellis and wondered what she was doing here. The two of them stared at each other, each working out what the other signified. Then the way Rachel looked set off alarms in Susan, though she didn’t know why.

“Is Michael here?”

“What happened to you?”

They’d both talked at once, Susan belatedly seeing the bruises on Rachel’s face. She guessed it was Rachel she’d seen at the house that night, something she couldn’t begin to figure out. Rachel’s hand went automatically to her discolored eye.

“Please,” Rachel insisted, “do you know where he is?”

Susan went to her, putting aside all the other things that were buzzing in her head. “What is it?” she asked.

Rachel took a breath. “It’s Pete, he thinks … He’s not himself right now, and I’m worried.”

“What does he think?” Susan didn’t understand.

“I don’t know where he is,” Rachel said. “I’m worried what he might do.”

It started to dawn on Susan what Rachel was talking about, and though she didn’t understand all of it, she could see that Rachel was genuinely concerned.

“They’re not here. I mean Michael and Jamie. My son. They went to release his falcon.” She was thinking while she spoke. There were bruises on Rachel’s cheek and eye, her lip looked swollen, and there was desperation in the way her gaze didn’t stay still.

“Pete carries a rifle in his truck,” Rachel said.

Susan grabbed Rachel’s arm, infected by her urgency now, fighting down the dread in the pit of her stomach. “You go into town and find Coop. Tell him they’ve gone up toward Falls Pass. I’ll go on ahead.”

Rachel hesitated a second, then turned and started running for her car.

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RACHEL DROVE TO Coop’s house, but no one was there, so she turned around and headed back toward the station house, where she saw his car parked outside. She jumped out of her Honda and hammered on the door.

“Coop!” she yelled. “Are you in there?”

She couldn’t hear anything from inside, and she hammered again and then thought he might have gone somewhere on foot. She looked down the street, but it was mostly empty this early on a Sunday. She didn’t know if the diner was open yet, but she thought she’d go down that way and have a look. If she couldn’t find him there, she’d just head up to Falls Pass herself. She kept trying to tell herself that she was panicking, but she still felt this tight knot in her stomach that refused to go away.

As she turned to go, the door opened and Coop stood there with his hand on the jamb, rubbing his face and blinking in the light. He looked like shit, which gave her a moment’s pause, but she didn’t have time to wonder about it.

“What is it?” he said.

“It’s Pete,” she said. “I think he might want to kill somebody.”

He blinked at her, absorbing what she’d said.

THE DAY WAS perfect for this, Michael thought. Overnight there had been a light snowfall, and the ground was virgin. The sun was behind them, bouncing off the white slope, striking and reflecting off the cliff face a mile distant. The unbroken line of the ridge marked a horizon beyond which the sky beckoned wide and blue like a still ocean.

He wanted to let Cully go from the top of the ridge, where they could watch her soar out over the valley until she chose to leave them. He paused, stroking her breast, beginning to feel the sadness he knew would wash over him as she left. The air was crisp, as if he could take it in his hand and make it crackle between his fingers. He’d come to love the air here. It was dry and rarefied, scented with pine.

Cully detected a breath of wind, and her wings flicked open. Her dark bright eyes fixed on Michael’s, as if prompting him to keep their

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bargain. They began the walk across the snowfield toward the cliff, and halfway there they stopped.

What happened next was stupid and unexplainable. He’d taken off Cully’s leash and jesses countless times, and today he meant to cut the leather anklets that attached them to her legs. He took a knife from the bag and then, hesitating, put it in his pocket. He offered Cully a piece of meat that at first she ignored, then, apparently changing her mind, reached for and swallowed.

He thought he’d allow her to eat her fill of the rabbit carcass he’d brought with him. Possibly he was distracted as he unwound the leash from his gloved fingers and reached for the knife again. Unexpectedly she took to the air, startling him, and the leash slipped through his fingers. Before he could stop her, she was rising, flying away from them, trailing her leash underneath her.

Shocked by his own carelessness, it took him seconds to react. In a rush, he saw how serious the situation was. How many times had he read that a bird that escapes with its leash and jesses still attached faces a certain and unpleasant death, caught up somewhere to hang upside down and starve?

Fumbling in his haste, he grabbed the lure and called her name as he swung it at his side. She continued to rise as he called again, desperately willing her to respond, to begin her turn. She flew on, and his terror formed a tight feeling in his throat. He knew that if he lost sight of her now, if she flew on over the valley, he might never find her again, and the knowledge that in the end, after everything, he’d failed her, weighed him down.

Jamie’s expression pleaded silently for him to do something, and not knowing what else he could do, he began to run after her.

Normally she would catch a thermal and then rise to wait for the lure, but now she kept on toward the cliff. Lack of hunger made her inattentive. Michael called as he ran. He was thinking that to come so far, to have saved her only to be the cause of her death, was an unbearable prospect. Images of her spinning like a bundle of rags in the wind, caught up in some tree where he’d never find her, tormented him.

He ran, stumbling in the snow, his breath ragged, sometimes sprawling head first and then struggling to his feet again. He tried to reason with himself, to find something that would offer hope. Though she wasn’t sharp set, he thought that the effort of flying

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would quickly burn energy and she would become hungry again soon. All he had to do was keep her in sight until that happened.

He willed her to change direction, to rise and circle high above them—that way, he might eventually be able to call her down. But she was making for the cliff, and it was his real, sickening fear that she would pass beyond it and be lost to him. Her leash would become tangled where she landed, and her efforts to escape would only tire her. She would die slowly and there would be nothing he could do. Finding her would be like searching for a needle in twenty haystacks.

As she drew farther away, he felt that the situation was hopeless. Out of breath, gasping, half choking with remorse, he stopped running. She was almost at the cliff, rising high. Jamie clutched at Michael’s arm, his eyes streaming tears. As loud as he could, Michael shouted Cully’s name, his voice carrying in the cold still air and echoing faintly. For a second he felt unable to breathe, as if his heart had paused midbeat, and he prayed that she would turn. Then, her image lost briefly in a shadow, he saw the pale flick of a wing as she settled on the cliff face.

The relief he felt was short-lived as he realized she could take off again at any moment. Already he’d lost sight of her, but pinpointing the general area where he thought she’d landed, he started to run on, nurturing a tiny flicker of hope. He stumbled and tripped, Jamie beside him, and soon they arrived at the base of the cliff.

“Can you see her?” Michael said, his voice tense, desperate.

The place he figured she ought to be was a crisscrossed pattern of shadows and rifts in the rock. Incredibly, Jamie nodded, grabbing Michael’s arm and pointing.

Michael peered up. At first he couldn’t see anything, but then a movement caught his eye. His eye must have passed over her, mistaking her for a pale splash blending with its surroundings, but now he could clearly make her out, perched on a ledge between jagged outcrops about a hundred feet up. She seemed unconcerned.

Michael tried to work out what he should do. If he called her and she left her perch but still refused to come down, there was a good chance she would be lost somewhere in the valley. He reasoned it might be better to wait and hope that the longer she remained up there, the hungrier she would become, that if she would just stay put long enough, the lure might bring her back. He was still weighing

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his options when Cully made her own decision, and with a flick of her wings she took to the air.

He saw immediately that something was wrong. She remained flapping at the rock face, her wings beating uselessly, propelling her a foot forward before she fell back again. Repeatedly she tried to escape, but her leash had caught on something and she was helpless. As they watched, her efforts tired her, and after a minute she hung suspended by her feet, flapping weakly, spiraling slowly in the breeze.

Michael gave Jamie the lure and searched for a route up the cliff, which was run through with fissures and cracks that would at least give him handholds. He saw that the main problem would be the ledge where her leash was caught, which formed part of an overhang he’d have to get around. It was in permanent shadow, and he could see the cold sheen of ice against the black rock.

He crouched down in front of Jamie and explained what he was going to do. “I have to try and reach her, but when I go up there, there’s a chance she might get free.” He paused and gripped Jamie’s shoulders. “If she does, you have to stop her before we lose sight of her. You have to bring her down.” He put the lure in Jamie’s hands, clasping his fingers around the rope. “If we lose her with that leash still on her, she’ll die, Jamie.”

He wished there was another way, but he had no choice, and searching Jamie’s expression for reassurance, he was met with a blank look. He didn’t know if Jamie understood what he was asking him. “If she gets free, you have to call her. You have to get her attention before she’s lost. Okay? You have to call her down, Jamie.”

He knew how impossible it seemed. He searched for some sign that Jamie could do what he was asking, but Jamie just looked up at Cully with frightened eyes. He was just a small boy, pale and on the verge of tears.

Michael turned back to the cliff and began to climb.

The rock was smooth in places, worn by the wind and rain over millions of years to defy the frozen hands of a man; it was so cold it felt impregnated with ice. It scraped the flesh from his fingertips as he sought to find each grip, his chafed and reddened hands numbed by a freezing wind. On the ground he couldn’t feel it, but thirty feet up the air moved around him, jabbing cold needles wherever flesh

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was exposed. His ears rang, and his face felt swollen but deadened, as if his cheeks were full of Novocain. In places where the rock was cracked and split into fissures, there were sharp edges that peeled his skin and lacerated his palms.

He paused for breath, his eyes streaming from the cold, and looked for Cully. She was twenty feet away, hanging by her leash, flapping listlessly to try and free herself but caught fast, her efforts only tiring her. She gave up, her wings hanging down as she panted and twisted. He could see her accusing eye, but if she recognized that he was coming to help her, she gave no sign.

As Michael looked down, the ground seemed distant. The pain in his hands and the numbness seeping into his bones allowed him to imagine that falling was a real possibility. He saw himself bouncing against rocks on the way down, breaking bones painfully. He found the next handhold and hauled himself up, and when his toe slipped, his fingers scraped frantically for purchase until he found another hold, leaving faint smears of blood.

As he got closer, he began speaking softly to Cully, trying to calm her, and when she heard his voice, she flapped her wings and pitifully bounced off the rock. She was only ten feet away, but the overhang was above him and there didn’t seem a way around it. He thought that if he could climb up beneath it and hook an elbow over the edge to support himself, he might be able to reach her, though having her in his grasp and saving her might not be quite the same thing.

Jamie looked small down below, an elfin dark figure against white snow, pale upturned face watching intently. He held the cord of the lure in both hands, at the ready.

Reaching with outstretched fingers, Michael grasped the edge of the overhang and blindly scrabbled one foot after the other to find a place that would support his weight. The rock was smooth, and the places where his fingers found a hold were too small for his boots. He had climbed into shadow, and the temperature had dropped as the sun was lost from his back so that it felt like being plunged into a deep abyss where daylight never penetrated. If he fell, he knew he’d never be able to climb this far again.