Of a Feather Read online

  When we get home, Aunt Bea and I rush to feed the beasts. Inside his aviary, Rufus is flappy, hopping from perch to perch. I take him out and fly him across the yard a few times on the creance to let him stretch his wings.

  “He’s looking good,” Aunt Bea says. “I think we should try flying him free tomorrow.”

  Rufus swoops across the grass, flaps once, and alights on my fist, gobbling the tidbit down and then squawking for more. “You think he’s ready?” I rub under his beak and he playfully bites my fingers.

  “Do you?” Aunt Bea whistles and Red screeches, then emerges from the trees.

  Rufus peeps and twitters, chattering on about something. Most likely, he just wants more food. I place him on the farthest perch and walk back, and then Rufus shuffles around to face me and barks a raspy squawk. I hold up my fist and whistle. He’s instantly off the perch, flying right to me, and hits the glove right where I tapped.

  He’s proud of himself. I can tell by the way he gobbles down the tidbit and then gazes down his beak at the world. He thinks he’s hot stuff.

  “He’s ready,” I say. It’s me who’s not ready.

  Aunt Bea’s phone rings inside the house. Rufus and Red both snap their heads in the direction of the noise. Aunt Bea sends Red off into the trees and runs for the phone. Through the glass of the sliding door, I see her glance at the number and pause before answering.

  Rufus squawks, nibbles my hair. He can sense when things start going all wonky inside me, and my guts are suddenly boiling.

  Aunt Bea sticks her head out the door. “It’s your mom,” she says, waving the phone.

  Mom calls every night now, but usually around eight, before I go to bed. It’s not even six thirty.

  I start walking toward the house.

  Aunt Bea points to my outstretched arm. “You want to leave the bird?”

  Rufus swivels his head around.

  “No,” I say, reaching out to take the cell phone.

  “Reens?” Mom’s voice is all strangled—ugh, I don’t even want to ask.

  “Hey, Mom,” I say, trying to sound cheerful. “What’s up?”

  “Oh, Reens, just—gah! I have to blurt it out. We got the apartment! I can’t believe it—there’s so much paperwork and I had to talk to all these people to get approved, but it all worked out, just like that!”

  Rufus bobs his head, tilts it like he can’t quite comprehend what’s coming out of the phone.

  “Reenie?” Mom asks. “Did I lose you? We got our apartment—did you hear me?”

  My brain snags on the word our. “Oh, yeah?”

  “It’s great—two bedrooms. And you can go back to Rutland Intermediate, see all your old friends.”

  I want to tell her I have no friends there. I say nothing.

  “I have the weekend to get our stuff from Gram’s, and then we move in next week. Randi—the social worker—she said we could do our visitation on Tuesday at the place. Maybe try an overnight next weekend. What do you think?”

  “That’s great,” I say, because what else can I say?

  Rufus digs his talons into the glove. He knows everything’s sliding off the rails. I take a deep breath. I have to calm down—for Rufus.

  “No, really,” I add, projecting calm and control. “I’m sure it’s really nice.”

  “You’re going to love it, Reenie-beany,” Mom says, though she doesn’t sound one hundred percent.

  A part of me wants to say, Of course I will! But then I look at Aunt Bea and the warm light in the kitchen and Rufus twitters and squeezes my hand through the glove and I can’t imagine loving anywhere else on earth.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “I’ll call tomorrow to give you an update.”

  “Great.”

  We say good night, we say we love each other.

  “Everything all right?” Aunt Bea asks.

  The buzz has returned like a nightmare, familiar and awful all at once. Rufus must sense it because he bates, flapping and scratching, and I do nothing for a second because I feel exactly like that: caught, frantic, whole world upside down.

  I grab him. Set him right on my fist. At least I can save my owl.

  “Everything’s fine,” I tell Beatrice. Because that’s just how things always have to be: fine.

  22

  Rufus

  The night is cold. The usual noises are silent, as if the summer forest dwellers all as one dug down into their holes or flew off after the warmth. I fluff my feathers, lifting each downy fluff to its fluffiest. This is the first whiff of the winter Mother warned of. This is the bird-killing time.

  Father would often hoot about his first winter. “Barely caught a mouse a day,” he’d squawk. “And that was a good year.”

  He’d screech about winds nearly blowing him off his branch, of flying through snow so thick he couldn’t see the tips of his primaries, of ice on the lake catching water birds by their webbed feet.

  “Easy meals, those birds,” he added.

  Even First would shudder to hear these stories. I was ready to crawl back into my eggshell. Finally, one night, I asked Mother, “Why does he tell us about this?”

  She sighed and then groomed my ear tufts with her beak. “He wants you to be ready.”

  “How can a bird get ready for rain freezing his feathers into a sheet of ice?”

  Mother snuffled through her beak. “I guess there’s no getting ready for that.” She ran a talon over my skull. “Your father just wants you to know that there’s a whole world outside this nest, and it’s not a friendly one.”

  I’d always meant to ask her why we didn’t fly away to a friendlier world.

  “Were you ever out in the winter, Red?” I hoot softly. I can tell from her heartbeat that she’s only pretending to sleep.

  “No,” she tweets. “And that’s a blessing.” She rouses, shifts her footing on the perch. “Too many sad stories have come through this place. Broken wings, birds so hungry they lie on their chest feathers and can’t lift a talon. Winter is cruel.”

  “Then why have winter?” I ask.

  Red flaps her wings as if shooing my hoots away. “Do you think we have a choice?”

  “Why not fly with the warmth? Like the honkers?” Mother hated the honkers, always flying low over our nest like there was something in it for them.

  “Honkers? They can’t do anything but fly after the warmth. It’s in their gizzards. Is your gizzard telling you to fly somewhere?”

  I turn my eyes inward, dig deep inside. “No,” I hoot. “My gizzard isn’t pointing me anywhere. But why not? Why is nature like that?”

  “Every creature in the forest has its role to play, and every season, too. Winter lets the ground sleep and renew itself. But winter also keeps the balance. Only the strongest can survive.”

  Meaning winter picks off the Absolute Worst Owls in All of Owldom so that the Absolute Best Owls can find more mice. Meaning winter is meant to cull out . . . me.

  But I don’t want to be culled.

  “How will I survive the winter?” I peep, afraid to hoot it too loudly.

  “Maybe you won’t,” Red screeches. “Birds who ask questions like that don’t make it too long out in the forest.”

  That just about gets me fluffed. Here I am, asking her honest questions, and she’s screeching back nastiness? Why is she being so mean?

  Or is she being mean at all?

  Perhaps Red is trying to push me, as usual?

  “I will survive the winter?” I hoot, just trying it out.

  “You will?” Red squawks. “How’s that?”

  “I will hunt.”

  “Hunt how?” She’s in the opening now, peering in at me.

  “I will listen,” I hoot, tipping my head.

  “And?” She tilts her head to match mine.

  “And I will find the heartbeats,” I say. “I will glide between the snowflakes and crash down like lightning with my talons.”

  Her eyes sparkle. “Perhaps you will survive.” Sh
e flaps away from the opening, across her nest to her favorite perch near the roof. “Now get some rest, Hatchling.”

  Warmth unfurls inside me as I picture what I just hooted. I hunch down between my wings, close my eyes, and open my ears. The silence fluffs out into layers: stillness, and quiet, and fullness, all different breeds of silence. And hidden among these are pockets of noise, of life.

  I will survive the winter, I promise the silence. I will live to see the spring.

  * * *

  The Brown Frizz sneaks out to my nest in the darkness, sending the hidden crickets springing from the stiff grass. I can see her well enough as she stumbles over the tussocks. She slaps her wing-toes against the wall of my nest and crouches down like she’s hiding.

  “You cannot hide from me, Brown Frizz,” I hoot.

  She shudders, giving off Good Feelings. And then she toots out her beakless maw an approximation of—Great Beak, is she trying to hoot back to me?

  “Brown Frizz, this is embarrassing for us both,” I hoot.

  “Hoot, hoo-hoo, hoot!” she replies.

  Absolute gibberish. Ah, well. She is family, after all. I hoot back at her, mimicking her ridiculous Owlish. She practically explodes with Good Feelings and hoots back at me some more. We go on like this, hooting back and forth, and by the end, she almost has a decent “Get away from my nest, you bent primary feather!”

  She plunks her tail-less bottom in the dirt, leans her back against the wall of my nest, and begins growling in Furless Creature–ese, which is truly the ugliest means of communication. I flap down to a lower perch to see if there’re any mouse bits coming my way. All that hooting made me hungry. But no, she just sits and grumbles, mumbling on like this is getting either of us anywhere, particularly as regards breakfast, which I’m sensing is due.

  “Excuse me, Brown Frizz, but might there be any mouse in your meat pocket?” It’s a wonderful thing about furless creatures that they have little pockets full of meat.

  She sucks in air and lets out a long breath, then rolls onto her haunch and produces a squeaking something, which she drops in through a space in my nest’s wall.

  She wants me to hunt.

  I am an owl who will live to see the spring. Hunt, I shall!

  Bobbing my head, I lock on to the mouse’s position, scuttling along the edge of the wall like it can hide from me in the shadows. There is no hiding from a great horned owl!

  I flap, twist, dive, and slam down on that mobile meal.

  I AM RULER OF ALL I SURVEY!

  “For fluff’s sake, would you shut your beak!” Red squawks. “Some birds are still trying to sleep.”

  But the Brown Frizz and I are pumped full of Good Feelings. She’s hooting and twittering at me like my hunting has anything to do with her. But that’s family, I guess. Mother was always excited to see me hunt. At least now I’m actually catching things.

  I gobble down the mouse. The Brown Frizz opens the web and comes in, paw on. I flap up to it and nip at her face to say hello. She sneaks those infernal tails into my leg sparkles, but I don’t mind them nearly so much now. I hardly end up tufts down like a bat these days.

  We head out into the perch meadow and I see that the Gray Tail is also out in this half day. She grumbles at the Brown Frizz and they have a bit of a hoot about something. The Brown Frizz then swings her paw, which is our signal for me to fly off to the nearest perch. There’s a dead tree a flap away, and I land, then turn to look at the Brown Frizz. This next part is my favorite.

  Yes—there it is! She gives off a little tweet, smacks a wing-toe on the paw, and waggles a bit of meat hidden there from her pocket of yummies. That is the signal for me to fly back to the paw for said yummies.

  Mmmmm. I gobble that mouse bit right down and squawk for another.

  But the furless creatures are chattering to themselves. Something exciting has happened. “What?” I peep.

  The Brown Frizz runs a wing-toe over my chest feathers. She is giving off a gust of Good Feelings. Whatever happened, it is good.

  She swings the paw and I flap off again, this time to a different perch, just to keep things interesting. Again, I turn, and she taps her paw, and I fly to it and gulp the yummy meat. The furless creatures are practically bouncing on their little talonless toes. And yet none of this is the least bit unusual—we have been doing this every half day and half night for ages!

  “What is going on with you, furless creatures?” I squawk.

  This only leads them both to start chittering little happy chirps like a couple of squirrels in a tree full of nuts.

  “Take a peek at your legs, Hatchling,” Red calls from her nest.

  I bend over, peck at my leg sparkles—they’re still there. And the infernal tails hang down and are gripped in the Brown Frizz’s paw . . .

  Where’s the vine?

  Every time we fly out here, there’s a little vine on my leg-tails. Now it’s gone.

  I’m flying free.

  I look up. I’m flying free.

  An instinct to fly high, far, launches me from the paw and I soar up, up, landing on a branch in a tall sugar-sap tree near the furless creatures’ nest. I’m dizzy being so far from the ground. I tighten my grip, steady my gizzard.

  This is a perch for a great horned owl.

  From here, I can see . . .

  The trees deep into the forest, the twitch of a thousand branches, dry leaves rasping, crunching, whistling through the breeze as they fall to the ground. Songbirds flitting between them, their tiny hearts thrumming. Insects buzzing under the fallen leaves, zipping away from the birds. A moth fumbling through a gust of air. And all the prey I could ever hope to swallow, pulsing beneath the shadows, rustling among the dry leaves, scurrying amid the grasses, digging down into their dens.

  Thweet!

  The Brown Frizz is holding up her paw. Tapping. Waving the bit of meat from her pocket.

  There’s a whole wide world out there.

  A crow comes cawing out of nowhere, and then another, and then more, until there’s a veritable swarm perching in the nearby trees.

  There’s a whole wide world full of things that want me dead. But just there, in the perch meadow, is a furless thing that wants to keep me safe.

  It’s not even a choice.

  23

  Reenie

  “I got you something,” Aunt Bea says at breakfast Saturday.

  The plan is to head out around sunset for our first walk in the woods with Rufus. Which means I have a whole day to suffer through. Which is probably a good thing since I still have to finish up my research for the hunting project.

  “Is it my essay for school?” I say.

  Aunt Bea snuffles a laugh. “Sorry, but no.”

  Excitement hums in my belly when I see her lift a brand-new falconry waistcoat from a bag. She shakes it out. “There’s a real knife in the holster, so don’t get silly with it.”

  “But Mom just called to say—” If I’m leaving, why buy me a whole vest?

  “Because you’re a falconer,” she says, cutting me off, “and a falconer needs the right equipment.”

  I let her hold it while I slip my arms in. It’s heavy canvas, with big pockets covered with thick flaps of material. It fits perfectly.

  “Thank you,” I manage, tears pricking out from the corners of my eyes.

  She smiles. “You’ve earned it.” She stands, collects her dishes. “Now, finish that schoolwork or we’re not flying that owl.”

  I salute her as I get to work, my new vest wrapped around me for good luck.

  As the light turns golden, I finish typing up all my notes. Falconry hasn’t changed much over the centuries. The ancient kings whose hawks soared over Middle Eastern deserts are kin with King Arthur, whose falcons flew across English moors, and with Aunt Bea and Red. And with me. I’m connected to something deep and true in the world, like I’m part of this thread reaching back through time and stretching forward into the future.

  I hunt through the house for Aun
t Bea—I’ve got to show her my finished essay. But she’s outside, standing in the yard, flying Red and using a lure—this one meant to imitate a rabbit, but it’s really a stuffed sock made of fur. She tosses the tidbit-laden rabbit lure into the grass, then drags it fast across the ground. Red dive-bombs from above, hitting the lure like a missile. I was so into my essay, I’d forgotten that we’re taking Rufus to fly.

  “Is it time?” I ask, shrugging on a fleece jacket under my vest as I step out the back door and trundle down the wooden steps. “I finished my project.”

  Aunt Bea calls Red to the fist, and she lands there in an instant. “About,” Aunt Bea says, feeding Red her tidbit.

  I get Rufus from his aviary as Aunt Bea puts Red back in hers. We’re flying Rufus solo in the woods. It’s his first time, so we agreed two sets of eyes would work better than one.

  “You sure we shouldn’t put a radio on him?”

  Aunt Bea nods, handing me her pouch of tidbits. “If he flies off, that’s how it should be anyway.”

  Her words bruise my insides. I know she’s right; I know that’s what we’ve been working toward; but I can’t just yet. I can’t even think about it. I tuck the pouch into my vest pocket.

  We fly him in the yard a few times, just to remind him about returning to the fist. My confidence builds each time he hits the glove. We’re ready, I keep telling myself. You’re ready, I send out to Rufus, as if my mind can penetrate his.

  “It’s time,” Aunt Bea says, checking the sky.

  A plume of dust signals a car coming down the road. We’d agreed cars would be bad for Rufus, and we’d wait for any to clear out before heading into the woods to fly him. I call Rufus to the glove, just to keep him focused until the car passes. Only this car—truck, actually—pulls into Aunt Bea’s driveway.

  I visor a hand over my eyes, try to see who it is, because who would be coming to visit unannounced at sundown on a Saturday? It takes me a second to register the blue lights on top of the truck. And then a man in a uniform—a uniform with the Fish and Wildlife symbol Jaxon’s been sketching for our project emblazoned on his vest.

  Aunt Bea’s jaw clenches. “Stay here,” she says, holding up a hand, like I need more than words to comprehend the full depth of her meaning. I am fully aware of that depth. Aunt Bea warned me that first night: This is a rehab bird. We make him better and then we release him back out to his wild life. But I wouldn’t listen.