The Summer of the Falcon (13 page)

The young mice of the year, out seeking their fortunes, were as careless as her father predicted. Soon Don kicked up a family, and Zander bulleted out of the sky to tie the score.

“Tallyho!” she shouted.

Ulysses was thrown off. While Charles tried to find him food he suddenly came down on a pigeon flying from the barn to the nearby granary. Again the boys hoorayed, and ran far out in the field to bring back the fleet-winged tiercel.

Zander went aloft and waited on until June feared he would drop of exhaustion. No small birds were flying. No young mice were rushing into openings. Suddenly Zander plummeted from the sky and disappeared into the purple blooms of the alfalfa.

“It counts!” shouted Don. “He dove, and that counts. So it’s Ulysses two, Zander one!”

June was furious. “It doesn’t count,” she shouted. “There wasn’t anything to catch. There has to be something, or it doesn’t count!”

She continued to argue with them as she backed to the spot where Zander had disappeared.

“Yes, it does!” said Charles, siding with Don.

And June continued to shout, “No, no, no!”

With flashing suddenness, a red-tailed hawk appeared overhead. He was winging from the woods at the edge of the field, where he had been watching the contest. He dove, and with horror June saw him plunge on the spot where Zander sat.

She shouted and waved her hands, but there was a hundred yards between herself and the big hawk. Intent upon his mission, he saw nothing but food fluttering in the grass.

The boys burst behind her, shouting and waving their arms as they responded to the crisis. Suddenly Charles took off his shoe. He stood very still, aimed, and hurled it at the hawk.

The shoe clipped the big bird. He veered off. His wing beats rippled the grass as he flew to the apple orchard.

Zander was unharmed. He was sitting in the grass “covering.”

“He’s got something!” June cried. “He’s got something! And that counts! It’s a tie score!”

The boys were grinning. June put her hand under the yellow legs and lifted Zander into the sun. She stared at the prey.

“A grasshopper!” she shouted. “Tie! Tie!”

Her father trotted up behind, looked, laughed, and said, “Wait a minute. I’ve never seen a grasshopper with so many legs...he’s got two grasshoppers!”

“Hooray again!” June shouted. “He’s ahead!”

“And the winner!” Don said. “It’s too dangerous with big prey hunting this field for the small contestant to stay in the race.”

“The winner!” Rod shouted and jumped in glee until his knees touched his chin. “Those Indian princes are great. What a bapa!”

June caught up with her father as he walked home. She was feeling expansive. “That was fun,” she said.

“The match or the winning?” She smiled sheepishly at his glance. “Junie,” he went on, “never feel bad about wanting to win. We’d never get anywhere if we didn’t try to excel.”

A half-grown rabbit ran out at their feet, and three steps later another leaped off.

“Do all animals leave their parents?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered, “in late summer and fall.”

“It’s sort of like children.”

“Very much like children,” he answered, “because we are animals, too.”

“Are you going to shove me off your land when the goldenrod blooms?”

“Well, people are a little different. You’ll want to go when the time comes. You’ll see.”

“Never, never,” she said. “I
never
want to leave home—I don’t think.”

And so the summer ended, and the Pritchards went back to school and the regimental life of the city. June studied hard; and that winter her training of Zander made the routine of her study more meaningful, at times even exciting. Her grades were good. And they got better and better. Then one day the school principal telephoned Mrs. Pritchard and announced that he would like to nominate June as an exchange student to Belgium from his school. He would have to have a decision by the end of the summer. Her family was proud and excited. June was excited and scared. That night she held Zander very close as she went to sleep.

T
HIS YEAR
June
walked
into the house. She did not run. She helped her mother by carrying suitcases and boxes. On the third trip from the car she stood quietly in the hallway.

“Does the place look any different to you?” she asked her mother.

“No,” answered Elizabeth Pritchard, curiously following her gaze. “It is still the same wonderful house at the foot of the mountains.”

“But the paper is sort of shabby and dirty, and the staircase looks narrow, doesn’t it?”

“Well, the paper has always been shabby and dirty, ever since I can remember. That’s the beauty of the place, and the stairs, well, they couldn’t shrink.” She tipped her head and looked at her daughter, “Could be those two inches you grew this winter. They’ve lifted you closer to the shabby wallpaper and farther away from the steps.”

“No,” June said, “it’s something else.”

“Well, maybe you really want to leave the dust and narrow stairs and go off to Belgium and see the world and be on your own. You have to decide, you know.”

“No, please, I can’t, I can’t.” She shook off the idea, and when she looked at the hallway again, it was just as she had remembered it, beautiful and grand.

She walked carefully up the stairs to her room, holding her head high as she had been taught in the interpretive dance class she had taken in the winter.

Another month brought her to sixteen. On her birthday Elizabeth Pritchard gave her daughter a family party. June was generously teased.

“Ho,” Don said, “sweet sixteen and never been kissed.”

“Or have you been?” Charles jibed.

Her mother tilted her head high and said firmly, “It’s none of your business.”

June lifted her eyes from the table to her mother’s face. For the first time her mother was a friend, not a mother, a friend who made her feel golden and secretive. Today it did not matter whether she had or had not been kissed. Either was her secret. She had earned privacy, and she liked it.

She sat slowly eating cake and thinking about decisions and first kisses. Then the mood passed. Charles picked up a .22 and went to the front porch.

“A sixteen-gun salute for sixteen years!”

She listened as the blanks went off, felt the blush rush to her cheeks. She ran out across the yard to Zander for protection—and looked down to see that she had attended her sixteenth birthday party in bare feet.

Zander this year was a crime to falconry—he was a pet. A falconer regards a pet as a spoiled indulgence. A pet cannot be a falcon in the grand sense of the name, for a pet cannot hunt, only cry and play. In the spring June had stopped training him, and now he was unable to hunt, but he was free to come and go—like Bobu.

He was not on his perch when she stood under the maple. She whistled and he dove down to her from the sycamore at the creek. He back-winged above her head and dropped on her uplifted hand. He flew to her now, not for food, but out of affection and habit.

As she tossed him into the air and ran down the yard, the bird followed above her, then circled into an elm. She held up her hand. Zander returned. She tossed him into the air, he killied, dove, and swept up the creek.

She ran to the canoe landing and whistled. Down over the water came the falcon. He flashed his wings and alighted on her head. He pulled her hair in his beak.

“You’re no lady’s falcon anymore. You’re a silly American pet...and spoiled.” June rumpled his feathers. He scolded in irritation.

The change from falcon to pet had come about soon after the invitation to go to Belgium. It began the day June took Zander to an assembly lecture on falconry. The bird flew around the auditorium and came back to her whistle. The high school students leaped and shouted and laughed. She was a gay success.

Then John Doyle, handsome, curlyheaded John Doyle, arose in pensive wonder and said: “What is it about a falcon that makes him able to be trained to hunt, whereas a sparrow cannot be?”

June could not answer. She did not know. She was not embarrassed, but she wondered what the answer was. That night when she put Zander on his perch on her desk and sat down to study she viewed him with new eyes. He was no longer a little person. He was part of the earth...and June wanted to know more about him as a bird and why he had evolved to the creature he had become. She opened her drawer and took out a sheet of paper.

“Dear Charles and Don:

How’s college? Does Ulysses like German? I have done the worst. I have withdrawn Zander from the Joust. He is no longer a falcon in falconry terms...just a biological one. I am sorry, but he is a pet, indoors most of the time. Just the same he is wonderful, and I will never part with him.

Please tell me this. Why does a falcon train to hunt and a sparrow does not?

Don’t date the fluffy duffs. Look for a gal with brains.

Love,     

June”

And so the falcon and June had finished the spring in quiet companionship as she learned about his feathers and feet and bill and bones and wings. By summer she knew more about birds and sky and what evolution had done to the ancient reptile to get it airborne. The bones were hollow, the breast muscles enormous, the feathers almost piloted themselves, they were so light. The bird was air-lined. This knowledge put her in her place—on the earth with two feet fastened there.

Now, as her sixteenth birthday ended, June put Zander back on his perch, and, softly slipping her feet into her shoes, walked to her room.

The next day Don and Charles were as busy as executives, organizing and packing a secondhand Chevy with camping equipment and suitcases. They were going to drive west for the rest of the summer with a couple of school friends. Finally they were ready and all the Pritchards stood around the car on a cool, dew-lit morning to see them off. Their mother cried. Their father grunted and said, “The food bills will be lower.” And June was gnawed by jealousy.

With shouts and waves and hoots they backed out of the yard and drove away. As the dust from the car settled over the nettles and daisies at the side of the road, June sat down on a rock and dreamed of the adventures the four young men would have. She saw the laughing people they would meet—nice, beautiful people. She envisioned the Galahad adventures they would enact—noble, triumphant adventures. And for a long moment she was with them, meeting a handsome gypsy who sang and carried her off with a single kiss to a vague, misty ending.

She sighed. Suddenly back down the road came the Chevy, cutting dust as it rolled up to the house.

“We forgot the cameras!” Don called sheepishly, and jumped out of the car.

Their father came around the house chuckling, “Some planners. You’re still little boys.” Last year they would have taken the teasing. This year it hurt. Charles grew angry. He flared at his father.

“You forget things, too. How about the fishing rod you left back home?” That was the first time June had seen her brother get angry to their father’s face.

Charles senior raised an eyebrow. “Well, you
are
fledging!”

Charles hit back. “What do you mean?”

The slender man rocked back on his heels and said, “The nest is too small.”

“It certainly is!” Charles snapped and turned to June as if this break with his father had cleared his mind. “Junie, there’s a sparrow hawk’s nest in the sycamore tree above the swimming hole. You might be interested in watching how the mother takes care of her young.”

She felt uncomfortable but she was fascinated, for Charles seemed to be an adult speaking to a sister who was also adult. “Why should I?” she asked.

“Because.” he went on, “it may help you with that question you wrote me at college last winter.” He held tight to the cameras and ignored his waiting brother. “Why does a falcon train and a sparrow not? The answer is in the nest, but if you go down there you’ll see that we’ve only elaborated on their wild way of life for our own purposes. A sparrow is a picker, not a hunter.

“And,” he added, ignoring his father, “in a way, our trained falcons are forever children. We feed them as if we were mothers. We take care of them, and even though they’re physically adult birds, emotionally we keep them dependent fledglings. Go to the nest,” he said.

June stood still. As the car drove off she no longer saw romantic gypsies and Sir Galahads. Rather she looked up at her father. She noticed that his hair was thin and the lines around his nose were deep. “Will there be red-tailed hawks for Charles and Don as there were for Zander, Dad?”

“Of a sort,” he answered.

“Then why did Charles get so mad at you for teasing?”

Her father smiled pensively. “The time of the goldenrod has come for Charles and Don and me. We’ll clash more and more, until, like the young animals in the field, they leave my home and find their own.”

“Oh, that’s awful,” June dropped her head.

Her father continued. “The mother otter turns on her young and bites if they come crying back, the cat spits, the bear growls.”

“Oh, Dad,” she said. “Not me. Ever.”