C Box - Winterkill

Sheridan watched as her dad went back outside and brought the furniture back in. Most of the pieces-clearly not all that great to begin with-were damaged. “The least we can do is get this stuff out of the weather,” he said. It took her dad eight trips to get everything back inside. She helped as much as she could. One thing she could not stop staring at was a framed photo with cracked glass. The photo was faded, but it was of four men standing shoulder to shoulder in the desert. The men wore white robes, and behind them was a camel. Three of the men looked like Arabs, with dark features and beards. The fourth man was fair, with piercing eyes and a slight smile.

Her dad saw her looking at the picture and picked it up.

“That’s Nate Romanowski, by God,” he said, pointing at the fourth man. Her dad sounded surprised. He nodded at the picture, and pursed his lips as if reaffirming something.

“What is it?” She asked.

“Nothing,” her dad answered, but in a way that she knew meant he didn’t want to talk about it.

They went outside, and her dad closed the door behind them. Then he scanned the sky.

“There’s one of them,” he said, pointing toward the river. She followed his sight line, and there it was, all right.

“That’s a red-tailed hawk,” he said. “He’s immature, not older than a year. You can tell because he’s still got a brown tail and a speckled dirty breast.”

She looked to her dad, and he smiled. “Go ahead and walk up to him, but give him plenty of space. He needs sort of a cushion between you and him, or he’ll get nervous. I’ll go get some of their food and be with you in a minute.”

The hawk stood on a piece of driftwood near the river. He stood so still that she thought it would be possible to miss him if they hadn’t been looking for him. His eyes were on her as she approached.

Her first impression of the bird was that it was smaller than she would have guessed it would be. Still and compact, not revealing his wingspan, the hawk looked to be about the size of a large raven. But unlike a raven, the hawk had a sense of majesty about it, she thought. The bird’s head was cocked back slightly, as if looking down on her. Its coloring was finely textured, a beige breast and mottled, bay-colored wings. His large, wrinkled talons gripped the driftwood, and she could see shiny black and curled nails.

From behind, she heard her dad approach. The hawk was now watching him instead of her. She found out why when he approached the bird and lowered a dead sage grouse on the ground in front of it.

The hawk looked at the grouse, looked at Sheridan, looked at her dad. Its movements were precise, almost mechanical.

Then, with a slight shuffle of his wings, he hopped down from the driftwood to the grouse and began to eat.

“This is kind of… gross, honey,” her dad cautioned.

But she was fascinated. She watched the hawk methodically take apart and consume the entire sage grouse. As he ate, a lump above his breast got bigger and bigger.

“That’s called his crop,” her dad explained. “It fills as he eats. The food is stored there for later. That’s one of the reasons these birds can go so long between meals.”

She noticed now that blood flecked the hawk’s sharp beak, and that bits of down from the grouse floated through the evening air. She watched the hawk carefully. Although its eyes were hard and impassive, she sensed a kind of comfort in him now. He was full, and relaxed.

“This bird is somebody’s pet ?” she asked.

“It’s not like that,” her dad said. “Good falconers don’t break the birds, or domesticate them. They work with them, like partners. The birds can fly away any time they choose to leave.”

All that was left of the sage grouse was a pair of clawed feet. Sheridan watched as the hawk dipped down and took one of the feet in his mouth and started eating it. The crunching sound reminded her of when she opened peanuts to eat them.

“Here comes the peregrine,” her dad whispered.

She looked up and saw it, an airborne “V” cruising upriver like a missile, a few feet from the surface of the water and ice. She could hear it cutting through the air with a hiss as it went by.

“Stay still,” her dad said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “I think he’ll come back.”

“Do you have another sage grouse?” she asked, concerned.

“Yup.”

It took a few moments before the peregrine reappeared. This time, it was flying downriver, and a little closer to the bank.

“What a beautiful bird,” Sheridan said.

“Peregrines are the ultimate hunters,” her dad said. “They’re not the biggest falcons, but they’re the fastest and the most versatile. They used to be endangered, but now there are lots of them.”

She was entranced.

And when the peregrine came back, flared, and lit with a graceful settling of his wings just a few feet away from them, she felt as if something wild, and magical, had happened.

Her dad lowered the other grouse to the ground in front of the peregrine. The little bird, darker and somehow more cocky and warlike than the red-tailed hawk, gracefully tore into it.

“I think I’d rather learn about these falcons than play basketball,” she heard herself say.

In the pickup, as they drove from Nate Romanowski’s place in the pre-dark of winter, Sheridan realized just how cold she was. Her teeth chattered as she waited for the heater to warm up. Seeing the falcons had made her forget about the cold, forget about how late it was getting.

She noticed that her dad’s cell phone, clipped to the dashboard, was turned off, and she mentioned it.

“I forgot about that, damn it,” he said, turning it on. Her dad rarely cursed.

Almost immediately, it rang and he grabbed it quickly. She watched him. His expression seemed to sag, then harden, as he listened.

“I can’t believe she said that.”

“Is it Mom?” Sheridan asked. But she knew it was.

“I’ll be home in half an hour, darling. I’m so sorry this happened. And I’m sorry you couldn’t reach me.”

Sheridan was concerned. His voice was low, and calm, and very serious. But she knew that inside, he was hustling.

The next morning dawned gray and cold, and there was a bulletin on the radio that said a stockman’s advisory had been issued for Northern Wyoming. For their first day back to school, the girls were dressed in clothes they had received for Christmas. Because the girls had become used to sleeping later in the morning over the break, Joe and Marybeth had trouble moving them along so they would be finished with breakfast and ready to go when the bus arrived.

“Christmas is over, ladies,” Joe told them. “Back to work we go.”

Marybeth was quiet, her eyes tired. She had spent most of the previous night awake and crying about her encounter with Jeannie Keeley. Joe had held her, and shared her rage and frustration. Both Joe and Marybeth were painfully aware of the fact that this might be the last “normal” breakfast with the three girls for a while. And both were determined to see it go smoothly. Neither Marybeth nor Joe had said anything to April, or Sheridan and Lucy about Marybeth’s encounter with Jeannie Keeley the afternoon before. But April seemed prophetic, and was acutely alert. Throughout breakfast, her eyes darted furtively from Marybeth to Joe, as if trying to pick up a signal or read a glance. Just as Maxine always seemed to know when Joe was going to go out of town, April seemed to sense instinctively that something was afoot. Sheridan and Lucy, rubbing sleep from their eyes, were oblivious to the morning drama.

After they’d gathered their coats and backpacks, Joe ushered all three girls outside to meet the bus. As the bus doors opened, April turned and threw her arms around Joe’s neck and kissed him goodbye. Joe couldn’t remember such an open display of affection from April before. When he returned to the house, it was obvious that Marybeth had seen them from the front window, and she was wiping away tears again.