Erin Fisher - That Tiny Life

Axel legs it through the snow, following the cow trails through the open gate to just inside of the pasture. He’s barely on the far side of the pole and wire fence when he unwinds the white’s jesses.

“Why’re all the cows out?” Cody asks.

“Gate’s open.” That should be obvious. The cows on the highway are likely licking salt. “Hitching a ride,” she jokes. “Who knows?”

Axel pulls the bird in to his chest and murmurs to the top of its head. He raises his arm. “Stand back.”

The bird lifts. Kendra raises her fist to her mouth. Let it fly. Let it fly and, let it not fly — it’s not trained to come back. The bird flutters into the snow like a light-blind moth. She lowers her hand and leans against a paddock fence post. Behind her the boy lifts the corner of a tarp next to the slurry lagoon’s cement ramp. Axel picks the white off the pasture to go again. Knowing that Axel is about to fail makes it both sad and funny. How can it not be? A damp firework.

The white sat on the lower perches. He should have seen that. Other falcons fly from one perch to another in the flight pen. The white only hopped down. He took her on the fist and fed her, but as a breeding bird that wasn’t for sale, there was no reason to train her alongside the juvies to be sent to Doha and the East. With another bird, he would have noticed. With any other bird. The white struggles to walk in the snow. It beats its wings, but can’t clear its legs, and lurches sideways like it’s broken. He bends and lifts it.

“I told you.” Kendra zips her coat. Cloaked like the Argentinean nuns, head to foot, hair tucked away under her winter cap. The bird he flew at the convent — the reason he still keeps hawks around now — was speckle-breasted, brown, with yellow legs and beak — sun-yellow, the colour of a spring siesta. Above the wings, chestnut shoulders. A fondness for snakes. For landing next to the sisters with the snake. Well, that was him. So easily trained, that bird, all it needed was opportunity and out shone a spirit of alert, high excitement. Keen-pitched enjoyment. The bird shot from his fist and exploded pigeons to feathers. He flings the white up. It falls, wings spread, in the snow.

“Isn’t it enough?” Kendra nods toward the kid, who wipes his nose and tucks the tarp back under the dismantled slurry poles.

Enough? It’s too much. All his plans. The books of charted mating history, documentation of which falcons from which continent at what time, family oddities and traits he explored — white deck feathers, striated quills, ceres and nares without their usual waxy blue. He scoops the bird from the wet snow. Falcons have been flown for centuries. His Argentinean hawk would have been a bird for a poor man, but the lift it had. The chalky girl now on his fist — perfectly plumed, sleek and unruffled feathers. Black-eyed. White toes and pounces. A bird for a king. Has about the same use as a king. She hangs from her jesses and flashes him seven thousand white feathers. Bleached bitch. He hurls her skyward.

On the road, in the middle of the road, across the highway by the river, over the driveway, in the paddock and in front of the slurry lagoon, almost everywhere but in the pasture. Cows. His fault. He left the gate ajar after moving the tractor to the driveway, and opened the barn to get to the garage without remembering he’d left an escape route. He thumps a cow on the side. No response but the hollow sound of its lungs. Get off the damn highway. He clasps his hands, raises his arms, and chops down behind its shoulder. The cow swivels its ears. He leans on the cow and it leans back with all its brickish bovine heft. “Move!” It takes a step or two sideways when he pulls away, then drops a pile of crap that burns into the salty highway slush.

Cursing. At first he thinks it’s his own voice echoing off the wide valley walls, but there’s Axel in the dairy field — barely through the pasture and paddock fence — with a big, impressive bird on his fist. Kendra yells, Axel yells. Their boy mills, a bit back from the two of them, beside the slurry lagoon.

Maybe if he corrals the cows closer to the gate, the highway band will follow them in. He walks down the drive, his boots skidding on the sodden layer of melt and mud under last night’s now-wet snow. The bird is bigger than Axel’s standard breed. Makes sense now why Axel’s been so secretive, and why he was so angry at Melanie in the hatchling barn. Milo hasn’t seen a bird like it his whole life.

As he passes his house, Melanie runs onto the porch. The door flails on its hinge, slaps the wall and bounces back. She bends over the rail, sees him, straightens, and pushes clumps of snow off the banister. The sleeves of her sweater are visibly darker than the rest of the material — wet or filthy or wet and filthy. She’s in her pyjama bottoms and boots. He’d hoped to get the cows in before she woke.

He claps his hands and hollers. “Go cows.”

“They been milked?” Melanie asks.

“Not yet,” he says.

“You turn on the machine and they’ll wander back.”

Of course. Of course they will. He looks at his kid. Day two, he imagines telling her. Hasn’t had a drink for two days. He kicks snow over the puke and gasoline holes beside the tractor.

“When the power comes back on I’ll do it.” Melanie opens the door and reaches for her coat. She slips it on and laces the toggles through their loops and walks along the driveway toward the barn. As she goes she shoos a cow, a big tan, swollen at the belly, into the paddock and next to the lagoon. The cow’s probably in late gestation, though he’s not good at judging birth times.

Oh God, the still. “Wait.” He runs after Melanie. She can’t learn he made another batch. The heifer shies away, antsy — now they listen to him — and heads through the paddock to where Axel and Kendra argue at the pasture fence. Axel holds the bird on his fist and turns toward Milo and the paddock and driveway. Axel’s not in his everyday jumpsuit. Instead he wears grey sweatpants — the outline of his thigh and missing leg visible under the worn fabric — and a faded green canvas coat. He’s Austin’s age, and still all that muscle in a stump. Milo stops and rests a hand on the tractor seat. “Melanie.”

“What?” Melanie turns and faces him. All her hair is sheared now, short and pretty, and darker blonde without the length. Her glasses perch crooked on her nose — have they always been twisted? Did she sleep on them?

“What do you want?” She claps her palms, then raises them above her shoulders like she’s giving a blessing or a long-shot prayer. “What is it now?”

“I only,” he starts. “I brewed to pay Axel and Kendra.”

She bites her upper lip then says, “You don’t think they’d take milk?”

The boy, to his right, plays with his bangs, then his kilt, and tucks his fingers into his sleeves and rubs his elbows. The slurry stretches snow-covered and bright behind him. Ahead of Milo, on the other side of the open gate that separates pasture from paddock, Axel lifts the bird. “Go. Get.”

Kendra puts her hand to her head, either to help her gaze or out of exasperation. The bird falters, then rises, goes up maybe ten feet — Axel punches his palm — then the white bird snaps down, quickly, like all falcons do. For a moment Milo thinks it’s coming for him, but the bird smacks the pelvic bone of the tawny milker in the paddock, halfway between him and the boy at the slurry. That does it. The cow bolts. Away from Milo, from Melanie, away from Axel and Kendra. The boy cringes to almost a kneeling position as the cow stampedes his way then veers right, hoofs it onto the slurry ramp, and stops at the metal gate — the only rail around the lagoon still standing after yesterday’s “fixer.” The bird, with its body half-sunk in the snow, tries and fails to fold its wings. The boy backs slowly and trips onto the tarp-covered posts.