Ширли Мерфи - The Flight Of The Fox

They searched the ground for bodies but found none. So at last they went back into the hangar. The flicker rested a bit longer, ate once more, then prepared to go in search of his family. While he rested, he told them how the starlings had discovered his nest when the children were only half-grown and defenseless, and how the dark birds had tried to push the babies out so they would fall to the ground and be killed. The starlings had attacked both himself and his wife as well. The two had fought back, of course, but it had not been easy to fight two dozen starlings, gather food, and guard their helpless young. So the old flicker had gone in search of a safer place. "But then I fell in the hole. It was a stupid thing to do, and I made everything worse, and now they may all be dead. And if they did get away, there are few enough places to go with the town overrun and no other trees but the pine grove. The starlings are apt to go back there at any time. I'm sure there isn't a decent bird left in the town, with starlings roosting there."

"Would it take your children long to learn to fly?" Crispin asked. The lemming was quite in awe of the flicker.

"Oh, no. Once they're ready, their wings strong enough, it's just a matter of that first surge off the nest. They won't fall, you see, once their wings can hold them; they're out there on the wind suddenly, excited and scared, and they just start flapping for all they're worth. It's harder to get back, to make their wings pull them up. But they do it." The flicker sat still, seeming to remember other families, other times. And the three friends sat before him in silence, each thinking his own thoughts.

CHAPTER 14

they watched the flicker depart, rising into the wind in an undulating flight as if he rode ocean waves. A lilting but purposeful flight. When they returned to the magazines, the dusty pages of Pilot and Flying seemed tedious indeed, for the flicker had awakened in each of them a strange longing and restlessness.

"Well," Rory said. "Well, we don't have to go poking in them magazines."

"We do if you want her to have her own name," Charlie said absently, gazing off in the direction the flicker had taken. He hoped he found his family out there.

"Old magazines make me sneeze," Crispin said and promptly went to sleep under the desk. Charlie and Rory looked at each other, shook their heads, and settled down half-heartedly to turn pages.

There were plenty of old planes, biplanes, tri-wings, homemade jobs. Tiger Moths and Sopwith Pups and old Fairchilds. But nothing at all that looked like Rory's plane, with her sharp-pointed nose and rakish air. And the old magazines surely did make them sneeze. They had almost given up when, several hours later, Rory turned a page, stared, and let out a whoop of surprise that made Charlie jump. "Fox!" he shouted. "Fox! She's a Fox! Look there! There she is!"

Crispin ran onto the page still half-asleep. "Where, Rory? Where?" And no one could see anything with the lemming milling around. Charlie lifted him off, and there was her picture all right, her pointed nose, her four wings and twin cockpits. " The Fairey Fox Bomber," Charlie read. "Designed by Charles Fairey in 1924. Wow, a bomber!"

"Fairy Fox?" said Crispin.

"That's the name of the man who designed her, sonny. Fairey's his name. We don't have to call her the Fairey Fox. Her name'll be Fox. Painted in big red letters on her fuselage."

"She looks like a fox, Rory, with her pointed nose. I saw a fox once outside our snow tunnel, but Mama pulled me back in right away."

"She sure does look like a fox." Rory grinned, aimed a kick at the untidy stack of magazines, and did a double flip in the air. He felt great. It was just the right name for her. A sleek, quick fox of a plane. "Come on, you two, let's get back to our own hangar. We have work to do. And bring those flight and weather manuals there on the shelf, Charlie Gribble. I'll have to have a little ground school if I'm going to fly the Fox high and handsome."

The minute he was back in his own hangar, Rory found a pencil and began to letter fox carefully on the fuselage; and by the time Charlie returned the next morning, the letters fox shone bright red on each side.

Rory had painted all her repairs, too. You couldn't tell she'd ever been hurt. She looked sharp indeed. The sun glanced off her cracked windshield and her clean, new paint. And now that she had a name, she seemed really to come alive, seemed almost as eager as Rory and Crispin to be off and flying. She and Rory and Crispin were three companions now, poised on the brink of an adventure no creatures had ever attempted. An adventure Charlie could never share. He would have given anything at that moment to be as small as the two animals, to be able to crowd into the Fox's cockpit beside Rory and take off to see the world.

"The next thing, sonny, is the gas tank," Rory said, "and that flappin' condenser. Gas tank should've been the first thing to go in, not the last!" the kangaroo rat grumbled. "A million cans out there! Lard cans, cat food cans—and every flappin' one of 'em either too big or too small or the wrong shape! It's been twice as much work, not having the tank. If we don't find a gas tank pretty soon, we might as well forget about seeing the flappin' world!"

Charlie couldn't blame Rory; he couldn't fly the Fox without gas. The old tank, which Rory had torn out, would hardly have been enough to get her across Skrimville.

"And what about the condenser, Sonny? Did you write to those people?"

"I wrote. But I haven't even had answers to my first letters. Maybe no one is going to answer, maybe . . ."

But Rory had picked up a scrap of paper bag and was standing at the work table scribbling figures. "The Fox ought to weigh in at about eight pounds, including fuel. Then, plus baggage and Crispin and me, say nine pounds. We're going to need a scale, sonny."

"I'll bring our bathroom scale."

"Nine pounds," the kangaroo rat repeated. "And she ought to fly about fifty miles an hour, give or take accounting for the wind. At that weight, I'd say she'd get about a mile and a half per ounce. Let's see, that would be—thirty-two ounces to a quart— that's forty-eight miles to a quart of gas. She won't carry a half-gallon like I thought at first. Let's see, that's, um, four quarts to the gallon . . ." Rory scribbled on. "That would be one-hundred-ninety-two miles to the gallon, sonny! Pretty good for an old gas burner! We have to find a long, thin quart can that'll fit in the fuselage. A quart'll give us just about an hour's flying time between refills, and almost fifty miles distance. Going to have to stay close to farm country, though. Best place to get gas and oil will be from farm tanks. Of course we could siphon the gas out of cars and leave some money on the hood, but that doesn't give us the oil we need to mix in. And anyway I don't like coming down in towns. I'd rather be out in the country, no matter how you look at it.

Rory had been watching the dump carefully for a gas tank, going out every day to scrounge. He had set aside several cans that could be rebuilt if nothing else turned up. "I hate like heck to rebuild one. My seams won't be as good as machine made, and it's a flappin' lot of unnecessary work!"

It was nearly a week later, and still no gas tank, when the spark plugs and points arrived. Skrimville was involved in another wild scheme to get rid of the starlings that involved glue on all the utility wires, and Charlie was glad to get out of town before someone handed him a gluepot and pointed him toward a ladder. He scorched out to the dump on his bike, batted away at some starlings that were flying around his head, and found Rory scrounging in some new trash for useful parts. He handed Rory the package and the letter that had come with it. There were four new spark plugs and the two new sets of points. The package had come from Mary Starr Colver. Charlie guessed the second letter he had written to her, about the condenser, had crossed her letter, because she didn't seem to have gotten it. But she had answered his question anyway, almost as if she had known they might need a condenser. Her letter said,