She carries the bucket down the stairs and across the drive to the training yard. No need for keys — Axel left the door open behind him. “Hey,” she calls. “Where you at?” He must have gone straight for the white. It would be so much easier if she hadn’t said anything. If she hadn’t taken the white out and not known anything. She trudges past the breeding pens and toward the back of the yard. The kid, behind her, uses her as a breakwater from the melting snow and cows and Axel. She sets down the bucket. “What gives?” Between flight pens, Axel paces and tugs on his glove. Snow grinds unevenly under his steps, his limp accentuated as his right foot doesn’t clear the snow. He flexes the glove and opens the pen. He lifts out the white.
Axel with a bird, it’s like seeing him with his leg on. Like it’s another appendage. Like the bird’s sitting in for something. Hop it on and it not only co-operates, it belongs. And Christ, the size of the white. Three years since it hatched, reached adult plumage, and it’s now ready to mate. This circle, this rearing, is why she’s here. Maybe she didn’t give the bird enough of a chance. Axel strides through the snow to the pasture and the bird tips sideways; its right wing beats the air while the left stays folded. He twists the jesses around his fist to help it keep hold. Enough of a chance? She’s full of wistful crap. Axel exits the netting, the lure — duck wing attached to a leather ball attached to a rope — over his shoulder.
“Starting off big,” she calls. “Maybe keep her in the yard?”
He raises the back of his hand to her as he strides away.
“I’m serious.” Fuck. “Wait.” She pushes by Cody and follows Axel over the drive and paddock, skirting the slurry lagoon. Milo’s property’s a mess. The tractor sits in his driveway between puddles of frozen sick and holes in the ice where, by the looks of it, gas spilled out of the syphon. Have to admire him, though — a night like that and there he is, out on the road herding heads, his shoulder pushed against a heifer.
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.”