Raptor Read online

  “You ready?” Avery whispered happily. The tougher the going got, the younger he became.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  He went first, crawling into the opening that was about as high as a wolf or a large coyote. I followed. There was rock above us and to our right, on our left was a long way down. We crawled across like other predators with our noses to the ground, but unlike the others our senses had been dulled by centuries of abuse and neglect. If any prey had peed or been in heat here, the appeal of it was wasted on me. I didn’t have a predator’s keen vision either, able to spot a marmot on the ground five hundred feet down, or a fish leaping in the lake, or the bloodstains on the rock where Pedersen had landed. If I hadn’t been wearing my contact lenses I would have barely been able to see the soles of Avery’s hiking boots. I could see well enough, however, to note that my hands and knees were dangerously close to the edge, that there was nothing between me and the rocks but the aforementioned five hundred feet. Four-legged predators know fear, fear of us, fear of each other, but the precipitousness of that drop so close to their paws wouldn’t fill them with the same queasy terror that sickened me. What did they care? They are surefooted and their instincts for self-preservation impeccable, but a human’s instincts are always questionable. We’re too removed, maybe, from the basics. People are capable of extremely destructive acts, self or otherwise, and the bottom line is you never really know what you’ll do until you are faced with the chance to do it and even that depends on how much sugar you’ve eaten and where the moon is on a particular day. This was no time to be having an acrophobia attack, but that seemed to be what I was having. Acrophobia isn’t the fear of heights, it’s the fear of depths. There was nothing keeping me out of the abyss but myself; it didn’t make me feel any better.

  “Don’t look down,” Avery said.

  “Thanks,” I replied.

  I could always divert myself from phobias by fear of the real thing. We were approaching the end of the overhang where the cedars grew. Their shimmering green needles filled the opening, the rusty dead ones covered the ground. It had to be where the wolf-wiper had been concealed; it was the only place there was any cover and the needles and fallen branches beneath the tree provided it. Pedersen must have put his hand right into it and detonated the cyanide. “Careful, Avery,” I whispered.

  He turned and winked at me. “Piece of cake,” he said. He crawled into the branches. I followed, trying to put my hands and knees exactly where he had placed his. I pushed my way through the branches and saw Avery’s corduroy pants and hiking boots as he stood up, and then I stood, too. I brushed myself off and took a look around. The view was still enormous, the drop still precipitous, but the ledge, I was happy to notice, had widened by about fifteen feet. Avery walked around the cedars and away from the edge. I followed. He stopped suddenly and stared at the ground.

  He was looking at a bloody broken-necked pigeon lying flat on its back in the last convulsions of death. There was a string attached to its foot and it made a path through the bird shit and bones that littered the ledge. It led to a two-legged predator semicamouflaged by tree-bark pants, a jacket with deep pockets and a headdress attached to a metal frame that had cedar branches sticking out of it at peculiar angles. The stark reflecting glare of the face hidden behind the branches had been further concealed by camouflage netting pulled down like a thug’s stocking with holes cut through for the eyes, nose and mouth. The human predator wore an elbow-length gauntlet on one arm and on it was balanced a large, white falcon.

  21

  WE’D COME FACE to face with the falcon of legend and of kings and the man who managed to be two places at once. Despite his protective coloring, the man was approximately the same size and shape that I’d expected, about five foot six and built like a boy. He wore L. L. Bean hiking boots on his feet.

  “Cortland James,” I said.

  “What are you doing in that ridiculous getup?” asked Avery.

  “Hello, Avery,” replied Cortland.

  The gyr was very large, almost two feet tall. Pigeon blood stained her fiercely hooked beak and her piercing talons. Her breast and leg feathers were pure white and thick as warmup pants around her legs. You might have expected the object of so much male desire to be softer, but there wasn’t a wasted ounce of fluff on this bird, or the slightest inclination to compromise. She was streamlined, functional and efficient, the ultimate in performance and speed. Fierce and regally beautiful, she was captive but unbowed. Her head was held high, her bearing erect, her wings at her sides. Her eyes were huge, black and dense, so large that they made her rounded head seem small in comparison. Although momentarily still, she was not tranquil and appeared to be taking the measure of her situation. Cortland had already attached jesses to her feet and they bound her to his wrist. It was clear why someone would pay a fortune and travel a great distance to see her, but to capture or kill her, never. I wanted to stare into her black eyes long enough and hard enough to enter her pouring-away world of no attachment, but in her world a stare was preliminary to an attack. I’d fallen under the spell of her alien essence; it was broken by the sound of bickering men.

  “I thought you went back to Connecticut. What in God’s name are you doing here?” asked Avery.

  “Isn’t that rather obvious?” Cortland replied.

  The voices caused the bird to raise her wings and hiss an angry warning.

  “You’re the twisted, modern-day Audubon, aren’t you?” I said. “The man March told me about who takes rare and endangered birds from the wild and stuffs them for his collection. The gyr is another rare bird for your list—your death list.”

  “That’s despicable,” said Avery.

  “I have an extraordinary collection,” Cortland said. It wasn’t often, I supposed, that he had the opportunity to brag about his illegal hobby. “You would be quite impressed by it, Avery. I have a magnificent quetzal, the most elegant male in the bird kingdom, and now I am going to include this fierce female. Isn’t she splendid?” His voice, muffled somewhat by the camouflage, still managed to express his enthusiasm. His mouth, an opening cut through the camouflage netting, was an obscene hole, the mouth of a pervert sucking on a forbidden pleasure.

  “I’m impressed by birds in nature,” said Avery, “not in somebody’s den. What gives you the right to take a bird from the wild? After a hundred fifty million years of life on earth who are you to decide what lives and what dies? Your father is one of the world’s most respected conservationists, and here you are a common poacher. If he knew about this, it would break his heart.”

  “That’s probably why he does it, Avery. It’s a secret thrill, an arrested adolescent’s rebellion against an overpowering father,” I said.

  Cortland laughed a short and bitter laugh. “What do you know about it?” he asked me. “My father, the respected conservationist, had all the time in the world for conservation. I was supposed to grow up just like him, but how could I do that when I saw more of him in the newspapers than I did at home? As for your question, Avery, species are vanishing daily with or without my interference. At least when the birds are all gone I will own a valuable record of the magnificence that was. You might say it’s an investment, an investment in our desolate future. My father’s conservation efforts are a joke. He was going to cut me off unless I came home to run his stupid organization. So I’m doing it, and I’ve learned one thing for my trouble—that his efforts are futile, a finger in the dike against man’s hunger, stupidity and greed. We buy up our little bits of land to preserve habitat, islands of green surrounded by pollution and scum, and the world goes on losing rain-forest habitat and species daily. This,” he raised the arm that held the gyr, “is the only way left to preserve wildlife.”

  “Giving into despair is a self-indulgent cop-out,” Avery said. “As long as there is one person on the globe who cares and fights, there’s hope. Let the bird go.”

  “I’ve gone to an inordinate amount of trouble to get her. I’m not
going to give her up now.” Cortland’s eyes no doubt had a brilliant but deadly sparkle as they caressed the gyr.

  “The trouble includes setting the trap for Pedersen and trying to eliminate me by running the van off the road. Doesn’t it, Cortland?” I said.

  He didn’t answer, just watched the falcon.

  “You mean he attacked you and killed Pedersen to get this bird?” asked the incredulous Avery.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “To say he did it for his reputation and to keep his father from discovering what he was up to would be more like it. To him, it was a matter of self-preservation. Cortland made the mistake of negotiating with Pedersen for the gyr. He probably had a considerable reputation in the black-market bird world which led Pedersen to contact him. Maybe Cortland wasn’t confident of his abilities to trap the gyr, maybe he was afraid of being spotted by March or another birder at the nest, maybe once you start negotiating in the black market they won’t let you stop. In any case Cortland fell into the government’s sting operation. Pedersen, who wasn’t known for being subtle, taped their conversation; Cortland discovered that.”

  “Clever,” said Cortland. The gyr hissed and fixed him with a cold eye.

  “He probably tried to get or buy the tape back but Pedersen refused. Since Pedersen now had the means to ruin his reputation, his fortune and his collection, Cortland got ahold of a wolf-wiper, killed Pedersen and stole the tape. He was planning to use the birding expedition as a cover for his activities. When the gyr disappeared who would ever suspect a birder and conservationist was the cause of it? But the prince and his agent, Heinz, whom the government wanted badly to entrap, came along and forced his hand. It was what I’d suspected, but I hadn’t been able to prove it.”

  It was the last straw for Avery. “That is contemptible. Let the bird go.” As he stepped toward Cortland, his poncho caught a gust of wind and billowed around him, altering his shape and startling the gyr, who cakked shrilly, a harsh, loud and primeval sound.

  “Back off! You’re frightening her.”

  “Be careful, Avery,” I said.

  “Ke-a, ke-a,” the gyr screamed a warning.

  The man who lunged at Cortland wasn’t eighty-two years old. He was a young man armed only with a passionate commitment; it wasn’t enough. Cortland’s free hand came up out of the deep pocket holding a pistol, and, as Avery reached for the arm that balanced the gyr, the gun went off. The sound echoed horribly around the canyon. I screamed and my screams echoed, too.

  Enraged by the sound of the shot, the smoking gun, the white tremor of the too-close hand, the gyr leaned forward and with her sharp and fierce beak bit Cortland’s finger. “Damn,” he swore, shaking her off and dropping the gun, which clattered across the ledge. In the fractions of a second in which I had to act, I pounced on it and picked it up.

  Avery had taken the shot in the middle of his chest, and the force of it knocked him backward. A red spot appeared on the front of his poncho and the blood spilled over his fingers as he staggered across the ledge clutching at his chest. As he came to the edge, he was already beyond knowing where he was. The gyr screamed, “Ke-a, ke-a.”

  “Please, Avery,” I cried.

  “Ke-a, ke-a,” the cakking echoed. Avery’s glasses fell off and his ear pieces flapped while he struggled to stay erect. His eyes widened incredulously as he teetered for a moment on the edge of the cliff. I lunged for him and grabbed onto the tail of the poncho, but it slipped through my fingers as he fell. The white fabric billowed around him, his hat fell off and his hair spread out. He looked like an otherworldly snowy owl that had been attacked in midair and was falling backwards, but no falcon waited below to pluck him up. He was probably unconscious before he smashed and split open against the rocks. I hope so.

  “You killed Avery,” I said stupidly to Cortland, turning the weapon over in my hands.

  “He attacked me. The gun went off.”

  “Self-defense?” I replied. “You shoot an unarmed, eighty-two-year-old man, while in the act of committing a felony, and your argument is self-defense?”

  “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to kill him, but think of it this way, if Avery had had the chance to choose his own death it’s the death he would have chosen, isn’t it? Quick, practically painless, in the wilderness, fighting for something he loved and believed in at the peak of his powers. What lay ahead of him anyway but old age and decrepitude?”

  The gyr, at the apex of her own powers, flapped her powerful, aerodynamically perfect wings and tried to lift herself out of the human mess, but the jesses bound her to Cortland’s arm. The force of her struggle knocked her over and she fell backwards, hanging upside down from the jesses, bating with wild ferocity, as if she would harm or even kill herself rather than be taken by him.

  “Careful, careful. I want you to be absolutely perfect,” Cortland said. With his bloody free hand he reached to help her back up.

  “Let her go, Cortland,” I said.

  “I can’t. She’s too precious. I’ll never find another like her.”

  I stepped toward him, straightened my arm and lifted the gun. The trigger felt smooth beneath my finger. “Now.” Cortland unwrapped the jesses from his arm. He held the gyr’s legs carefully with one hand, lifted her to an erect position with the other and took the jesses off. And then, as slowly as was humanly possible, he let her go. She flapped her powerful falcon wings, wings that were better equipped for flight than anything else man or nature has ever created. She ke-a’d once to celebrate her freedom, and then with rapid wing beats she circled higher and higher and higher, pure white against the darkening sky. As I watched her become a streamlined silhouette, then a dark speck, I hoped that her brief contact with our species would teach her to avoid us forever. But she hung in the air, hovering above us, and then like a thunderbolt she shot down again, folding her wings up close to her body and plunging back to earth with devastating speed motivated by a prey visible only to her keen eyes, by some impulse to protect her nest or maybe just because she knew how. She swooped within inches of Cortland’s head, startling him so he tripped and fell. She swept by me so close I heard the wind rip through her feathers. She plummeted down, down toward the lake and then she opened her wings and lifted gracefully up again, inscribing vertical loops as she rose. Higher and higher she flew while Cortland and I watched in awestruck silence and then she was gone.

  I stepped to the edge of the ledge, picked up Avery’s glasses, put them in my pocket and took one dreadful look down at his bloody and lifeless body. To Cortland I said, “Halloween is over; you can part with the costume now.” If Avery hadn’t been lying dead on the rocks below us, I might have enjoyed this part, although Cortland dawdled and took his sweet time about taking off the cedar boughs and the camouflage netting, until his deliberation got on my nerves. “Now,” I said.

  I could practically see the clouds sliding down the peaks beyond the lake. A cold, wet drop smacked my lips and then a snowflake landed on the arm of my parka. The flakes were full and fat and meant business. The storm hadn’t waited long enough to prove the forecasters right—it had begun.

  It wouldn’t be much fun to climb out of here in a blizzard burdened by a foot-dragging felon. There was a cliff face to climb, a narrow path to follow. The visibility would get poor, the trail slippery. Cortland would be looking to make a break and add the only witness—me—to his death list. If he succeeded, it might be springtime before I was found by humans, if there was anything left to find. He’d dawdle—he’d already proven he could do that. It would get dark by four-thirty. He’d try to trip me or slip away in the darkness and falling snow. Why should I subject myself to the risk? Why not just kill him now? The gyrfalcon killed day after day after day. It was her nature to kill; she had to to eat, but she’d also kill in self-defense without a thought. Why have to kill him later in the heat of fear and passion, why not be rational, plan ahead and get it over with? Cortland had killed Avery; the time had come for him to pay his debt. The pistol
, which already had at least one notch in it, felt steady and firm in my hand. The target was only a few feet away. All I had to do was point and squeeze. It was probably even the natural thing to do. Self-defense, I could argue, and why not?

  Killing a man had to be like stepping off the dark edge and swinging far out over the abyss. Once you’d done it, what was there to bring you back? Cortland himself had killed twice now, once in premeditation, once in haste. If he’d put on any power with the knowledge, it didn’t show.

  I steadied my arm, squeezed hard on the trigger and sent a bullet off the cliff. Cortland jumped. I’d scared him, but I hadn’t killed him. It wasn’t what I’d been trained to do. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. Already the pace of the snowstorm had picked up so I could see the white drops separating Cortland and me. There was only one way off the ledge, the same way we had come in. I made Cortland empty his pockets and take everything out of his backpack. A Swiss army knife fell out. I took it. Some chocolates and fruit. I took those, too. I told him to disassemble the headdress and put that and the mask in his backpack—evidence for Wayne Betts—and made him precede me under the overhang. I pushed his backpack along between us. I wondered how long it would take before the snow claimed Avery. It was a death he might have chosen, outdoors with winter and nightfall coming on, but he would have chosen not to die at all. He was dead; there wasn’t anything good to say about it. He had lived; there was plenty to say about that.

  As I crawled along behind the soles of Cortland’s Bean boots with the gun in my hand, my hands and knees were just as close to the edge as they had been coming in, the rocks were still five hundred feet below, but the fear of falling or diving was gone; I’d found out what I couldn’t do.

  Cortland stood up clumsily when he got out of the overhang, bumping into Avery’s pack and knocking it over the edge. I watched it tumble down and smash into the rocks. It sickened me to see all of Avery’s careful preparations for food, shelter and warmth get trashed.