Winterkill - C. J. Box [65]
“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