Pregnant and Incognito Page 5

  He already knew that Dana glanced upward and to the left when telling the truth, as when she’d said that her mother had died within a year of her father. But she had flicked her eyelids briefly down and to the right when she’d told him that she’d worked in advertising. This set off an alarm in his head.

  Why would Dana lie about her profession? What difference would it make if he were to know what she really did for a living in Chicago? What was going on here?

  Dana seemed completely unaware that she had betrayed herself. She had changed the subject and was talking about the hawks.

  It took him a moment to regain his equilibrium, and by the time he had, she was asking where he got his birds.

  “My friend Steve Karos—the one whose house I bought here—owned most of them. Aliah is mine, though. I bought her from a Saudi businessman.”

  “I thought maybe you had to catch the birds in the wild.”

  “You can. I’ve been wanting to capture some eyases—”

  “Some what?”

  “Eyases. Birds taken from the nest and raised by hand. I’d like to train a bird of my own.”

  “Where would you get one?”

  “Around here. They nest in the rocks. If I know there’s a nest, I’ll go looking.”

  “Is that fair? To take them?”

  “I care for my hawks very well.”

  She helped herself to another doughnut. “I see that.” She paused, took a bite. “I’ve been thinking about what you said this morning.”

  “About?”

  “Captivity.”

  “Ah. You agree with me.”

  “Mostly.”

  “That must mean that you consider yourself a captive—along with everyone else, of course.”

  She looked at him, an unfathomable look. “I think about your birds, how they must want to fly free.”

  “They do fly free. They aren’t tied to me by a chain or a line when they’re up there in the air.”

  “What makes them come back?”

  “Depends on the bird. With an eyas, you’ve hand raised her, and a falconer likes to think that she has true affection for him. That’s why she comes back. On the other hand, a hawk trapped in adulthood is trained to come back for food. Some of them don’t, you know. I’ve lost a bird now and then.”

  “Then there is a possibility that they could be free if they chose.”

  “You could look at it that way.”

  “That makes me feel better. Perhaps they are more able to choose than we are.”

  Privately he wondered what she meant by that. He was framing his next remark in his mind when she stood up, went and got the teapot, brought it to the table. From the back, he almost couldn’t tell she was pregnant.

  She noticed that he hadn’t drunk much of his tea.

  “Doesn’t it taste all right?” she asked anxiously.

  “It tastes fine.” He took another doughnut so that he wouldn’t have to make an excuse to leave.

  “Do you mind talking about the birds?” she asked curiously.

  “Why would you think that?” he said.

  “Every time I think we’re on the subject, somehow we get off of it.” She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin, and he noted that it was made of cloth. He knew hardly anyone who used cloth napkins anymore.

  “Do you want to know more?” He doubted that she would answer in the affirmative.

  She tilted her head to one side, considering. “I do. Yes,” she said, surprising him.

  “And why is that?”

  She drew a deep breath, measured his mood with a glance.

  “I think I want to fly a hawk. Will you let me?”

  Conn sat back in his chair, more surprised than he let on. No one had ever put this question to him before, and he had no stock answer. He considered his hawks a private indulgence, a place he could go, a thing he could do alone. And now this woman, this Dana Cantrell, wanted to intrude upon his privacy. He had been right; she would shatter his solitude, infringe upon his life.

  Yet, when he spoke, he heard himself saying, “Of course you can fly one. Tomorrow you’ll come with me to Shale Flats.”

  Chapter Three

  Dana, bundled up in a warm, fleecy sweatshirt against a light morning frost, was waiting for Conn on the front porch when his hawk wagon came bumping through the pale-gray half-light of dawn the next morning. Her stomach kept performing nervous little flips that had nothing to do with morning sickness. Ever since he’d agreed to take her along, she’d been having serious second thoughts about going.

  Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to ask Conn to take her to Shale Flats, and if she’d thought about it at all, she probably could have made a good case against asking in the first place. In retrospect, it seemed like such a cheeky thing to do. These second thoughts had cost her a good night’s sleep the night before, and she’d spent the night tossing and turning.

  Conn got out of the truck, leaving the engine running and the driver’s side door open. He hailed her with a grin, which was a more good-natured greeting than she had expected. She stumbled on the broken step on her way down to meet him, and somehow he managed to catch her. She felt a rush of confusion, of excitement at the strength of him as his arms balanced her.

  “I’ll fix that step for you,” he said close to her right ear, and she pulled away before she could feel any more. That was the thing about this man that was so confounding; he made her feel. She had managed to hold off feeling anything about anything but the baby since she left Chicago, and now she was beset with inappropriate thoughts and emotions whenever this man was around.

  As she collected herself, she saw him studying the faulty board, measuring it with his eyes. She wanted to say, I can fix that step myself, but she knew she couldn’t. She didn’t have the tools, she didn’t have the skill, and the best she could do would be to hire someone to see to it.

  “I’ll get someone out here. Esther at the library has this nephew—”

  Conn interrupted. “I’ll do it today.” There seemed to be no point in further discussion, so she climbed into the front seat of the truck while Conn came around and got in his side. Something about being so near to him made her feel as if she couldn’t breathe, or maybe it was the baby pushing up against her lungs. She shifted in the seat, trying to get more comfortable, and when that didn’t work, she rolled down the window and inhaled deeply of the breeze winding in from the hills. Conn kept his eyes on the road, not talking, and she didn’t want to fill the air of this quiet morning with meaningless chatter, so she kept her silence. By the time they had started up the hills, their gentle slopes a patchwork of autumn colors, she was feeling almost normal.

  Dana had never been to Shale Flats before, and she leaned forward in her seat, eagerly taking in the scenery. The pickup jounced past an old mine, the Piccolo, its abandoned buildings ghostly in the purple haze. By the time the glow of the rising sun had become visible behind the mesa, they had reached a wide flat meadow bordered by a tall stand of cottonwoods, their leaves shivering in a chill breeze.

  While Dana watched, shifting from one foot to the other and wrapping her arms around herself to keep warm, Conn unloaded perches for the hawks, bowed metal stands that he set on the ground. He fastened a leather gauntlet on his wrist and reached into the back of the hawk wagon where Dana could see the vague shapes of the birds arrayed along its length. They were quiet, but when he reached in, one of them jumped onto his wrist. He quickly slipped a hood over the hawk’s head before bringing her out into the light. She was slate-blue above, her breast streaked and barred, her face marked like a mustache. The peregrine, Dana thought.

  “The hood makes her easier to handle,” Conn said, but Dana had already figured that.

  “That’s Aliah, right?” she said, watching closely as he threaded a leather thong on the gauntlet through a metal ring joining the two leather straps attached to the peregrine’s ankles.

  He shot her a sharp look. “Very good that you remembered,” he said.
He finished tying a knot. “You may have noticed that my hawks all wear a pair of these leather straps. They’re called jesses.” He carried Aliah to a scale. “I weigh them before they fly. She has to make flying weight before I let her go.”

  “Flying weight?”

  “If she’s even an ounce or two overweight, I can’t count on her being hungry enough to come back when she flies. This morning I know she’ll want food, so it’s okay.” The weighing done, he nudged Aliah’s legs with his gauntleted wrist so that she either had to step forward or fall backward. She stepped forward onto the gauntlet.

  Conn strode out to the middle of the flat, tall and silhouetted against the golden sky. The sunrise was behind him, and in that moment, with the light behind, he seemed to hold the sun within him. He dazzled her so that Dana lifted her hand and shaded her eyes against his brilliance. Legs splayed wide for balance, he untied the jesses and lifted the bird up high. Dana might have mistaken the gesture as a kind of salute to the morning until Aliah unexpectedly raised up and unglamourously expelled a dropping.

  “They all do that,” he said over his shoulder, explaining. “It’s called muting, and it lowers their flying weight even more.”

  Illusion had become reality once again. Dana moved closer, watching intently as Conn flung the bird into the air. Aliah began to flap her wings, caught the air, glided. Dana felt her heart rise in her chest, almost as if borne along with the falcon. It must be lovely to fly like that, she thought, to leave the heaviness of the earth below, to breathe in great drafts of clean, fresh air, to ride on the crest of an air current toward the warmth of the sun.

  She felt herself grinning at the sight of the bird rising free; she couldn’t help it. Conn was busy untangling a line with two gray-feathered wings at one end.

  “How long will she fly like that?” Dana asked.

  “In good weather like this, she’ll fly for hours if I let her.” He glanced up at the falcon. “She’s feeling her strength, almost ready to get serious,” he said as Aliah cruised and dipped above them. It was hard to tell, but Dana thought that the falcon had reached an altitude of forty-five feet or so, never going far, always circling and returning to where they stood below watching.

  Conn went to the middle of the clearing and let out a long whistle. “I’ll show her the lure now,” he said. Then he began to swing the line with the wings around and around over his head, his movements swift and fluid.

  Aliah banked sharply, homed in on the lure, picked up speed, zoomed toward it with wings tucked back in a vee. Suddenly she angled her feet forward, talons outstretched, and Conn yanked the lure away only a moment before she would have captured it. The falcon wheeled around and soared so high that for one heart-stopping moment, Dana feared that she was lost.

  But no. Aliah circled above them, spiraling down and down. In a few moments Conn whirled the lure again, and again Aliah seemed poised to attack, foiled only when Conn jerked the lure away at the last second.

  “It seems cruel,” Dana said. “Not letting her have it, I mean.”

  “This is play,” he said. “It’s what Aliah was born to do. Don’t worry, she’ll have her reward.”

  Again and again he swung the lure, and time after time Aliah bore down upon it, the morning sunlight glinting on her pale feathers. She was a picture of beauty and grace, and Dana was thoroughly captivated.

  “Want to try it?” Conn said when Dana thought he had forgotten she was there.

  She cranked up her nerve and stepped forward to accept the lure from him. He showed her how to hold it, then stepped back. She wished Conn would stay closer in case she did something wrong, but then she decided that it was good that he trusted her to do this on her own.

  She began to swing the lure, low at first, then higher as her confidence grew. The string hummed, the lure caught the rays of the rising sun, and Aliah began her dive. The lure skimmed through the air, and the falcon came straight toward Dana.

  “What she’s doing now is called stooping,” Conn said from behind her. “She’ll drop low, then come up to take the lure.”

  It didn’t happen that way. When Aliah was almost upon the lure, she suddenly lofted upward and soon was only a speck in the sky. For one heartstopping moment, Dana thought the falcon might keep flying and never come back. But Aliah caught an air current and glided back around, hardly moving her wings at all.

  “Try again,” said Conn. “You want her to increase her pitch—the height at which she circles—so that she can stoop effectively.”

  Dana did as he said. Aliah flew lazily above, seemingly uninterested.

  “She sees the lure,” Conn said close behind her. “Now swing it higher.”

  Dana swung the lure up and up. Aliah executed a delicate turn and started down, and Dana almost held her breath as the falcon aimed her body earthward in a dive. She seemed to intensify her speed as she grew closer, her feet tucked back under her tail, her eyes intent upon the winged lure.

  She swooped down so close to the ground that Dana thought she might land, but then the falcon lifted higher, and Dana jerked the lure away from her outstretched talons. The falcon soared up over their heads, the rush of wind from her wings ruffling Dana’s hair. Dana bubbled with delighted laughter, and behind her she heard Conn laughing, too.

  “Can I do it again?” she asked, almost too eager, and Conn nodded yes. She threw the lure another time and then another, totally aware of every muscle in her body moving in harmony as she worked to bring the falcon in. It was as if she experienced all her outer senses in a new way, and that made her aware of her inner ones as she never had been before. She was part of the moment, totally engaged in what she was doing.

  She was so much a part of the moment, so enthralled by the interaction with Aliah, that it came as a surprise when, close behind her, Conn spoke. “Now it’s time for Aliah’s breakfast,” he said. He removed something from a cooler on the ground, and to Dana’s questioning look he replied, “Skinned quail.” She handed the line to him and stepped back.

  Holding the quail in his fist, he threw the lure, and this time he didn’t yank it away when Aliah stooped. She struck the lure with the long talons on her back toes and dropped with it to the ground.

  Conn reeled in the lure and showed the falcon the quail in his hand. Aliah lost interest in the lure and jumped to his wrist, and Conn quickly fastened her jesses to the gauntlet before letting the falcon have the quail. She pulled it apart with her beak, and he let her eat.

  “Falcons are raptors, and so are hawks, owls, eagles, ospreys and vultures. That means they specialize in hunting and killing prey,” Conn said.

  “I guess that means they’re at the top of the food chain,” Dana observed.

  He nodded. “Few animals threaten them in the wild. Humans are the biggest danger. Some species have nearly been wiped out because of pesticides. Encroaching civilization eliminates their habitats. A lot of them have run-ins with cars, and sometimes people shoot them.”

  “That’s sad,” Dana said, unhappy to think of these beautiful birds in danger.

  In only a minute or so, the quail was gone, and then, while Dana watched, Conn flew the other birds. She sat on the ground, protected from the dew by a ground cloth that Conn spread for her. He was solicitous, and that surprised her. Pleased her, actually. She was so accustomed to going it alone that these little kindnesses, like spreading the ground cloth and making sure she was comfortable before he took the other hawks out of the wagon, touched her immensely.

  A fresh breeze riffled Conn’s hair where it lay upon his neck. Dana longed to touch the strip of tanned skin beneath, to run her fingers across the hard edge of each vertebra. The thought made her cheeks warm, warmer than the first flush of golden sunshine would render them, and so she clenched her fists at her sides and made herself concentrate on the birds. She tried to remember their names—Demelza, the kestrel, she knew, of course. Roderic was the red-tail hawk, and Fairleigh, large and all black except for white streaking on her belly
, the gyrfalcon. The merlin, she recalled, dove-sized and looking like a miniature Aliah, was Nickel, and then there were Rosalie, a prairie falcon, and Muscatel.

  Muscatel was the last one to fly. A young red-tail hawk, she soared so high that Dana had to strain her eyes to see her.

  “Don’t worry,” Conn said when he saw Dana shading her eyes with her hand and scanning the sky for some sight of Muscatel. “She’s hungry. She’ll be back.”

  And he was right. Muscatel glided in as soon as Conn began to swing the lure. Dana watched mesmerized, feeling giddy and slightly drunk with the heady fragrance of pine and sunshine on warm stone, a scent she knew that she would forever associate with Conn.

  After he had flown all the hawks, Conn started to pack up. He noticed Dana as she struggled to get up from her place on the ground, and he came over to give her a hand up. “I should have brought a folding chair where you could sit,” he said.

  “I could have sat in the cab of the truck,” she pointed out. “But in there I couldn’t have had such a good view of what you were doing.” He didn’t comment. He only went to retrieve the birds from their perches.

  When Conn had returned the birds to the hawk wagon, Dana trudged back and forth helping him load the equipment—perches, leashes, hoods—back into the truck.

  “You don’t have to,” he said, but she demurred.

  “I’m stronger than you think. Stronger than I look,” she told him.

  He thought about that and decided it was probably true. The windows in her little cabin, for instance—she had washed them by herself. He didn’t like to think of her doing hard work, wondered if pregnant women were supposed to do all the bending and stretching that she’d obviously been doing.

  She was full of questions as they bounced their way down the rutty road down the hill. How long had birds been trained for hunting? How were they trained? Had he ever trained one?

  “Falconry probably began in Asia before 2000 B.C. It flourished in Europe in the Middle Ages, and a man’s social status determined what kind of hawk he was allowed to own.”