Flyaway by Suzie Gilbert

Author:Suzie Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061972850
Publisher: HarperCollins

Peregrine Falcon

Meanwhile the patient continued to improve. No longer content to hop from log to log on the bathroom floor, he’d jump up onto the towel-covered toilet and eye the window ledge with more than casual interest. Convinced that he was destined to slip off the ledge, fall behind the toilet, and break his neck, I banished him from the bathroom floor and instead put him in an extra-large dog crate with several perches. This seemed to ratchet his energy level up several notches. Normally when I picked him up and placed him on the scale for his daily weight check he stood casually, wearing a slightly bemused expression. Now, as soon as I lifted him out of the crate he screamed at me in his goshawk-crossed-with-seagull voice and bicycled his legs so frantically I had to put him down on the floor. He’d glare at me, rattle his feathers defiantly, then trot over to the scale and hop up by himself.

The day he started eating from a dish instead of my tweezers I committed an act of hubris that even now makes me shudder. As I ambled through the house I actually thought to myself: you’re a pretty decent rehabber. This is akin to spitting in the face of the rehabber gods, and it didn’t take long for them to retaliate.

I had put the crate on my bed so that Pancho could get some afternoon sun. I walked into the bedroom and the crate door was ajar. I must not have locked the gate securely. Pancho was gone.

I turned cold. I imagined the peregrine knifing through the house, grabbing a parrot in each foot; I envisioned Mario begging for his life by singing “Rainy Night in Georgia” with extra pathos. I shot into the living room, completely distraught, and shouted to the kids.

“Oh, my God, Mac and Skye! Pancho’s gone!”

“No, he’s not,” said Skye, without even looking up from her drawing. “He’s sitting up on the bedroom door. I thought you were letting him have some exercise.”

As I raced from the room it occurred to me that my seven-year-old daughter hadn’t thought twice about finding a fairly large carnivorous bird loose in the house. My Parent-o-Meter took another nosedive.

I found Pancho perched contentedly on the top of the door. “¿Cómo está mi pájaro guapo?” I asked. He looked down at me and cocked his head: anything good on the menu?

The day the shed was delivered John and I watched as a large flatbed truck rumbled slowly up our driveway, did a three-point turn, and backed up toward the house. Two men eased the shed off the truck and onto the top of a small embankment, the very beginning of our lawn. Still to go was fifty feet across the lawn, over a small retaining wall onto a lower level, then 120 feet along a long, sloping, rocky path to the back of John’s office.

I ran into the house to call Lew. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but a big job I’ve been waiting two months for just came through.

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