Peregrine Spring by Nancy Cowan

Author:Nancy Cowan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2016-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

Airborne

The day of reckoning came. I was confident N-Z would come at the call, but I was less confident about how he would go about it. Would it be a direct, straight-arrow flight, or would he take himself up to a tree and then swoop down? Would he do a “fly by,” meaning would he make a pass and then buttonhook back from the opposite direction to come to my glove? I took him up to the small field above the house where I had been flying him on the creance. To N-Z it probably seemed like any other training day, but my heart was pounding as I knelt to set him on the perch in the middle of the field.

Deliberately I removed the leash and the swivel from his jesses, then rose and walked carefully away, afraid that one wrong move would set him in motion before I was ready. As I walked with my back to him, I slipped a quail leg out of my pocket and between the thumb and forefinger of my glove. I stopped, turned, and raised my gloved hand, but never had a chance to blow the whistle. N-Z was on the move straight to my glove. He came in like a bullet now that he wasn’t dragging the weight of the creance line. His second flight assured me he knew he was free. Once he finished the quail leg, I set him again on the perch and stepped back.

There was just a short pause before he launched himself into the air. He circled around me before landing high in the top of a spruce at the edge of the field. I slipped my glove off and pulled the lure loaded with quail meat from my pocket. Giving a whistle, I swung the lure once before tossing it to the ground between us. He was down in a flash. As he gorged on quail, I knelt beside him to slip my hand behind his legs to attach the snap of my hunting leash to each jess. We sat there for a while in the pleasant, sunny afternoon. Both of us were pleased with the outcome of the first day of free flight.

For most of that week, N-Z and I did flight training in the small field. I would perch him and step away. When I stopped and turned to face him, he would shift from foot to foot once or twice and then he was off. Every day the flights got better, longer, faster. But for a falcon, he was flying extremely low. By the second day he was nearly at treetop level—too low for a bird that normally does well over a thousand feet and higher in the sky with ease. By the fourth free flight he was weaving in and out of the treetops lining the field at roadside. I would lose sight of him for moments at a time, but his reappearance was something I could count upon.

If N-Z grew tired, he had a favorite limb in a spruce where he would alight to catch his breath.

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