The Captors by John Farris

Author:John Farris [Farris, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Suspense & Thrillers
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2012-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

The peregrine waiting on in the high gray sky was only a dot, like a pencil mark on smooth slate, and she kept losing the bird altogether. She shaded her eyes against the mild afternoon glare, maintaining her own watch with a dry mouth, a tense avid expectancy.

The General took a live, unfettered pigeon from his falconer's bag and held it in his two hands for a few moments. Then, with a cry, he threw it into the air. The pigeon wobbled momentarily on its wings, circled higher. Almost instantly the peregrine broke her own circle, rolled over, swooped, fell. By the time she hit the frantically evasive pigeon with a closed fist she had traveled close to a thousand feet in eight seconds.

Stunned, the pigeon fell like a loose bundle of feathers tied together with a string. The peregrine, now in an upward trajectory with opened wings, gradually slowed. Then she spiraled downward to her prey. She picked up the pigeon with one foot and severed its neck vertebra with her beak, killing it. The peregrine relaxed her feathers and looked around, eyed them sharply as if expecting approval, then proceeded to plume and eat. The General took the falcon on his fist to finish its meal. "Beautiful, isn't she, Carol?"

Her hands fell to her sides, fingers uncurling. Her palms were wet. She approached the General slowly. The falcon paid little attention.

The falcon was a golden bird, in her prime, lean from the period of training but well-adjusted to captivity. The General called her Rosalind.

"Next week," he said, "with Riggs's help, I'll teach her to hawk game from a point." Rosalind lifted a foot momentarily and the bells there tinkled. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? Time to fly again. Just don't fly too far; I'd hate to lose you."

"How long will it take?" she asked the General as they walked back through the field.

He stroked Rosalind's feathers affectionately. "A day or two. She learns very fast. Hold her for me, Carol?" She raised her right arm and Rosalind, who had talons that could pierce bone, balanced herself delicately on the offered wrist, stared at her new companion with a full yellow eye, then folded her wings.

The General lit a cigarette. "The only thing to worry about is that she might ride the wind too far for me to recover her. No matter how well-trained she is I can't be sure what'll happen when she's flying free." He smiled. "Even if I lose her one way or another it's been worth it. This is the most effective and humane killing instrument a hunter has at his disposal. If she misses her target she misses clean. When she hits, which is most of the time, she kills."

The General owned thirty acres, not including the pond. Except for Sam and Felice he had no near neighbors. There were woods on three sides of his property, which was the nucleus of what had been, in the nineteenth century, a farm of over six hundred acres.

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