Smiler 03 The Painted Tent by Victor Canning

Author:Victor Canning [Canning, Victor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

During that week the education of Fria progressed. She caught her first field-mouse from a hovering pitch like a kestrel, her talons clamping on it through the grasses and killing it immediately. She took a starling which was running up and down the roof parapet of the old house prospecting for a nesting-site by launching herself downwards from the tower top. The starling saw her coming, panicked and, instead of diving for cover, flew upwards. Fria flicked her wings rapidly three or four times, increasing the power of her shallow stoop and then, with her momentum, threw up easily, rising almost vertically under the bird, and half-rolled and grabbed it from underneath with one foot. As she flew back to the tower she took its neck between her mandibles and broke it, the tooth in her upper mandible which fitted into a notch in the lower, biting through to the vertebrae and snapping the bird’s spinal cord. She was learning fast and every day discovering her latent powers. But she was still far from the perfection and smooth co-ordination of muscles, strength and deliberate intent which could take an adult peregrine at fifty or sixty miles an hour in level pursuit and at over a hundred miles an hour coming down in a vertical stoop from a height.

Fria was still hungry. Exercise and her freedom had given her an appetite bigger than she had known in captivity. Apart from the small prey, insects, mice, and the occasional small bird she might get, she needed at least the equivalent of one wood pigeon a day and, as she came back into condition, sometimes two a day. At the moment she was getting nothing like that. She was always famished and always looking for the chance to satisfy her hunger.

At first light now she was astir and spent a long time hovering over the jungled purlieus of gardens and wild shrubberies taking what she could find either from the air or by stalking on foot. As the light strengthened she would rise and fly to the woods that crested the hill and hang above them at fifty or a hundred feet watching the ground below. The birds knew her now and when she appeared over the trees they went silent and into cover.

That week she caught two more wood pigeons. The first she bungled but luck stayed with her. As she hung over the wood long after the alarm calls had died away a pigeon came flying back from the water-trough for cattle at the far end of the pasture. As it began to rise towards the first trees at the wood’s edge Fria went down to cut it off. She tipped over into a slightly steeper dive, gave a flick or two of her sharp-pointed wings and angled swiftly towards the pigeon, the white flash of its wing bars showing every single covert feather in her vision, the wet gleam of its beak where it had been drinking a collection of silver reflections.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.