1 A Storm Breaks

JEAN CRAIGHEAD GEORGE Newbery Medal-winning author of Julie of the Wolves On the Far Side of the Mountain The sequel to My Side of the Mountain

Chapter 1 IN WHICH A Storm Breaks This June morning is hot and humid with a haze so dense I can barely see the huge hemlock tree in which I live. I like the haze. It has erased all but the great tree trunks, making my mountaintop home as simple as it was when I first came here more than two years ago. I lean back in the lounging chair I constructed from bent saplings held together with rope made from the inner bark of the basswood tree, and enjoy the primitive forest. A wind rises as the sun warms the earth. The haze moves off, and I see my pond, my millhouse, and the root cellar. The first year I lived here I had only a tree, a bed, and a fireplace. But one idea led to another, and the next thing I knew, I had built myself a habitat. Things just kept evolving. Take this lounging chair, for instance. One day I replaced the old stump I sat on with a three-legged

stool, and then I replaced the three-legged stool with this comfortable chair. The people changed, too. At first I was alone. Then my family arrived and—except for my lively sister, Alice—departed. I don't know where Alice is this morning. She was going to go strawberry picking, but the haze is too dense for that. Maybe she's sitting on the porch of her tree house talking to herself just as I am. A haze mutes not only the birds and beasts, but people, too. As a hot dry wind clears the air, I can see Frightful, my peregrine falcon, sitting in front of the six-foot-in-diameter hemlock tree that I hollowed out for a home. Unlike the chairs and people, Frightful has not changed. She still holds her body straight up and down and her head high in the manner of the peregrine falcon. Her tawny breast is decorated with black marks; her back is gray blue; her head black. When she flies, she is still a crossbow in the sky, and she still "waits on" above my head until I kick up a pheasant or a rabbit. Then she stoops, speeding toward her prey at two hundred miles an hour, the fastest animal on earth. She almost never misses.

"Hello, Frightful," I say. "Creee, creee, creee, car-reet," she answers. That is her name for me, "Creee, creee, creee, car-reet." All peregrine falcons call the high-pitched creees, but when Frightful sees me in the morning or when I return from the forest, even when she is flying high above my head, she adds "car-reet." "Hello, Sam," she is saying. She is perched on a T-block that I covered with deer-hide to protect her feet. She lifts a broad foot and scratches her head with a curved claw on the end of a long, narrow toe. "Creee, creee, creee, car-reet." I call her name in her own language; I whistle three notes—low, high, low. She responds by lifting the feathers on her body, then shaking them. This is called rousing, which is feather talk meaning "I like you." I can't speak in feathers so I answer by imitating her love notes. I do this by pulling air through my two front teeth to make a soft, cozy sound. Sometimes I have nightmares that she has left me. I awake in a sweat and try to reason with myself. Frightful will not leave me, I say. If she were

going to do that, she would have departed last spring when I was flying her free. A wild tercel, the male peregrine falcon, passed overhead. The last of the vanishing eastern peregrine falcons breed in Greenland and Canada, and a few winter as far south as the Catskills. This one was on his way to his home in the north. Frightful playfully joined him. Together they performed the peregrine courtship dance, swooping low, zooming high, then spiralling earthward. I was scared. I thought Frightful was going to leave me. I whistled. She instantly pulled deeply on her wings and sped back. Within a few feet of my outstretched hand, she braked and alighted on my glove as softly as the fluff from a dandelion seed. "Creee, creee, creee, car-reet," she said. "Hello, Frightful," I answered happily. Now, I whistle her name again. She turns her head and looks at me. Her curved, flesh-ripping beak looks sweet and demure when you see her head on. Her overhanging brow shades large black eyes that are outlined in white feathers. She is a gorgeous creature.

At peace with me and herself, she bobs her head as she follows the flight of a bird. I cannot see it, but I know it's a bird because Frightful's feathers tell me so. She has flattened most of them to her body while lifting those between her shoulders. "Bird," that means. "Human" is feathers flattened, eyes wide, neck pulled in, wings drooped to fly. I get to my feet. I have daydreamed enough. While the last of the haze burns off, I weed the meadow garden and split kindling before returning to my tree. A hot sun now filters down through the lacy needles of the hemlocks in my grove. I look for Alice, wondering what she's up to. That's how one thinks of Alice—what is she up to? She's probably gone downmountain to the farm to see that pig she talks to. Sticks snap in the distance. Someone is coming. Frightful has clamped her feathers to her body to say that whoever it is is not a friend. Her feathers read "danger." The phoebe clicks out his alarm cry and I tense. I have learned to heed these warning signals. The birds and animals see, hear, smell, and feel approaching danger long before I do. I