5 Frightful Peregrinates

She dallied another two weeks. The window of the fall migration is open for only a few months. Once closed, the messages from body and environment shut off, and it is too late to go. For Frightful that would be disaster. There would not be enough food for her to survive in the frigid northern winter. IN WHICH Frightful Peregrinates When a light snow covered the Schoharie River Valley, Frightful's bird sense urged her one last time to leave or die. She took a reading on the sun's rays, listened to her internal compass, and started south. She covered only ten miles before she turned back. She was hungry. She would find Mole. When she was over the pine woods where she had been held captive, she flew faster. Mole's farm was ahead. Speeding swiftly, she overshot the

farm. It had changed. The weedy fields where the game lived had been leveled and their black soil turned over in neat rows. The dense bushes along the fences, where many birds lived, had been clipped. She circled the culvert. It, too, was changed. The bushes that covered its entrance were gone. The culvert was a round, bare hole. "Creee, creee, creee," she called. Mole did not come out. Frightful circled the farm again but did not find the yellow hound. She flew to the silo. The air was bumpy where warm currents met cold. She rode the waves to the ledge of the silo and stepped under the jutting roof. The veins of her flight feathers were split and dry. She oiled them, then snapped them back in line by running her beak down the shafts from base to tip. She let go with a flick that triggered the veins to fall neatly into place. This done, she was sleek and ready to hunt. Frightful surveyed the landscape. Even the woods were different. The leaves had fallen, and the red- tailed hawk nest was empty. The parents and young had migrated to warmer lands.

Weak from hunger, she left the silo and flew back over the culvert. She waited on for Mole. The wind tossed her. She matched each burst with a twist to stay in place, but Mole did not come out. Behind her, purple-red and blue-gray clouds forecast rain and wind. It was urgent that she find food. Swooping along fencerows to scare up game, she searched intently. Nothing stirred. Twilight sent her back to the silo ledge, her hunger raging. Hours later she was awakened by thunder shaking the old silo. The dark night was lit by flashes of lightning. With each flash she saw dancing trees and wild water pouring across the barnyard. It gushed out of Mole's culvert. The flashes became almost continuous, then stopped. The rain pummeled, swished, pattered, and was over. She went back to sleep. At sunrise the sky was white-yellow and pale blue, the colors of a rain-cleansed day. The woods and farm sparkled with freshness. Frightful flew over the culvert and waited on. Mole did not make an appearance.

She was growing weaker. Spotting a distant harvested cornfield, she flew to a tree at its edge. She waited for something to move. Finally she caught a mouse. The storm had driven the bigger game into their shelters and burrows. In the late afternoon Frightful flew back to the culvert. Out of the sky plunged a bald eagle. He aimed right at her. She back-flipped, and he missed. The eagle beat his wings and got above her for another strike. He dove. She rolled to her back, threw up her feet, and raked him with her sharp talons. He flew up to strike again. Frightful dropped to the ground and, as the eagle dove once more, ran into Mole's culvert. He lost sight of her. He climbed, circled the culvert once, then boarded an air current that carried him off toward the Hudson River. He would spend the winter fishing there. Safe inside the culvert, Frightful panted from fright, then quickly became calm. Bird emotions are intense but short. She glanced at her surroundings. The gushing storm water of last night had slowed to a trickle. She drank. Refreshed, she walked to the mouth of the culvert, saw no eagle, and sprang onto her wings. She climbed high and fast over the tilled field.

When she was high enough to feel safe, she leveled off. An undulating wind rocked her southward over a brushy meadow. She came down on a fence post and watched for food. She was growing feeble as hunger weakened her. Suddenly she was in deep trouble. The sun was setting. In mere minutes the light would be too low for her to find a roost. She flew up into the last light. It illuminated the bell tower of the abandoned church at Beaver Corners. She headed for it. Winging to its weathered and rotting peak, she landed gracefully. The churchyard was thick with weeds. A farm and a woods lay nearby. She had been here. She shifted her weight nervously as the condor face of the man who had taken her from Sam flashed into her visual memory. She felt fear, but it was too late in the day to move on. She forgot him. Snow patches lay under trees where the sun did not fall. A migrating Cooper's hawk dropped into the nearby woods for the night. Like Frightful he, too, was late.

The sun set. The sky turned a twilight purple. Frightful could see only light and dark shapes. She flew down to the sill of one of the four glassless windows in the church bell tower. Lifting her wings, she walked into a square, moldy room and jumped up onto a rusted bell lying on its side. Every window was black with night. She shook her feathers and, weak from hunger, fell into a restless sleep. Last night's thunderstorm had preceded a cold front. The temperature dropped below freezing, and the migration of the birds stopped. The robins and wood thrushes and other small birds that navigated by the stars at night fluttered down into the trees. They sought the warmth of the wind- breaking woods to wait for the cold front to pass. At dawn they tittered among the trees. They called to each other and ate insects numbed by the cold. It was also too cold for hunger-weakened Frightful to fly on her way. She must eat. She took off from the tower and flew out over a weedy I meadow. A rabbit jumped up and ran toward a thicket of spiny hawthorn trees. Hunger