William H. Hallahan - (17 page)

The failure left her no choice. Desperation called for desperate
measures. Half leaping and half gliding, she made her way to a long
sandy stretch of the desert. The sand still held some of the day's
heat. And she knew she would find snakes there. At the perimeter she
stopped and took up her position. She didn't need to wait long; a
rattler slithered across the sand toward an ocotillo bush, hunting
rats. When he saw her he paused, his darting tongue testing for odors
and sounds. Tentatively he drew up into a partial coil and raised his
head. He made a few hesitant rattles. He had no interest in her; he
just wanted her to fly away. They were two fellow predators with a
whole desert to share. Hunger prodded him and he conceded the point.
He undulated around her. When he crested the rim, he paused once more
to look at her, then crawled away. She struck.

It was a sharp blow behind his eyes and it should have stunned
him. In fact, she'd killed many times with that same blow. The snake
was enraged and he drew up into a tight coil, his rattle sounding its
deadly song. He opened his mouth to show his fearsome fangs as his
head rose to strike. One bite had enough poison to kill her six times
over. But she was just beyond striking distance and he waited. She
ruffed her feathers and fluttered her wings but she couldn't draw
him. She had to move within his range. She stepped closer and shook
her wings, emitted a soft
cree cree
call. He hesitated still.
She grew impatient. She abandoned caution and stepped closer, her
breast well within his striking range. He struck. She leaped.

His nose struck her breast as she left the ground and slid down
her body, the fangs just barely missing. He fell flat on the ground
and she jumped on him with both talons. She struck him again on the
head and again. Then leaped away as his body began to coil around her
feet.

He was hurt and furious. This time he didn't wait for her to come
within range. He moved after her, coiling as he crawled, eager to hit
her anywhere. She hopped back several times to watch him pursue her.
He wasn't going to make the same error. He would strike higher to
catch her as she leaped in air.

She hopped back to more solid ground and waited. His pursuit was
eager. As soon as she stopped, he drew up in a coil and began to
elevate his head, his rattle calling to her in a lofty rage. She let
him get far too close again, and as soon as he raised his head he
struck. She felt his left upper fang hit her. It penetrated her
feathers and slid down her body like a needle trying to puncture her
skin. Her luck was enormous; the fang failed to catch her. When he
struck the ground again, she delivered a series of sharp blows. And
this time she hurt him. But her strength was ebbing. She had to
finish him now. The next time he would surely hit her. Quickly she
seized his neck in her beak and with beating wings raised him in air.
He was too heavy for her and he was coiling his body in midair to
wrap around her. She seized his body with a talon to hold him off a
moment longer, then just before he enwrapped her legs, she dropped
him. When he hit the ground, he hit flat, and the whack sounded all
over the dark desert. She dropped on his neck and landed on his body
with both talons. He was stunned and she showered blows on his head
again but she couldn't finish him off. He began to gather himself.
Quickly she seized his head and neck in her talons as she felt the
rest of his body entwine her legs. He had her now. His head reached
around a talon and the mouth opened to sink the fangs into her thigh.
With a surgeon's motion, she hooked her beak through the tough snake
skin into the spinal column and raked him open to the skull bone. His
head arched in pain. Her beak probed into the open wound to his brain
and raked again. He died writhing around her legs.

For a long time she was so spent she stood panting. She was on the
slim edge of exhaustion. Then her ears picked up a familiar sound;
the marauding coyotes were coming. In a moment she saw them on the
crest of a rise, silhouetted and still, hunting with their ears and
eyes.

She began to feed on the snake's corpse urgently. She raked his
back open and pulled long strips of meat away from his backbone and
swallowed. The coyotes of course saw her and bounded down the incline
toward her, fanning out in practiced fashion to encircle her.

For her now every morsel counted. Her desperate beak seemed to
unzip the snake, and she used both talons and her beak to tear the
meat out She tipped over and lay on her side, working as fast as she
could. The coyote in the lead was one of the pups, and he raced up to
her with his mouth open and leaped.

Her good wing was ready and it struck him a stunning blow on the
snout just in front of the eyes. He winced and fell back.
Reluctantly, she abandoned the snake and gave an enormous flap. One
of the adults, jumping in the air, closed his teeth on her left talon
and pulled her down. She struck his eye with her beak and beat her
wings on his head. He let go and she turned to face the rest of the
pack. They began lunging at her to avoid those punishing wings, and
with perfect timing she flapped and ran and rose in the air. They
were too intent on the snake to pursue her.

She landed some distance away from them and watched them eat her
kill. Then with some effort she tore open a cactus and gargled in
beads of water. When she'd had her fill, she flew up on a cactus and
slept.

It was a false dawn when she woke. Above her, up where the
sunlight was, she saw a soaring hawk, circling above her.

She shook her feathers, yearning to soar like that. She noted that
her hunger was much less. She shook out her wings. She was stronger
too. And her hurt wing felt better. The pain had diminished. She sat
while the sun rose, watching the soaring hawk above her, then with a
great flap she launched herself. The wing held her and she felt the
great freedom of flight. She was mobile again. She flew five miles
before the wing pain stopped her. That was as far as the wing would
carry her that day. But tomorrow would bring a longer flight, much
longer.

She would fly after Timothy. Was she already too late?
 
 

It was the mountains that stopped Timothy, the Appalachian chain
that ran up the east coast through Kentucky, West Virginia,
Pennsylvania and New York. Had he and the mastiff been fresh when he
encountered them it might have been a different situation. But he'd
been pressing for days; his feet had fairly flown across the flat
midland of America. Gradually, the rising terrain in Kentucky began
to slow him. There was no way around the mountains, and soon he was
leaning into his stride as he climbed the foothills of the
Alleghenies. And beyond them were the Blue Ridge Mountains.

His legs rebelled in West Virginia. His shins began to throb and
pull. He turned off the climbing mountain road he was on and into a
forest toward the sound of rushing water.

Timothy picked his way through a stand of pines and wild hemlock,
past a grove of wild apple trees, through a thicket of bare aspen,
clambered over several high boulders and found what he sought beside
a rock ledge--a swollen stream, spilling over its banks, roaring with
autumn rains. The water rushed downhill, bounding over boulders,
spinning in the eddies and sucking up gravel and dirt He removed his
shoes and trousers and lowered both legs into a deep slow pool of icy
water. His shins became numb almost immediately. Repentance clambered
up on the ledge and settled beside him. The dog began to lick his
right front paw.

Timothy looked up, and watched a sharp-shinned hawk coursing over
the mountains in long concentric circles, drifting eastward toward
the Blue Ridge Mountains, hunting.

He hadn't seen Satan's hawk since the desert. Repentance must have
done more damage than Timothy had realized. And he patted the dog.
The poor creature had waited eons to get his teeth into that hated
bird. And it must have been worth the wait.

Once over the mountains, Timothy would be in the gently undulating
land of glacial moraines in southern Pennsylvania that would take him
through Gettysburg and on to some of the country's richest farmland
around Lancaster. Then the walking would be much easier. But first he
had to deal with the mountains.

He took from his coat pocket two rolls of elastic fabric and with
them he tightly wrapped his benumbed shins. Then he put on his
trousers and shoes and stood up. His legs felt much better, and he
led Repentance back to the road and resumed the steep ascent.

An hour later they reached the crest. As far as the eye could see,
east and north were rows of mountains in winter grays and browns.
Their rounded peaks were touching a lowering sky that was fast
filling with snow. The mountains were difficult enough; a heavy
snowfall would make them impassable.

Repentance sat and licked his paw again, and Timothy squatted to
examine it. The pad was intact but it showed a faint flush in the
interstices. The dog was footsore. Timothy's shin splints were
shooting pains up and down his legs.

He stood and looked at the awesome array of challenging mountains.
They would be a long time struggling up and down them. Before they
went on, they would have to rest. He was going to have to concede
great hunks of real estate to the pursuing hawk. As he cast his eyes
about for a place to rest, flakes of snow began to fall.

So near. And yet so far. When he tried
to walk, Timothy was hobbling.

The storm was a monster. It already had covered half the continent
from the Rockies to western Pennsylvania with heavy snow. There were
fourteen inches on the ground in Chicago, and O'Hare was closed to
all air traffic. The storm reached far into Texas, then swung
eastward, then northeastward, and was threatening to bury the east
coast in more than two feet of snow. It was borne by high winds and
was pushed by a massive cold front that sent temperatures plunging
below zero everywhere. And flying along the edge of it toward New
York City was the black hawk.

She was carried at a dizzying speed by the upper winds. To the
east of her the weather was clear with the earth showing the browns
and duns of January. To the west of her the storm itself was a
towering gray wall that rolled toward the Atlantic like a tidal wave,
whiting out the earth as it moved. Pittsburgh had five inches on the
ground, while the greater part of the storm was still to come.

With gale warnings posted on the Chesapeake Bay, the fleets of
fishing boats were fighting the vicious chop of the water to get back
to their docks and piers where the fishermen would ride out the storm
around wood-burning stoves.

The hawk passed over Annapolis, just before the snow began there.
She looked down on the Naval Academy by the Severn River, circled
West Street and the state capitol building, then, satisfied, resumed
her flight northward to the home of Brendan Davitt. She was only a
few hours away now.
 
 

Father Joseph, the monk who had baptized Brendan Davitt in Ireland
twenty-four years before, was already in New York City. He lay under
two khaki army-surplus blankets on a cot in the men's dormitory of
the Christian Help Men's Relief Center in the Bowery. He was
listening to the winter wind seething at the sides of the building.
He sensed that he still had a fever.

Weeks before, he had left Father Ambrose in the California desert
because the poor man was unable to keep up. And now he himself had
been brought down with the flu. Five days he'd lain in this cot,
waiting for the fever to burn itself out. This morning he was still
feverish. But he could waste no more time: He had to get to Brendan
Davitt's home today.

Father Joseph had become an old man and he didn't have much sleep
in him. A few hours, perhaps three or four at most, were enough, and
now the need for haste diminished even that Yet here he lay, hearing
the wind, seeing a leaden snow sky through the window and eyeing an
icicle that hung from a roof gutter. It had grown in length; the
weather had turned still colder. He dreaded going out into that
winter day. But he had already slept far later than he had planned.

Down the corridor at the far end of the dormitory hung a pay
phone. It would have been very easy to call Brendan Davitt's home. It
would have been equally easy to take a taxicab to Brooklyn, even a
subway. But nearly sixty years ago, he'd lain prone on the ancient
stone floor before the altar in that monastery in County Clare and
had taken his vows to model his life on the simple life of Jesus, to
live the life of the celibate, to pray for sinners, to beg for his
food in the streets and to shun all modern conveniences unknown to
Christ, tools so often of the archfiend. He had made those vows on
pain of loss of heaven. And since that day he'd not once set foot on
any form of transportation, nothing on wheels, or sleds or four legs,
nothing airborne or submarine. Only ships--they were the only vessels
permitted.

How easily he'd made those vows sixty years ago--when his legs
were young and his body strong. He raised his head from his pillow
and gazed at the telephone. Because he clung to those vows another
soul was in danger. Brendan Davitt. If he didn't find Brendan
quickly, the young man was the one who would suffer, not Father
Joseph. Now he had to ask himself if clinging to his vows wasn't
really a form of personal vanity, a terrible sin.

He would not break his vows; he struggled to one elbow, then sat
up. He knelt on the cold floor by his cot to pray. He asked for
strength. He had to face that terrible winter day. And he asked God
to protect Brendan Davitt.

"God bless," Father Joseph murmured to the few men who
were awake and watching him at prayer. "God bless mankind."
He struggled to his feet and walked weakly past the recumbent forms
of homeless men.