Dragon's Teeth Page 26

  We fed it wearing welding-masks.

  We believe very strongly in force-feeding; our experience has been that if you force-feed a bird for two to three days, it gives up trying to die of starvation and begins eating on its own. Once again, mind you, this is not always an easy proposition; we’re usually dealing with fully adult birds who want nothing whatsoever to do with us, and have the equipment to enforce their preferences. We very seldom get a bird that is so injured that it gives us no resistance. Great Horned Owls can exert pressure of 400 ft/lbs per talon, which can easily penetrate a Kevlar-lined welding glove, as I know personally and painfully.

  That is yet another aspect of rehabbing that most people don’t think about—injury. Yours, not the bird’s. We’ve been “footed” (stabbed with talons), bitten, pooped on (okay, so that’s not an injury, but it’s not pleasant), gouged, and beak-slashed. And we have to stand there and continue doing whatever it was that earned us those injuries, because it certainly isn’t the bird’s fault that he doesn’t recognize the fact that you’re trying to help him.

  We also have to know when we’re out of our depth, or when the injury is so bad that the bird isn’t releasable, and do the kind and responsible thing. Unless a bird is so endangered that it can go into a captive breeding project, or is the rare, calm, quiet case like Cinnamon who will be a perfect education bird, there is no point in keeping one that can’t fly or hunt again. You learn how to let go and move on very quickly, and just put your energy into the next one.

  On the other hand, we have personal experience that raptors are a great deal tougher than it might appear. We’ve successfully released one-eyed hawks, who learn to compensate for their lack of binocular vision very well. Birds with one “bad” leg learn to strike only with the good one. One-eyed owls are routine for us now; owls mostly hunt by sound anyway and don’t actually need both eyes. But the most amazing is that another rehabber in our area has routinely gotten successful releases with owls that are minus a wingtip; evidently owls are such strong fliers that they don’t need their entire wingspan to prosper, and that is quite amazing and heartening.

  We’ve learned other things, too; one of the oddest is that owls by-and-large don’t show gradual recovery from head injuries. They will go on, day after day, with nothing changing—then, suddenly, one morning you have an owl fighting to get out of the box you’ve put him in to keep him quiet and contained! We’ve learned that once birds learn to hunt, they prefer fresh-caught dinner to the frozen stuff we offer; we haven’t had a single freeloader keep coming back long after he should be independent. We’ve learned that “our” birds learn quickly not to generalize about humans feeding them—once they are free-flying (but still supplementing their hunting with handouts) they don’t bother begging for food from anyone but those who give them the proper “come’n’get it” signal, and even then they are unlikely to get close to anyone they don’t actually recognize.

  We already knew that eyases in the “downy” stage, when their juvenile plumage hasn’t come in and they look like little white puffballs, will imprint very easily, so we quickly turn potentially dangerous babies (like Great Horned Owls) over to rehabbers who have “foster moms”—non-releasable birds of the right species who will at least provide the right role model for the youngsters. Tempting as the little things are, so fuzzy and big-eyed, none of us wants an imprinted Great Horned coming back in four or five years when sexual maturity hits, looking for love in all the wrong places! Remember those talons?

  For us, though, all the work is worth the moment of release, when we take the bird that couldn’t fly, or the now-grown-up and self-sufficient baby, and turn him loose. For some, we just open the cage door and step back; for others, there’s a slow process called “hacking out,” where the adolescent comes back for food until he’s hunting completely on his own. In either case, we’ve performed a little surgery on the fragile ecosystem, and it’s a good feeling to see the patient thriving.

  Those who have caught the raptor bug seem like family; we associate with both rehabber and falconers. If you are interested in falconry—and bear in mind, it is an extremely labor-intensive hobby—contact your local Fish and Wildlife Department for a list of local falconers, and see if you can find one willing to take you as an apprentice. If you want to get into rehab, contact Fish and Wildlife for other rehabbers who are generally quite happy to help you get started.

  Here are some basic facts about birds of prey. Faloners call the young in the nest an eyas; rehabbers and falconers call the very small ones, covered only in fluff, “downies.” In the downy stage, they are very susceptible to imprinting; if we have to see babies we would rather they were at least in the second stage, when the body feathers start to come in. That is the only time that the feathers are not molted; the down feathers are actually attached to the juvenile feathers, and have to be picked off, either by the parent or the youngster. Body feathers come in first, and when they are about half-grown, the adults can stop brooding the babies, for they can retain their body heat on their own, and more importantly, the juvenile feathers have a limited ability to shed water, which the down will not do. If a rainstorm starts, for instance, the downies will be wet through quickly before a parent can return to the nest to cover them, they’ll be hypothermic in seconds and might die; babies in juvenile plumage are safe until a parent gets back to cover them.

  If eyases don’t fight in the nest over food this means both that their environmeent provides a wealth of prey and that their parents are excellent hunters. If they are hungry, the youngest of the eyases often dies or is pushed out of the nest to die.

  Redtails can have up to four offspring; two is usual. Although it is rare, they have been known to double-clutch if a summer is exceptionally long and warm. They may also double-clutch if the first batch is infertile.

  Redtails in captivity can live up to twenty-five years; half that is usual in the wild. They can breed at four years old, though they have been known to breed as young as two. In their first year they do not have red tails and their body plumage is more mottled than in older birds; this is called “juvenile plumage” and is a signal to older birds that these youngsters are no threat to them. Kestrels do not have juvenile plumage, nor do most owls, and eagles hold their juvenile plumage for four years. Kestrels for live about five years in the wild, up to fifteen in captivity; eagles live fifty years in captivity and up to twenty-five in the wild.

  Should you find an injured bird of prey, you need three things for a rescue: a heavy blanket or jacket, cohesive bandage (the kind of athletic wrap that sticks to itself), and a heavy, dark-colored sock. Throw the blanket over the victim, locate and free the head and pull the sock over it. Locate the feet, and wrap the feet together with the bandage; keep hold of the feet, remove the blanket, get the wings folded in the “resting” position and wrap the body in cohesive bandage to hold the wings in place. Make a ring of a towel in the bottom of a cardboard box just big enough to hold the bird, and put the bird in the box as if it was sitting in a nest. Take the sock off and quickly close up the box and get the victim to a rehabber, a local game warden or Fish and Wildlife official, or a vet that treats injured wildlife. Diurnal raptors are very dependent on their sight; take it away and they “shut down”—which is the reason behind the traditional falconhood. By putting the sock over the head, you take away the chief source of stress—the sight of enormous two-legged predators bearing down on it.

  Andre Norton, who (as by now you must be aware) I have admired for ages, was doing a “Friends of the Witch World” anthology, and asked me if I would mind doing a story for her.

  Would I mind? I flashed back to when I was thirteen or fourteen years old, and I read Witch World and fell completely and totally into this wonderful new cosmos. I had already been a fan of Andre’s since I was nine or ten and my father (who was a science fiction reader) loaned me Beast Master because it had a horse in it and I was horse-mad. But this was something different, science fiction that didn’
t involve thud and blunder and iron-thewed barbarians. I was in love.

  Oh—back in “the old days” it was all called “science fiction.” There was no category for “fantasy,” and as for “hard s/f,” “sword and sorcery,” “urban fantasy,” “high fantasy,” “cyberpunk,” “horror,” “space-opera”—none of those categories existed. You’d find Clark Ashton Smith right next to E. E. “Doc” Smith, and Andre Norton and Fritz Leiber wrote gothic horror, high fantasy, and science fiction all without anyone wondering what to call it. Readers of imaginative literature read everything, and neither readers nor writers were compelled by marketing considerations to read or write in only a single category.

  At any rate, many years later, my idol Andre Norton asked me for a story set in one of my favorite science-fiction worlds. Somehow I managed to tell Andre that I would be very happy to write a story. This is it. In fact, this is the longer version; she asked me to cut some, not because she didn’t like it the way it was, but because she was only allowed stories of 5,000 words or less; here it is as I originally wrote it.

  Werehunter

  Mercedes Lackey

  It had been raining all day, a cold, dismal rain that penetrated through clothing and chilled the heart to numbness. Glenda trudged through it, sneakers soaked; beneath her cheap plastic raincoat her jeans were soggy to the knees. It was several hours past sunset now, and still raining, and the city streets were deserted by all but the most hardy, the most desperate, and the faded few with nothing to lose.

  Glenda was numbered among those last. This morning she’d spent her last change getting a bus to the welfare office, only to be told that she hadn’t been a resident long enough to qualify for aid. That wasn’t true—but she couldn’t have known that. The supercilious clerk had taken in her age and inexperience at a glance, and assumed “student.” If he had begun processing her, he’d have been late for lunch. He guessed she wouldn’t know enough to contradict him, and he’d been right. And years of her aunt’s browbeating (“Isn’t one ‘no’ good enough for you?”) had drummed into her the lesson that there were no second chances. He’d gone off to his lunch date; she’d trudged back home in the rain. This afternoon she’d eaten the last packet of cheese and crackers and had made “soup” from the stolen packages of fast-food ketchup—there was nothing left in her larder that even resembled food. Hunger had been with her for so long now that the ache in her stomach had become as much a part of her as her hands and feet. There were three days left in the month; three days of shelter, then she’d be kicked out of her shoddy efficiency and into the street.

  When her Social Security orphan’s benefits had run out when she’d turned eighteen, her aunt had “suggested” she find a job and support herself—elsewhere. The suggestion had come in the form of finding her belongings in boxes on the front porch with a letter to that effect on top of them.

  So she’d tried, moving across town to this place, near the university; a marginal neighborhood surrounded by bad blocks on three sides. But there were no jobs if you had no experience—and how did you get experience without a job? The only experience she’d ever had was at shoveling snow, raking leaves, mowing and gardening which was the only ways she could earn money for college, since her aunt had never let her apply for a job that would have been beyond walking distance of her house. Besides that, there were at least forty university students competing with her for every job that opened up anywhere around here. Her meager savings (meant, at one time, to pay for college tuition) would be soon gone.

  She rubbed the ring on her left hand, a gesture she was completely unaware of. That ring was all she had of the mother her aunt would never discuss—the woman her brother had married over her own strong disapproval. It was silver, and heavy; made in the shape of a crouching cat with tiny glints of topaz for eyes. Much as she treasured it, she would gladly have sold it—but she couldn’t get it off her finger, she’d worn it for so long.

  She splashed through the puddles, peering listlessly out from under the hood of her raincoat. Her lank, mouse-brown hair straggled into her eyes as she squinted against the glare of headlights on rain-glazed pavement. Despair had driven her into the street; despair kept her here. It was easier to keep the tears and hysterics at bay out here, where the cold numbed mind as well as body, and the rain washed all her thoughts until they were thin and lifeless. She could see no way out of this trap—except maybe by killing herself.

  But her body had other ideas. It wanted to survive, even if Glenda wasn’t sure she did.

  A chill of fear trickled down her backbone like a drop of icy rain, driving all thoughts of suicide from her, as behind her she recognized the sounds of footsteps.

  She didn’t have to turn around to know she was being followed, and by more than one. On a night like tonight, there was no one on the street but the fools and the hunters. She knew which she was.

  It wasn’t much of an alley—a crack between buildings, scarcely wide enough for her to pass. They might not know it was there—even if they did, they couldn’t know what lay at the end of it. She did. She dodged inside, feeling her way along the narrow defile, until one of the two buildings gave way to a seven-foot privacy fence.

  She came to the apparent deadend, building on the right, a high board fence on the left, building in front. She listened, stretching her ears for sounds behind her, taut with fear. Nothing; they had either passed this place by, or hadn’t reached it yet.

  Quickly, before they could find the entrance, she ran her hand along the boards of the fence, counting them from the dead-end. Four, five—when she touched the sixth one, she gave it a shove sideways, getting a handful of splinters for her pains. But the board moved, pivoting on the one nail that held it, and she squeezed through the gap into the yard beyond, pulling the board back in place behind her.

  Just in time; echoing off the stone and brick of the alley were harsh young male voices. She leaned against the fence and shook from head to toe, clenching her teeth to keep them from chattering, as they searched the alley, found nothing, and finally (after hours, it seemed) went away.

  “Well, you’ve got yourself in a fine mess,” she said dully. “Now what? You don’t dare leave, not yet—they might have left someone in the street, watching. Idiot! Home may not be much, but it’s dry, and there’s a bed. Fool, fool, fool! So now you get to spend the rest of the night in the back yard of a spookhouse. You’d just better hope the spook isn’t home.”

  She peered through the dark at the shapeless bulk of the tristory townhouse, relic of a previous century, hoping not to see any signs of life. The place had an uncanny reputation; even the gangs left it alone. People had vanished here—some of them important people, with good reasons to want to disappear, some who had been uninvited visitors. But the police had been over the house and grounds more than once, and never found anything. No bodies were buried in the back yard—the ground was as hard as cement under the inch-deep layer of soft sand that covered it. There was nothing at all in the yard but the sand and the rocks; the crazy woman that lived here told the police it was a “Zen garden.” But when Glenda had first peeked through the boards at the back yard, it didn’t look like any Zen garden she had ever read about. The sand wasn’t groomed into wave-patterns, and the rocks looked more like something out of a mini-Stonehenge than islands or mountain-peaks.

  There were four of those rocks—one like a garden bench, that stood before three that formed a primitive arch. Glenda felt her way towards them in the dark, trusting to the memory of how the place had looked by daylight to find them. She barked her shin painfully on the “benchrock,” and her legs gave out, so that she sprawled ungracefully over it. Tears of pain mingled with the rain, and she swore under her breath.

  She sat huddled on the top of it in the dark, trying to remember what time it was the last time she’d seen a clock. Dawn couldn’t be too far off. When dawn came, and there were more people in the street, she could probably get safely back to her apartment.

  Fo
r all the good it would do her.

  Her stomach cramped with hunger, and despair clamped down on her again. She shouldn’t have run—she was only delaying the inevitable. In two days she’d be out on the street, and this time with nowhere to hide, easy prey for them, or those like them.

  “So wouldn’t you like to escape altogether?”

  The soft voice out of the darkness nearly caused Glenda’s heart to stop. She jumped, and clenched the side of the bench-rock as the voice laughed. Oddly enough, the laughter seemed to make her fright wash out of her. There was nothing malicious about it—it was kind-sounding, gentle. Not crazy.

  “Oh, I like to make people think I’m crazy; they leave me alone that way.” The speaker was a dim shape against the lighter background of the fence.

  “Who—”

  “I am the keeper of this house—and this place; not the first, certainly not the last. So there is nothing in this city—in this world—to hold you here anymore?”

  “How—did you know that?” Glenda tried to see the speaker in the dim light reflected off the clouds, to see if it really was the woman that lived in the house, but there were no details to be seen, just a human-shaped outline. Her eyes blurred. Reaction to her narrow escape, the cold, hunger; all three were conspiring to make her light-headed.

  “The only ones who come to me are those who have no will to live here, yet who still have the will to live. Tell me, if another world opened before you, would you walk into it, not knowing what it held?”

  This whole conversation was so surreal, Glenda began to think she was hallucinating the whole thing. Well, if it was a hallucination, why not go along with it?