Serena

THE next morning Rachel found a raccoon crouched in the stall's corner, the fishing line tugging one side of the creature's mouth. Its pink tongue was panting. The raccoon's head did not turn when she opened the stall door. Only the black-masked eyes shifted. It wasn't the eyes but the front paws that made her hesitate. They looked like hands shriveled and blackened by fire, but human hands nevertheless. A year ago her father would have done this, done what he'd done when a big cur had come into the yard and killed a rooster, done what he did when a colt was born lame. What you had to do on a farm.

Let him go and he'll be back, Rachel told herself, and you won't catch him again because a coon's too smart to be fooled twice. It'll look for the line and hook and stay clear of that one while it takes every other egg in the barn. I don't even have a choice. Rachel thought how that was pretty much true of everything now, that you got one choice at the begi

It ought not be like that, Rachel told herself, and she knew that for a few folks it wasn't. They could make a wrong choice and be on their way with no more bother than a cow swishing a fly with its tail. That wasn't right either. Her anger made it easier to go to the shed and get the axe.

When Rachel stepped into the stall, the raccoon didn't move. She remembered her father saying a bobcat's skull was so thin you could crush it with your hands. She wondered if a raccoon's skull was the same. She tried to decide if it was best done with the axe head or the blade. Rachel lifted the axe a few inches off the ground, thinking how if she didn't swing true with the sharp end she could slice the line.

She turned the handle so that the blunt end was what she'd strike with. She aimed and swung and heard a crack. The raccoon quivered a moment and grew still. Rachel kneeled and worried the fish hook free from the raccoon's mouth. She looked at the fur, knowing if the raccoon had come a few months later cold weather would have thickened the pelt enough to sell to Mr. Scott. She picked the raccoon up by the tail and took it out behind the cabin and flung it into the woods.

Eight

THE EAGLE ARRIVED IN DECEMBER. SERENA HAD notified the depot master it would be coming and must be brought immediately to camp, and so it was, the six-foot wooden-slat crate and its inhabitant placed on a flat car with two youths in attendance, the train making its slow ascent from Waynesville as if bringing a visiting dignitary.

With the eagle came two small leather bags. In one was a thick gauntlet of goat skin to cover the forearm from wrist to elbow, in the other the leather hood and jesses and swivels and the leash, that and a single piece of rag paper that may have been instructions or a bill or even a warning but written in a language the depot master had never seen before but suspected was Comanche. The conductor of the train that brought the bird to Waynesville disagreed, telling of the strange man who'd accompanied the bird from Charleston to Asheville. Hair black as a crow's feather and wearing a dress so bright blue it hurt your eyeballs to look at it long, the conductor told the men at the depot, and a pointy fur hat. Plus a sword on his belt nigh tall as he was that give a fellow pause about making sport of the dress he wore. No sirrie, the conductor declared, that wasn't one of our Indians.

The bird's arrival was an immediate source of rumor and speculation, especially among Snipes and his crew. The men had come out of the dining hall to watch the two boys lift their charge off the flatcar, the youths solemn and ceremonious as they carried the crate to the stable. Dunbar believed the creature would be used as a messenger in the ma

Serena had the youths place the eagle in the back stall where Campbell had built a block perch of wood and steel and sisal rope. Serena then dismissed the two boys, and they walked out of the stable side by side, each matching his stride to his fellow's. They marched back to the waiting train and climbed onto the flat car and sat with legs crossed and faces shorn of expression, much in the ma

Serena and Pemberton remained in the stable, observing the eagle from outside the stall door. The bird's head was covered with the leather hood, and its immense yellow talons gripped the block perch inside the crate, the six-foot wingspan pressed tight to the body. Motionless. But Pemberton sensed the eagle's power as he might an unsprung coil of wrought iron, especially in the talons, which stabbed deep into the perch block's hemp.

"Those talons look very powerful," Pemberton noted, "especially the longer one at the back of the foot."

"That's the hallux talon," Serena said. "It's strong enough to pierce a human skull, or, as more often occurs, the bones of a human forearm."

Serena did not raise her eyes from the eagle as she reached out and took Pemberton's hand, but even in the barn's dim light he could see the intensity of her gaze. Serena's thin eyebrows arched as if to allow her vision to take in as much of the eagle as possible.

"This is what we want," she said, her voice deepening, the emotion so often controlled fully unbridled now. "To be like this always. No past or future, pure enough to live totally in the present."

Serena's shoulders shuddered, as if to cast off an unwanted cloak. Her face reassumed its look of measured placidity, the intensity not drained from her body but spread to a wider surface. They did not speak again until the Arabian shifted in the front stall and stamped its foot.

"Remind me to tell Vaughn to move the Arabian into the stall next to this one," Serena said. "The bird needs to get used to the horse."

"When you train the eagle," Pemberton asked, "you starve her, then what?"

"She weakens enough to take food from my glove. But it's when she bows and bares her neck that matters."

"Why?" Pemberton asked, "because it shows the bird has surrendered?"

"No, that's where she's most vulnerable. It means she trusts me with her life."

"How long will that take?"

"Two, perhaps three days."

"When will you start?" Pemberton asked.

"This evening."

Serena slept all afternoon, and at di

For two nights and a day Serena did not leave the stall. It was late morning of the second day when she came to the office. Dark half-moons lined the underside of Serena's eyes, her hair matted and straw-strewn.

"Come and see," she told Pemberton, and they walked out to the stable, Serena's gray eyes set in a heavy-lidded wince against the unaccustomed light. A heavy snow had fallen the day before and Serena slipped, would have fallen if Pemberton had not grabbed her arm and righted her.