“Dad,” she whispered with a defiance I had never heard in her voice, “where do we start?”
I opened the cupboard at the top of the stairs. Two eyes glimmered out, a round, feathered face looming in the darkness.
I simply placed the folded sheets inside and closed the cupboard. This wasn’t the first time that one of Jay’s birds had found its way into one of the cupboards and decided to take up residence there. In fact, I was so used to seeing one of his hawks or owls lurking in some crevice at Crofton that I barely registered any surprise. Ours, you see, was not just a family home; it was positively a zoo as well, and Jay was in love with birds.
“It’s your turn to take Jay out tonight,” said Pat, tramping up the stairs behind me.
As I followed Pat into our bedroom, I caught sight of another pair of eyes, these hidden behind Jay’s long blond mop, shining at me from the bottom of the stairs. It wasn’t yet dark, and our thirteen-year-old son was already waiting. He had become a keen falconer since starting high school, and he plagued us incessantly to take him and his falcon Buffy out on night drives so that he could practice hunting with her. Buffy only hunted at night, and without this practice Jay was apt to become disgruntled, mischievous, and more taciturn than ever. And Pat or I had to go with them. But I really didn’t want to go out tonight.
I snatched up a deck of cards.
“I’ll play you for it.”
When we were at loggerheads like this, sometimes there was nothing for it but to play a hand of cards. The one who pitched the high card would get to sleep in the warm comfort of our bed, while the loser would have to drive Jay and Buffy out into the bush to go hunting. Sensing no other way out, Pat nodded.
I cut the deck and cut it again. I passed it to Pat, who shuffled it in his big hands. He cut it, I recut it, he cut it again, then he fanned it out and offered it up.
“Just deal it,” I said. The tension was unbearable.
Pat picked a card from the top of the deck: the seven of hearts. My hand hovered over the deck. I cut it again and lifted the top card.
The three of spades.
“Sorry, darling,” Pat said.
Two hours later, I set out behind the wheel of our truck, swinging out of Crofton and up into the bush. The night was close around us, the stars hanging high above the mfuti and msasa. In the back of the truck, Jay stood upright, his falcon Buffy blinkered and leashed to his wrist. Eagerly, he urged me on.
I could never resent these midnight trips—Jay had never been a boy suited to school like his brother, and it was only out here in the bush that he had found real confidence—but I had been awake for eighteen hours already. At a high ridge Jay unleashed Buffy; she turned and dived in the headlights of the truck, her talons sinking into one of the tiny nightjars that made their home here.
Jay looked at me. “Let’s go higher.”
“Darling, aren’t we finished yet?”
Jay frowned. “I think we should go higher.”
This, I thought, must have been how Patrick’s father used to feel.
Though Pat refused to admit it, Jay had certainly inherited his demanding stubbornness from the Retzlaff side of the family. As a boy, Pat had built up a flock of more than one thousand chickens. He had known every last one of them by name, kept meticulous records, and even co-opted several of his father’s workers to oversee the chicken project while he was away at school. The young Patrick Retzlaff would run his father ragged, demanding feed and materials for the chickens at every available opportunity, and, over the years, cost the family a small fortune in the process.
Whenever Pat left for boarding school, the farm would breathe a sigh of relief not to be under his tyrannical chicken gaze for a few weeks. Yet, one day, they made a mistake that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. While Pat was away, they decided to slaughter a few chickens for the deep freeze, convinced that, upon his return, Pat would never know. The cook was dispatched with a large ax and selected a few of the plumpest specimens. Grisly business done, he returned with a brace of big birds for a banquet.
A few months later, Pat returned home for the school holidays and headed straight to the chicken house. In minutes, he had zoned in on the missing chickens and promptly thundered into the farmhouse to confront his father. The young Pat was so distraught that, at last, his father had to confess: son, he intoned with an air of genuine solemnity, they have been eaten.
It was the very last time that anybody touched any of Pat’s chickens.
Tonight, at the wheel of the car, I opened my eyes, realizing too late I had fallen asleep. The moon hung, beached in a reef of cloud, above the line of the bush, and I was thankful I had not driven us both off the road.
“Darling, are we finished yet?”
“Just once more,” Jay insisted, feeding a scrap of some suspicious meat to Buffy.
I could have sworn her eyes turned on me with a keen, knowing air.
“Once more,” I insisted. I knew it would mean at least three more flights.
It was hours later when I drove the truck back into Crofton, heavy bags under my eyes. I roused Jay, who had fallen asleep, careful to avoid Buffy, who pierced me with her stare.
We were tramping past the stables where Frisky slept when I saw Pat striding out of the darkness between the barns. The tomatoes were packed, the trucks loaded, and he looked exhausted.
“Just an hour until you have to deliver these tomatoes, darling,” he said.
I could have killed that man and his animal genes.
From Crofton’s window I watched Kate. She had spent the morning doting on Deja-vous. The foal’s leg was healing only slowly, for infection kept setting in, reopening the wound. Now, the wound was dressed and she was gamboling in the garden. Her scarred leg was stiff and she would always carry it heavily, but the sparkle in the young foal’s eyes told me she did not mind, and the sparkle in my daughter’s told me it had all been worth it.
As an exhausted Deja-vous settled in the garden to sleep, Kate sat in the shadow of the mango tree with her schoolwork spread around. Oliver, our gardener, kept calling to her from where he was working on the edges of the garden, and each time, Kate returned his call with a smile that, like Pat’s, took over her face.
When I looked up next, her schoolwork was abandoned, loose pages caught up by the wind and only rescued from disappearing into the bush by Oliver’s quickly flicking pitchfork. Now Kate was up in the leaves of the mango, hauling herself from branch to branch with the agility of any of the monkeys that made daring raids on Crofton to take the tree’s fruit.
I remembered standing in this same place only days after we came to Crofton, watching as Paul and Jay swung from the same branches. That day, Kate stood beneath, marveling at her brothers, forbidden herself from following. Now she could climb faster and higher than they ever would. That was the thing about Kate: she saw what braveries her brothers could accomplish, and she always went one better.
In the highest branches, she stopped dead. Then, from the corner of Crofton, came Jay and his friend Henry, the son of a neighboring farmer. Both of them were holding their pellet guns.
In a sudden scramble of limbs, Kate jumped down from the tree just as Jay and Henry were disappearing into the first fringe of the bush. Quickly, she made to follow.
From the kitchen window, I watched her go. Jay, I knew, was going to be furious. I had seen her do this before. Jay and his friend were going to take potshots at birds in the bush, but it distressed Kate so much that she simply had to do something about it. Rather than run and hide, she had taken to sabotaging their hunts by frightening off the birds they were stalking. She would clap her hands and sing loud songs—and it had been a long time since Jay had proudly brought back