'Did she get it?'
'We told her that she could have as much as she wanted, but she'd have to do her own collecting. What the hell, you've seen our gorilla, he needs all the fun that comes his way. She didn't call back. What did she think, that we kept it around in bottles?'
Here on our left was the drinking fountain where we'd stopped before leaving. Georgie hadn't been able to reach, or so she'd said. So I'd lifted her to it, and she'd managed to spray both Loretta and me.
Frank said, 'All I'm wondering is, what did the bird do to offend you so much?'
'Not me,' I said. 'It's my nephew's. It got a taste for blood.'
'A canary?'
'It must have seen too many Sylvester cartoons. Now there's no stopping it. This is the best way.'
The final bell was ringing as we reached the line of pens which held the birds of prey.
Frank called a keeper out from around the back, and he produced the keys to open up the walk-through feeding alley by the side of the hawks. There were three of them, sleek, well-oiled machines with dark little hearts, and at the noise we made they turned and stared at us from their perches with eyes that were like small, beady lasers. They kept on staring as I put my box through the hatch and opened up the lid.
Within an instant there was a sharp pain in my hand as the canary came out in a flurry of yellow feathers, and it struggled and fluttered as I tried to shake it off. Frank and the keeper were both staring in surprise at the quarter-inch gash that its beak left in my hand, so deep that the blood simply ran, but I only had eyes for the birds.
The canary was zigzagging around, completely disoriented after its time in the box. Two of the hawks had already started to move, Indian sun-gods with their cloaks spread wide, and I drew my bleeding hand back and let the wire hatch fall shut.
'You could have released it,' Frank said. 'Cage birds hardly ever make it in the wild anyway.'
'I want to be sure of this one,' I said. 'And I want him to know what it felt like for the rest of us.'
It lasted no longer than a single wing-beat, of which I could feel the backdraft like the passage of a dark angel. The yellow bird was picked from the air with a squawk and returned to the perch, where the biggest of the hawks held it and decapitated it. After that, there was no sound other than that of tearing and feeding.
I told Frank that I owed him one.
And then I headed back toward the car, where Georgina would be waiting.
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Valley of lights Page 20
