Sky Hawk

by Lewis, Gill

  ‘Ta,’ Euan muttered. ‘You just wait, Rob,’ he said. ‘Fly fishing is pure skill, none of your computer techno stuff . You just wait.’

  I sat down in the soft grass and rubbed my bruised legs. Rob passed me some chocolate and we watched the playback on the action-cam. I thought I’d been in control for some of the death drop, but all I could see was me tumbling over and over.

  Rob laughed. ‘It’s mind over matter. You and the bike, you are the bike.’

  I looked at my bike, at the deep scratches in the paintwork and bent wheel spokes. ‘I know what you mean,’ I groaned.

  The sun was so hot, more like a summer’s day than one in May. The rest of the half term holiday stretched ahead of us. I lay back, closed my eyes and let the chocolate slowly melt in my mouth.

  It was over a month ago I’d sat with Iona on the heather hillside and seen the osprey return. I hadn’t seen much of Iona since then. I think she was avoiding me. I wanted to say sorry about the mean things I’d said about her and her grandad, but there was never a good time. I often went to the loch to watch the ospreys. I’d even seen the male osprey catch a fish in his talons right out of the loch, but it just wasn’t the same without Iona to share it with.

  ‘I’VE GOT ONE,’ shouted Euan.

  Rob and I scrambled down the bank.

  Euan was thigh deep in water, his rod arched downstream. ‘Here it comes,’ he said. The end of the rod bowed and bent against the fighting strain of the fish. A silvery underbelly flashed as the fish leapt from the water’s surface, twisting in the air before plunging back under water.

  ‘I’ve got you, I’ve got you!’ Euan reeled the fish onto the stony bank. ‘Rainbow trout,’ said Euan with a grin. ‘Not a bad size.’

  We watched the fish gulp and thrash on the ground at our feet. Its smooth scales glittered a million colours in the bright sunshine. The scarlet gills desperately flapped the air. I wanted to pick it up and let it slide back into the cool river water. I wanted to watch it skim away under the bright surface. But Euan hit it over the head with a stick.

  ‘CALLUM!’

  We’d been so engrossed looking at the fish that we hadn’t seen Iona on the bank above us. Her face was red from running.

  ‘Callum, you’ve got to come!’ she shouted.

  Rob and Euan were looking at me.

  I wanted to call Iona over to join us. I wanted them to like her.

  ‘I thought you’d got rid of her,’ said Rob.

  ‘Can’t it wait?’ I called to Iona.

  Iona slid down the bank and pulled me away from the others. I could see now she had been crying, tears streaked against her face.

  ‘It’s the osprey,’ she whispered. Her voice was thick and choked. ‘I think she’s dead.’

  CHAPTER 10

  ‘Come on, Callum,’ said Iona tugging at my sleeve.

  Rob and Euan were staring at me.

  I turned back to Iona. ‘Where is she?’ I said.

  ‘Back at the loch.’

  ‘Hey, Callum,’ yelled Rob. ‘Let’s go and ride the top trail.’

  ‘We’ve got to hurry,’ said Iona.

  Rob was walking over to us now.

  ‘Look, Iona … ’ I said, ‘I can’t … ’

  ‘Fine!’ spat Iona. ‘Don’t bother. Stay with your mates.’

  She picked up my bike, swung her leg over and pushed off down the track.

  ‘Iona!’ I shouted. But she was already racing towards the road over the stone bridge. I looked at Rob’s bike by my feet. It was his pride and joy, the Formula One model of all mountain bikes. I pulled it up, moulding my hands round the handlebars.

  ‘Oi, Callum!’ Rob yelled. ‘Leave my bike alone.’

  I glanced at him over my shoulder.

  ‘Not my bike,’ Rob yelled. ‘Not my bike.’

  I pushed off, slipping smoothly through the gears. The frame absorbed the stones and ruts, and the tyres gripped the thick mud. I flew down the track after Iona.

  ‘I’ll kill you, Callum. I’ll bloody kill you.’ But Rob’s voice was soon drowned in the rush of river under the bridge.

  I caught up with Iona at the bottom of the mineral track. We cycled up past the old quarries following the riverbank. My legs ached and my lungs burned.

  ‘Come on,’ said Iona.

  I pushed Rob’s bike up to the top of the track.

  ‘There,’ Iona shouted, when we reached the edge of the loch.

  I looked across the dark waters to the island.

  My mouth went dry.

  I felt sick.

  Hanging below one of the branches of the nest tree was the osprey, slowly turning as if held by invisible thread. She spun in mid-air, upside-down, like a gruesome ballet dancer. Feet skyward, wings pointing to the ground.

  ‘Fishing line,’ said Iona. ‘I reckon she’s tangled in fishing line.’

  There was no movement from the osprey. Her body hung slack and limp. I clapped my hands, once, twice. It echoed across the loch.

  The osprey jerked upwards. Her wings uselessly beat the air, and she swung like a pendulum beneath her eyrie, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.

  Her alarm cry rang out, ‘Kee … kee … kee … ’

  ‘She’ll die,’ said Iona. ‘She’ll die like that.’

  I looked at the tree. ‘We can’t climb that. It’s way too high,’ I said. ‘It must be over a hundred feet tall.’

  ‘You’ve got some ropes on the farm,’ said Iona.

  I looked at her. Her face was set.

  ‘You need the proper tree climbing stuff,’ I said. ‘Harnesses and abseil ropes and things.’

  Iona put her hands on her hips. ‘We can’t just let her die.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. I squinted into the sun. The osprey was still again. ‘We’ll have to get help.’

  ‘And tell someone our secret?’ said Iona. She was furious. ‘Never.’

  ‘We’ve got no choice,’ I said.

  ‘You promised, Callum,’ she said. ‘If you don’t go up there, I will.’

  I kicked the ground. ‘And what if we do get her down? She’s bound to be injured. What then? You’ll know what to do, will you?’

  Iona pressed her palms into her eyes. ‘We can’t let her die,’ she sobbed.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. I picked Rob’s bike up and pushed off down the track. ‘We can’t do this on our own.’

  CHAPTER 11

  Dad hung up the telephone receiver on the kitchen wall. ‘That was Hamish from the nature reserve,’ he said. ‘He’s coming to help.’

  ‘He mustn’t tell anyone about the ospreys,’ said Iona.

  ‘You don’t have to worry,’ said Dad. ‘He’s in charge of the ospreys at the reserve. He’ll keep quiet about it.’

  ‘He better had,’ said Iona, pacing up and down.

  Dad smiled and whistled softly under his breath. ‘Who’d have thought, eh? We’ve got ospreys here, on our farm.’

  An hour later we were in the back of the Land Rover bumping along the top field.

  ‘Hold on tight back there!’ yelled Dad as the Land Rover bucked over the hummocks of grass.

  Hamish didn’t look much older than some of my cousins. I guessed he was twenty-three, maybe twenty-four. He came with a big grin and a whole load of stuff: harnesses and ropes to climb the tree, scales to weigh the osprey, and a kit to put a ring on her leg. He crammed them all around us and sat on a bag of ropes, holding a small black case carefully on his lap.

  I liked him straight away and I could tell he liked us too. As the Land Rover lurched over the rough ground, Iona told Hamish about the pine-martens’ den she’d found in a hollowed tree and about the golden plovers that nested on the moorlands and the herd of red deer that grazed the high slopes above the farm. And Hamish listened, I mean really listened.

  ‘You’ll be putting me out of work,’ Hamish laughed.

  The Land Rover slithered and slipped in the muddy track beside the river, and Hamish tightened his grip on the
black case.

  ‘What’s in there?’ asked Iona.

  ‘This?’ said Hamish. He tapped the side of the small black case. ‘You’ll have to wait and see. I only hope we get a chance to use it.’

  Dad pulled up at the end of the loch where our small rowing boat lay on the gritty shore.

  ‘Where is she?’ said Hamish.

  ‘There,’ I said. I pointed across the loch to the island. The osprey hung below the eyrie, like a corpse. She spun slowly, round and round and round.

  Iona covered her face in her hands. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’

  Hamish focused his binoculars on her. ‘I can’t tell,’ he muttered. ‘But she’s got company.’

  A pair of crows tumbled from the sky, and swooped at her from the side. She suddenly lurched up, beat her wings and jabbed at them with her beak, but I could see she was already much weaker.

  ‘Come on,’ urged Iona. ‘We’ve not got much time.’

  Dad and Hamish rowed. I sat in the prow of the boat and Iona sat holding Hamish’s small black case. It took for ever to reach the island, and all the time the crows bombed and dived at the osprey.

  ‘Look!’ said Iona. ‘The other osprey.’

  The osprey’s mate appeared at the nest. We could hear his high piercing alarm calls. He chased the crows, twisting and turning in the air, but they flew into the cover of a branch thick with pine needles, where they cawed, mocking him.

  The boat crunched on the rocky shore of the island. We hauled the stuff out of the boat, and Dad helped Hamish into his climbing harness. He fed the rope as Hamish climbed higher and higher up into the tree. The male osprey flew off to the other side of the loch, where he watched us from the top of a tree. Hamish worked his way along one of the branches below the eyrie. The branch bowed and dipped as he edged out towards the osprey. I could hardly watch.

  ‘He’s got her,’ Dad said.

  Hamish sat astride the branch pulling the osprey upwards. Soon he was hidden behind a huge pair of beating wings. We heard Hamish cry out once, before he folded the wings and pushed the osprey into a canvas bag around his waist. He inspected the nest briefly, and then dropped down on the rope, like a puppet on a string, to the ground beside us.

  ‘She’s a bit feisty, mind,’ said Hamish. He wiped some blood from a fresh cut on the side of his chin. ‘Still, it’s a good sign, I guess.’

  We crouched on the ground next to him. Hamish untied the straps around the sling holding the osprey. She struggled inside and I could hear the scratch of talons on the rough canvas.

  ‘Are you ready for this?’ said Hamish. His face was deadly serious. ‘I mean are you really ready?’

  Iona and I leaned forward. We couldn’t take our eyes off the sling holding the osprey.

  Hamish pushed his hands into long leather gauntlets, and then slowly and carefully unfurled the canvas.

  CHAPTER 12

  Nothing prepared me for seeing her right in front of me. It was as if the lochs and the mountains and the sky were folded deep inside her, as if she was a small piece of this vast landscape and none of it could exist without her.

  ‘Grab some more gloves, Callum,’ Hamish said. ‘I’ll need a hand here.’

  I pulled the thick leather gloves up to my sleeves and wrapped my hands around the osprey’s folded wings. I thought she’d be really heavy, but she was light, much lighter than I expected, as if she was made out of air itself. My hands were shaking. I didn’t want to hurt her and I didn’t want to be on the sharp end of her talons.

  ‘She’s got three eggs up there,’ said Hamish. ‘Take a look while I set this stuff up.’

  Iona showed me the picture on Hamish’s phone. There were three creamy white eggs with chocolatey brown smudges in a bed of soft grass.

  ‘She’s been off the nest a while now,’ said Hamish. ‘We’d better work fast or the chicks inside might die.’

  Hamish weighed the osprey in another sling with weighing scales. ‘Good weight,’ Hamish nodded. ‘Let’s check her over.’

  He gently spread out each wing. The feathers weren’t just plain brown, but all the colours from dark furrowed fields to pale golden wheat. When Hamish stretched them out, her wingspan was as long as me.

  ‘Look at those talons,’ said Dad. ‘They could do some damage.’

  ‘She’s a fish-killing machine all right,’ said Hamish. ‘See here, her foot has ridges and spiky scales to hold on to slippery fish.’

  I had to touch her talons. I took my gloves off and felt the smooth perfect curve of each talon and the needle-sharp tip.

  ‘Careful,’ said Hamish. ‘Once she’s got you, she won’t let go.’

  ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ said Iona.

  I nodded. But it was the osprey’s eyes that fascinated me. They were sunflower yellow, bright and intense. When she fixed me with her eyes it was as if she was looking right into me, as if I couldn’t hide anything from her.

  ‘I reckon we got to her just in time,’ said Hamish. ‘She’s got Iona to thank for that. That fishing line has cut right into her foot.’

  I helped to cut the long strands of fishing line. The osprey flinched as Hamish gently pulled them from her foot. The line had cut through the skin and deep into the flesh and we could see shiny whiteness inside.

  ‘She’s lucky,’ said Hamish. ‘That’s her tendon in there. If the line had cut the tendon, she wouldn’t be able to grasp with her foot. She’d never be able to fish again.’

  ‘Will we need to keep her in for a few days,’ asked Dad, ‘till it heals?’

  Hamish shook his head. ‘I’ll spray it with some antiseptic. It should heal OK,’ he said. ‘These birds don’t do so well in captivity, and anyway, her mate will feed her while she sits on her eggs.’

  ‘So can we let her go now?’ asked Iona.

  ‘Soon,’ said Hamish. ‘Open that little black case will you, Iona.’

  Iona undid the plastic catches and opened the lid. Inside was a small rectangular black box, a long thin wire, and small harness that looked as if it would fit a toy bear.

  ‘It’s a satellite transmitter,’ Hamish said. ‘Latest technology. We strap it to her back, a bit like a mini rucksack. It tells us her position. You know, where she is in the world. We can tell how high she’s flying and how fast. We can follow her journey all the way to Africa and back.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit heavy?’ frowned Iona.

  ‘No. Here, feel it.’

  Hamish handed it to Iona. She held it in her palm and curled her fingers around it.

  ‘But how can we find out where she’s been,’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll give you a special code,’ he said. ‘You put it into your computer and it plots her journey on Google Earth. You might even be able to see which tree she roosts in.’

  ‘So we can actually see her fly?’ asked Iona.

  ‘No,’ said Hamish. ‘Google Earth has satellite pictures of the Earth that were taken before now, but you can see the sort of places she flies over.’

  The osprey jabbed at the leather gloves with her beak while Hamish tied the straps of the transmitter. ‘No one must find out about this nest,’ said Hamish. ‘Not a soul. News like this has the nasty habit of finding the wrong ears. Some people pay thousands to get their hands on osprey eggs.’

  ‘We’ve kept her secret this long, haven’t we?’ said Iona suddenly fierce.

  Hamish grinned. ‘You have,’ he said. He passed her a small tin. ‘And she wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for you. So you get to choose her coloured leg ring, Iona.’

  Iona probed around in the tin, sifting through the coloured rings.

  ‘Take your time, Iona!’ I said. ‘Her eggs will have hatched by the time you choose one.’

  She frowned at me. ‘It’s got to be right.’ She picked up different rings, examining each one as if it were a precious stone. ‘Here … ’ she pulled out a white ring with the letters, RS.

  ‘Why RS?’ I
said.

  ‘RS … it sounds a bit like Iris,’ said Iona. ‘We’ll call her Iris, after the Greek goddess of the wind and sky.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t you remember? We did it in school. Iris was a messenger from heaven.’

  ‘It’s not a very Scottish name,’ I said. ‘This is a Scottish bird.’

  Iona frowned at me. ‘And what makes her so Scottish if she spends half the year in another country?’

  Hamish clipped the ring on her leg and laughed. ‘You’re like an old married couple, bickering away.’

  ‘Iona wins,’ Dad chuckled. ‘Iris, it is.’

  I scowled at him.

  ‘So, Iona,’ said Hamish, ‘do you want to do the honours and let Iris go?’

  Iona looked at me. ‘I think Callum should do it.’

  ‘You mean it?’ I said. I couldn’t believe it.

  Iona smiled at me and nodded. ‘We both saved her.’

  ‘All right then,’ said Hamish. ‘Here you are, Callum, you don’t need gloves on. Hold her like this.’

  I wrapped my hands around the osprey’s folded wings. The top feathers were smooth and soft, but I could feel the quills of the flight feathers like strong wire under my fingers.

  ‘Hold her firm, mind,’ said Hamish. ‘Face into the wind and just throw her, as high as you can.’

  I turned Iris into the wind. Her whole body tensed under my hands. Her muscles were tight and hard. The wind ruffled the soft feathers on her head. She fixed her eyes on the sky above.

  ‘Now,’ said Hamish.

  I threw her upwards. She exploded from my hands in a blur of wing and feather. I felt the rush of air against my face as she beat her wings.

  Up, she flew, into the sunlight.

  A single feather spiralled down to earth.

  She was free.

  CHAPTER 13

  I returned Rob’s bike the next morning. ‘I’ve cleaned your bike,’ I said.

  Rob was down in the village with Euan and some boys from school. They were kicking a ball about on the rough stony ground below the play park.

  Rob glanced down at his bike. ‘It’s not just some cheap bike, that. Dad nearly killed me when I didn’t come home with it last night.’