When Eagles Fall (Fesler-Lampert Minnesota Heritage) Page 3

  “Hey!” called a guy from behind her. “Don’t bother the eagles!”

  “What’re you doin’?” a girl added. “That’s a protected island!”

  Rattled, Alex sat back on the seat.

  The voices came from a sparkling red speedboat filled with a half dozen teenagers. Three girls in the bow, three guys in the seats. A blonde in a lavender two-piece stood up and pointed to the sign. “Didn’t you see the sign?”

  “Uh … sorry, missed it!” Alex called lamely, back paddling from shore. She kept paddling, increasing the distance between herself and the island, and then, when the speedboat roared away, she drifted, letting the waves rock her back and forth. She hated being scolded by teenagers not much older than herself. Part of her wished she could join them. Maybe they were friendly, people she could hang out with. Anything would be better than returning to spend time with the Naatucks and her father, who talked about her behind her back.

  Now two eagles circled the island. It wasn’t that eagles wouldn’t nest when people were nearby, Ned had explained, but the sign helped to keep people from staying too close for too long. If boaters and campers stayed on the island, the adult eagles would circle endlessly, leaving the eaglets exposed to hunger and bad weather. As Alex saw it, she would disturb the nest for only a short time. In the end, she might be saving one of the eaglets’ lives.

  Alex could understand how parents could neglect their young if disturbed by outside forces. Hadn’t it happened with her own parents? They’d spent so much energy, every ounce of it, trying to protect her brother. Like the eagles, they’d circled and cried, worried and fretted, not seeing that their actions to fend off his sickness were in some ways making things worse. They fought more and more with each other. During a particularly bad fight, her dad threw a carton of eggs on the floor; her mom swore and screamed, “You’re heartless!” They blamed each other and neglected to see they had another child: her.

  A boat motor droned in the distance, growing fainter and fainter. She listened intently for approaching boats. Nothing. A breeze swooshed through the pine boughs towering above the island. Seagulls cried somewhere beyond her view. She paddled back and nudged the canoe to shore.

  Backpack on her shoulders, she climbed over the canoe’s yoke to the bow and heaved the canoe over the rocks, struggling with low cedar branches until it was hidden. The shiny green of the canoe, like the shell of a beetle, would be impossible to hide completely, but now it wouldn’t be easy to spot from a distance.

  She walked to a circular steel fire pit and campsite area, only yards from the nesting site. If the island weren’t off-limits, maybe she’d return here with a tent and be by herself for a few days. Just her and the eagles. Of course, she knew she couldn’t. The island would remain closed to visitors until the nesting season was over, sometime in August. Too much human activity wouldn’t be good for the birds. Suddenly she almost felt like her father. She brushed the idea away. He was the last person she wanted to resemble. God was a bit too hard for a human like herself to live up to.

  In a bed of grass, she dropped her backpack. She pulled out her baggy jeans and slipped them over her shorts. She threw her long-sleeved shirt—wrinkled, the way she liked it—over her tank top and knotted it just above her belly button. Then, on second thought, she untied the knot. She needed to save her skin from scrapes when she climbed.

  She followed a skinny path toward the nesting tree. Light-green lichen crunched beneath her weight. Blueberry plants covered a slope, berries still tiny and white, a long way from ripening.

  Near shore, immediately below the nest, eagle droppings covered leaves like white paint. Amid a pile of discarded sticks lay two fish skeletons, the tail of a squirrel, and several black feathers. Crows, most likely. At least she wasn’t about to climb a turkey vulture’s nest, she reminded herself. “Turkey vultures feed on anything dead,” her father had explained, “and their nests are writhing with maggots.” She squirmed inside, remembering.

  She tilted her head and surveyed the climb. With the nest directly overhead, she couldn’t see any sign of the eaglets. The parents circled in the graying sky. That meant the eaglets had to be there, hunkered down. Her skin prickled. She took a deep breath and studied her approach. If she panicked, she’d be useless. The lower limbs of the white pine were gone. How was she supposed to get up the tree if she couldn’t get started?

  A smaller pine tree ran parallel to the nesting tree, only a foot away. The smaller tree would make a good step stool to the large pine. She found a limb for her foot, a limb for her hand, and began to climb. She touched something sticky and groaned. She’d forgotten about pitch, sappy and sticky and strongly pine scented. Her hands would be pasted with the stuff. She paused and examined her free hand, now flecked brownish-black with bark bits and pitch. “Ah—so what?” she whispered. Compared to the importance of removing the lure, what did getting a little dirty matter? When she got back, she’d hit the sauna for a good cleaning.

  She kept going, hand up, then foot, then hand. Pausing, she glanced down. She was already ten feet up the smaller tree, and it had been easy. She could barely touch the big pine, yet knew she had to switch trees. Only a foot, maybe a foot and a half between the two trees, but the distance looked huge. A larger limb offered support, seemed to reach her way. She edged her foot over to it, slowly shifted her sticky hands from one set of branches to another. There.

  On the nesting tree, she got her bearings. Looked down. Studied her way up, heart thumping. The nest shadowed her climb. It was a mass of sticks. How was she supposed to get over its edge? She drew a few deep breaths, then kept climbing, finding a knob of footing here, a solid branch there. Along the tree’s length, a lightning strike had cut a line in the trunk from top to bottom, weakening it. But what could the added weight of a hundred-pound girl do to the tree? Surely it would hold. She hoped it would hold. Was she crazy for climbing the tree? Loco? She pictured the eaglets, the glint of a lure, and kept going.

  Her neck began to ache from craning at the nest and its supporting branches directly above. How could her father climb to eight nests, sometimes a dozen, in a day? Sure, he used ropes and spikes, but the trees he climbed towered much higher than this one, their girth three or four times as wide.

  Don’t look down. If she looked down now, with thirty or forty feet between herself and the ground, she might stop. She might freeze. She kept her gaze forward. Upward. First one hand up, then one leg. Get around the next branch. Steady, steady. Up.

  All too soon, she reached the base of the nest. She straddled a branch, pressed her forehead to the tree’s trunk, and rested for a moment.

  A slight rustle sounded above her.

  “It’s okay,” she said softly, her voice wavering. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Maybe that’s why her father talked. He couldn’t help it. She hadn’t planned to talk, but the words just came out.

  She studied the fork where the nest was wedged. As her father had done with each nest, she’d have to clear debris from an edge so she could get a foothold. Squatting on the branch, with one hand around the tree, she reached to the nest and cleared away loose feathers and stuff she’d rather not think about—much of it falling into her hair and eyes.

  Blinking back debris and dust, heart gathering speed, hoping, praying that it would hold, she grabbed the nest’s strongest supporting branch, found the last knob on the tree’s trunk, and, nearly breathless, pulled herself up—she was crazy!—and over the nest’s edge.

  She nearly fell headfirst into the nest, then steadied herself and sat back on her haunches. She was in an eagles’ nest—a nest the size of a bathtub.

  Two pairs of deep black eyes met her. Beaks wide, the eaglets hopped back, their talons almost as large as her own hands, which were shaking. At least she didn’t have to worry about bagging the eaglets for research.

  “I’d be scared, too,” she cooed, “but don’t worry. I won’t hurt you.” For a second, she glanced out. Whitecaps frosted the lake. Wind whistled through her hair. She was actually sitting on the edge of an eagles’ nest. Her friends would never believe it. No wonder her father loved this work. Above, the sky was a soft gray, but to the west, thunderheads formed an ominous wall. Dread tied itself around her stomach. She’d better make her visit quick. She didn’t need to become a lightning rod. Get the lure and go.

  The nest was a downy-lined mass of sticks and twigs. A half-eaten fish lay in the center of the nest, nearly covering a silver lure. With one eye on the birds and one eye on the lure, Alex reached down. The lure’s deadly barbs were half stuck in nest matter, and Alex wiggled the barbs free, pulling the jawbone of a fish with it.

  In that moment, with that small motion, one of the eaglets flattened itself to the opposite side of the nest, wings slightly extended outward, its head turned sideways, watching her with one eye. But the other eaglet, the smaller of the two, scooted back, flapping its wings. His wings.

  “Hey, little fella,” she said, alarmed at the way the eaglet kept backing up. “Come on, now,” she whispered, her throat suddenly dry. “Stay in your nest, little guy.”

  But the eaglet opened his dark beak wide, his tongue fluttering rapidly.

  Overhead, a flash of white filled her vision. A pair of bald eagles circled, their raspy cries filling the air. “Don’t worry,” she said, hoping the adults would keep their distance as they usually did. One dive, one swipe from their talons, and—she put the idea out of her mind. She dropped the lure over the edge of the nest. “I’m leaving, I’m leaving.”

  Frantically the smaller eaglet began to flap his fledgling wings—half feathers, half fluffy down—and clawed awkwardly for footing on the nest’s edge. He kept trying to back up, but there was nowhere to go. Then, as Alex watch
ed in horror, the eaglet toppled backward, beyond her view, screeching once as he plummeted through tree branches toward the ground.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Eaglet

  No matter how awful she felt, the only way down … was down. But she couldn’t move. Couldn’t budge her hands or her legs. She squatted in the nest and wanted to disappear, to rewind time, to wake up in the porch at the Naatucks’ cabin, to find that what had just happened had been a terrible dream.

  From the ground below rose a series of short, shrill cries. The eaglet was either dying or calling for help. Then the cries stopped altogether.

  The distant wall of thunderheads, black as burned marshmallows, had drifted closer. The wind carried a scattering of raindrops. Overhead, the bald eagles continued to circle, endlessly circle, crying their raspy high-pitched alarm.

  To the far side of the nest, the remaining eaglet pinned itself down, eye steadily watching. Accusing her.

  Alex’s mind whirred. If she ever made it down the tree again, how was she supposed to get the eaglet back in its nest? Her windbreaker. She’d wrap it up—somehow—and carry it up, avoiding its beak and talons, and get it back in its nest where it belonged. She’d managed to climb the tree. She’d done that, almost without thinking about what she was doing. She’d climbed it before she knew how scary it was. Could she climb it a second time with an eaglet? She wasn’t at all sure.

  A thin lightning streak zigzagged the dark horizon from sky to earth like the first line on an Etch A Sketch. She’d been good at that thing, twisting the knobs to create pictures. But her brother, his corkscrew sandy hair framing his brown eyes, had usually tried to mess up her efforts, just to irritate her. Crazy that he—Jonathan—should enter her mind now. She stared at the horizon, waiting for another shaft of light. Lightning. Then it dawned on her. It was as if her mind had been working in slow motion, not connecting the dots. She was in a treetop. A tree that had been struck once before. Why not again? It was a perfect lightning target.

  Get down, she told herself. Move. You have to get down now. The tree was bending slightly with the wind. Whitecaps frothed the lake in every direction. Some judge of weather she was. She should never have started out from shore.

  Slowly Alex unclenched her hands from the nest, willing herself to let go. She swallowed hard, blinking past the sudden gush of tears to her eyes. Then she shifted her body around, away from the eaglet in the nest, and looked over the edge. The ground was incredibly far away. She couldn’t do it. She’d just have to stay put until someone found her and carried her down or helicoptered her off the nest.

  Her stomach lurched. Somehow she had to find her footing again over the edge of the nest, a tangle of sticks and feathers. What was to keep her from slipping and falling to the ground below? Probably serve her right.

  The eaglet, she tried to assure herself, would be okay. Eagles were tough. She’d get down—first things first—and then figure out how to help the eaglet back to his nest. Heck, maybe he could fly. The thud sounded again in her memory. No. Not yet. At worst, she’d get help. She winced. And if she had to, she’d ask her father to help her get the eaglet back to his nest.

  She edged closer to the limb that formed much of the nest’s support. The limb she’d followed on her way up. Panic filled her. She couldn’t do this.

  Bass drums of thunder rolled in the distance.

  Cautiously she moved her body back over her earlier path, back over the edge of the nest, legs dangling in the air. She kept moving until her waist buckled over the sharp sticks of the nest, scraping against a patch of bare skin, catching on her belly ring. She felt a sharp tug at her navel, but she wriggled slightly and came free. Still, she found no footing.

  The wind picked up its tempo, and tree limbs creaked below her. She had to get down. Keeping her grip firm on the supporting limb, she kicked toward the underside of the nest, found a spot. Her foot caught and held. One of the spots she’d cleared out on her climb up. She eased her weight downward, sliding her hand along the limb, panicking at the open spaces around her, the dizzying feeling in her head. Maybe she’d just pass out and fall, and it would all be over before she felt anything.

  She was closer now to the tree’s crook. She eased herself lower, nearly losing her grip, but she held fast. There. Her foot hit the limb beneath the nest. She rested for a moment, both feet now on the limb, and glanced down. A flopping motion caught her eye. A few yards from the base of the tree, the eaglet—nearly camouflaged amid the brush and vegetation—flapped his wings. Flapped one wing.

  No. Alex wanted to cry. Something was terribly wrong. Even from so high up, the eaglet shouldn’t look so strange. As it flapped, one wing hung limp, oddly extended from his body. It must be broken.

  She had to get to the eaglet.

  She eyed her next move downward, gripped the nearest branch, and carefully climbed down. Foot first, then hand, then foot. Rest. Her limbs trembled. She licked her lips, suddenly dry. Take it one step at a time. She neared the base, her hands black and sticky, shifted over to the parallel tree, and dropped shakily to the ground.

  The eaglet hopped away from her, his beak open wide.

  “I won’t hurt—” She stopped herself. Like a twig snapped nearly in half, his wing hung limp and touched the ground. “I can’t tell you how sorry—” Alex blurted. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, I didn’t. I only wanted to help, to get the lure.”

  All actions are selfish, a voice in her head chided. Somewhere she’d heard that. That even when you think you’re doing something out of the goodness of your heart, you’re usually helping yourself somehow. She had meant to help the eaglets, hadn’t she? Or was she helping herself, trying to make herself feel better somehow? It didn’t matter now.

  She glanced around the base of the tree for the lure. It had to be there, somewhere. It proved her intentions were good. She walked around the nesting tree and scanned the ground for a glint of silver. If she had to explain herself, the lure would prove why she’d come there. … She kept searching. She’d dropped it over the nest’s edge. Finally she glanced up. Halfway up the tree, dangling from a thin branch, stopped by a whorl of pine needles, was the lure. At least it was no longer in the nest. The eaglets wouldn’t peck at it now or get hooked by its barbs.

  Alex let out a heavy sigh. She’d done a good thing, she was sure of it.

  She turned back to the eaglet, now perched a foot off the ground on a mossy stump. His right wing hung crookedly at his side. He opened his beak wide, tongue fluttering wildly, turned his head, and watched her.

  “I was trying to help,” Alex said, tears in her voice. “Really I was.”

  Rain began to fall steadily, whipped along by the steady wind. Alex pushed wet strands of hair from her eyes, sat down a few yards from the eaglet, studying him and wondering what to do.

  Water dripped off her nose and she shivered, arms clasped around her knees. She was getting soaked, even with the shelter of tree limbs above her. Rain ran in tiny rivulets off the eaglet’s head. He shook his feathers. Usually, Alex remembered, adult eagles would spread their wings and protect their young from a storm. Now they were off their nest. If she didn’t leave the island, neither of the eaglets would get the protection they needed from rain and wind.

  The eaglet sat on the stump, eyeing her. He didn’t seem afraid of her, or maybe he was in shock from his fall. She could leave the island and get help, but with predators—foxes, weasels, even bears—the eaglet would be vulnerable. She couldn’t leave him alone. It might be hours before she could return with help. And the eaglet needed help. Her father’s help. He’d know what to do with it. There were raptor centers, places where injured birds could be treated, where a broken wing might be mended. That’s where this bird needed to go. She ran her forefinger over her bottom lip. And as much as she didn’t want to confess what she’d done, she was going to have to bring the eaglet to her father.

  She jumped up and ran along the path toward the campsite. Rain pelted her head and shoulders as she pulled her blue-and-teal windbreaker from her backpack. All she had to do was get it over the bird’s head. All she had to do was get the eaglet into the canoe and back to the Naatucks’ on Dryweed Island.