Once more in the kitchen, he sat down with his mug of chai and sipped it slowly. He started on his early morning ritual, the ritual of the list; the list that avoided troublesome distractions during the day, distractions which would take him away from his painting. Shower and brush teeth, shaving was always optional, check; dog fed and watered, check; dog flap unlocked, check; tea made, check; birds fed, this would be the next job. Finishing his chai, he put the mug into the dishwasher along with the rest of the washing up. He tidied up the table but left it standing in case Chani might wish to sit there when she woke up.
He looked out through the French doors into what was still essentially night. He could not see any sign of the dim glow which would herald dawn and he flicked all six switches on the panel on the wall by the garden doors. The lawn lit up as lights came on to illuminate his way to the weatherings. It had been a beastly nuisance, the weeks spent laying and burying all of that cable to provide power to not only the lights in the lawn but also to the sheds, greenhouses and the weatherings, but it did mean that he was not restricted to a torch's dim light and lack of throwing power in the winter months. He retrieved his old ski jacket from the cupboard under the stairs, accessed through a door in the laundry room, and went out into the chill night air.
He walked quickly through the gardens until he came into the 'Tea Party shed' in which his hawking equipment and furniture were stored. Donning the thicker of the two gauntlets, Fjorgyn was invariably grumpy and bad tempered in the morning and was apt to bite unless the sun was out, he first took one bird, weighed him or her and made a note of the weight in his 'ledger'; he noted whether or not the bird has flown the day before and for how long; he calculated whether any adjustment was needed in the quantity of food that day; what time it was appropriate to feed the bird on the current day, if not now, (a minimum of eighteen hours was required between feeds to ensure that new food entering the crop did not prevent the casting, the fur and feathers which are not digested, from being regurgitated); he made a note of any variance from 'yarak' (a bird's optimal flying and, therefore, hunting weight) plus or minus.
He followed the same procedure with every bird not in an aviary, the birds that flew free, when permitted. It was a tedious process, especially with more than one or two birds, but it was essential if the bird was to have any chance of remaining passibly healthy, let alone fly and hunt. Eventually the weighing process was complete and he prepared the day-old chicks which he had taken from the freezer the previous day, added the SA37, a necessary supplement if the bird is fed day-old chicks whose bones are not developed enough to provide the necessary calcium for a raptor and laid them out in order for each bird.
Finally he removed the next day's chicks from the freezer and took the ledger back to his study, where the information was all entered into a spreadsheet which allowed computerised graphing and charting to further reduce potential problems which may go unnoticed in a manual system. The ledger was returned to the shed only when dawn had come and the birds could be flown, if he chose to do so.
He could hear no sound from the upper floor so he left a brief message for Roy, the vet, in case he came early. His patio doors to the garden were invariably only locked at night. A very few people knew the 'secret' way into the main garden, the hedges were tall and thick and seemingly impassable, the metal railing through and over which the hedges grew, a legacy of the previous owner, made sure of that; in any event, you could get nothing out of the house unless it were staggeringly small. One of the many reasons why Rory was called 'Eegit' was because it had taken five weeks of careful training, every day, to get Rory to recognise the path to 'her' field.
If he went away for more than twenty four hours, metal shutters made entry or egress through the front doors and windows impossible without Semtex. Only his hi-fi was worth that kind of effort and woe betide the man who tried to lift a speaker cabinet without first emptying the hundredweight of sand from the base!
It was slowing getting light and, in the absence of anything very much to do which would make little or no noise and he did not feel much like painting in early dawn light, even under daylight bulbs, the previous day's events had not helped matters in this respect at all, he decided that, as the birds had not yet been fed, he could fly Fjorgyn. She was just on the right side of her flying weight and he could put her on a creance for added protection until the light improved. Eegit, the falcon, was at her optimal flying weight and so might be tempted, when the light was brighter, to try her hand, rather her feet, at some of her usual perfunctory, feeble stoops at a lure.
He collected the ledger from the study, double checked his assessments of Fjorgyn's and Eegit's 'yarak' and made his way out to the shed. He hung the hawking bag across his shoulder, checked that the creance remained inside, donned his glove and went to bid 'Morn, Morn' to Fjorgyn. He approached her, crouching low, and gently coaxed her onto his fist from behind, teasing her rear toe to encourage her on to his hand; he kept his right, ungloved hand well away from the sharply hooked bill. Fjorgyn had a fondness for raw human flesh, unrivalled in his experience, and the taste of buckskin left a too sour taste in her mouth. As she gingerly settled on the his fist, he was relieved to note the leash and the jesses had fallen in front of his fingers. He merely had to open his gloved hand for the jesses to fall into his grasp. He wound the leash around his ring and little finger twice and untied the leash from the perch, the knot being released easily if you just knew which part to pull. Fortunately none of his raptors had ever learnt which part of the knot to pull.
He strode back to the shed, entered at a crouch to avoid the bird hitting her head on the door frame and picked up the bow perch from the floor. He went out onto the 'Tea Party' lawn and, in traditional manner, moistened the forefinger of his right hand and held it to the wind. The high hedges gave a certain degree of protection but the wind could be felt blowing from roughly north to south. He positioned the bow perch at the south end of the lawn and took the hood out of his bag. Holding it by the tassels, he gently slipped it over the birds head; if Fjorgyn could not see him, she could not bite him. Keeping a firm hold, he fixed the 'D' ring at the end of the creance to the jesses, replacing the leash, and unwound the fifty or so metres of strong nylon twine; the bird was now still on a leash, albeit a much longer one.
Carrying the bird to the perch, he gently coaxed her onto it. Fjorgyn was due a ration of 4 chicks. He crudely dismembered the bodies with his hands and found that he had nine morsels, he put those in his bag; 9 flights of one hundred yards, roughly two laps of an athletics track. He wrapped the free end of the creance around the ring and little fingers of his left hand and took off Fjorgyn's hood and put it in his bag. He advanced towards the north end. He stopped short about five yards from the hedge.
The bird was quite disinterested until he grabbed a chick head from the bag and threw it into the air, whistling as he did so. He did this three times and, finally, Fjorgyn ruffled her feathers with a deep shudder and he switched hands so that the chick head was firmly between his left thumb and forefinger. The bird took off. With deep strokes of her broad wings, she crossed the intervening distance in seconds and, as he raised is hand to slightly below head level, she pitched up and, in a near unmanageable stall, grabbed at his outstretched fist with her toes and finally settled after a good deal of wing-waving to restore her balance. She pulled at the chicks head and, temporarily distracted from the prospect of raw human flesh by the lure of a tasty 'chicken nugget', Leo was able to retrieve the jesses from behind his left hand and grab them tightly in his gloved fist. He released the sole object of Fjorgyn's attention into her mouth. When she had finished eating and the head had passed into her crop, he waved her away. She dutifully returned to her perch. Fjorgyn had been performing these early morning exercises for two years and was only too aware now of the rules and rituals of the game, if she was to indeed to receive food.
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