SHERIDAN WAS BOTH tired and dirty as she looped the weighted duck wing lure around her head through the air with her left hand to signal to the falcons to return for the early evening. The temperature on the Never Summer Ranch had dropped significantly once the sun began to descend, and she could see her breath as clouds of condensation as she worked the lure. It whistled as it circled.
The first falcon to come in was the peregrine, and it settled with surprising grace on her gloved right fist. The second raptor to come home was a prairie falcon. She secured both birds to dowel-rod perches in the back of her vehicle by their leather leg jesses. Before proceeding, she ran her hands over them to look for broken feathers or any other injuries. When that checked out, she gently touched their gullets with the tips of her fingers. As she had suspected, the prairie falcon didn’t need more food—it had blasted a few starlings out of the sky in the late afternoon and had fed on them. The peregrine hadn’t eaten yet, although she’d seen the falcon hit and kill several of the target birds to send them spiraling down to the sagebrush like spent rockets—a warning signal not to come back.
The combination of a prairie falcon and a peregrine had worked very well to strike terror into the hundreds of starlings and send them packing to other locations. Once she’d put the birds into the sky in the late morning, she’d waited until they maintained a long oblong aerial route above the ranch, riding on thermal currents.
Soon, she could hear the shrill cries of the invasive birds increase in volume and pure panic inside the barn. The falcons had been spotted, and the din had become almost unbearable.
Then, in what looked like a black cloud, the starlings had broken out and poured from the openings in the barn to flee to the south, with the falcons accompanying them from above and at times shooting through the cloud like fighter planes. The prairie falcon had followed one of its kills to the ground.
*
A SECOND WAVE of starlings had emerged about fifteen minutes later, as if they’d grouped up and decided to wait to flee until the falcons were otherwise engaged. This grouping poured out nearly at ground level and flew east. It didn’t take long for the falcons to double back and provide taloned accompaniment. Sheridan had watched the remaining starlings streaking toward the mountains until they were out of sight. In the last hour before calling her birds back, Sheridan had entered the building. It was eerily quiet inside the barn and she couldn’t locate a single living bird still about. What was left, though, was disconcerting. The rafters were caked with white excrement, as was the barn floor. It smelled inside of avian panic.
Tiny errant feathers still shimmered in beams of light through windows and cracks in the walls. Hundreds of corpses of dead starlings lay in different stages of decay on the floor and shelving from the long occupation. Starlings didn’t clean up after their own.
She was grateful that her job was complete after the bird abatement was over. She wanted nothing to do with cleaning up the building and making it suitable for any kind of use again. Years of bird shit and tiny rotting carcasses made the building reek ripe and rotten.
Sheridan was also pleased with how well her first lone assignment had gone. Nate had shown her how well peregrines and prairie falcons could team up to work together on the same mission. Some falcons turned on each other to claim the airspace, but these two had cooperated. There had been no need to release her remaining birds.
Nate attributed it to the fact that prairie falcons, while the only large falcon species native to North America, were distantly related to peregrines and shared similar attributes. Prairies were slightly smaller, but more perfectly adapted to a harsh arid western environment. What they shared with peregrines was their aggressiveness, their coloring, their grace while in flight, and their eager embrace of terror tactics when it came to going after prey.
Both birds had done their jobs, returned to her at the end of the day, and done so tired but unharmed. She still had fresh falcons in reserve if needed.
Sheridan was keen to return to her motel, have a nice meal somewhere in Walden, and report to Liv how well things had gone. The only thing that nagged at her throughout the day had been her repeated sightings of the old woman lurking about inside the ranch home.
Katy Cotton kept a very close eye on Sheridan’s comings and goings. In fact, every time Sheridan glanced toward the house, she found Cotton in one of the windows on either the first or second floor, pushing aside the curtain to glare at her.
Once, Sheridan had waved. The old woman hadn’t waved back. She’d simply stepped away and let the curtains meet.
*
SHE WAS CLOSING the tailgate on her SUV when Leon Bottom drove his pickup into the ranch yard and strode over to her with a smile on his face and a six-pack of Coors in his hand.
“How’d it go today?” he asked. He was wearing the same all-black cowboy outfit as he had the day before, with the addition of a white silk kerchief around his thin neck. Maybe to make it look thicker, she thought.
“It went very well,” she announced. “There are officially no starlings left in your barn.”
Bottom did a faux reaction as if he’d been pushed back in the chest, then resumed his approach. “Man, that’s the best news I’ve heard all month. I wish I could have been here to see it, but I had to meet with my banker in Fort Collins.”
“I remember.”
*
HE PULLED TWO yellow cans out of the container and handed one to Sheridan. He said, “I was almost hoping you would need to work again tomorrow. I really wanted to see those falcons of yours chase the starlings off.”
“Oh, I’ll be back tomorrow morning to make sure none of them came back during the night,” she said, opening the can. “Sometimes a few of them return because they don’t know where else to go. Also, there might be a few birds out there who don’t know what happened today and think of the barn as their home. We can chase them all off tomorrow. Thanks for the beer.”
“My pleasure,” Bottom said, taking a long pull of his and exclaiming, “Damn, that’s good. I should have asked you first if you wanted a beer. You might not even drink.”
“I’m from Wyoming,” she said. And it was good.
“So that’s it,” he said. “You come, you chase all the problem birds away, you give me a bill, and you leave.”
“That’s it. If they come back, you can call us again. But to be honest, it’s unusual for starlings to come back within their lifetimes. Birds like starlings get hardwired fast to avoid places that have threatened them.”
“Where did all the birds go?” Bottom asked.
“The bulk of them went west, and the rest to the south.”
“So they’ll be someone else’s problem,” Bottom said with apparent glee. “I hope a bunch of them end up in Walden to plague my enemies.”
Sheridan didn’t respond to that.
“Still, this is all fascinating,” Bottom said.
“That barn will need a real cleaning,” she said.
“I’ll hire some illegals to do it,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve seen a few of them hanging around the post office in town. There’s no paperwork and I can pay them in cash. That’s what’s nice about my situation.”
She looked away and drank the rest of the can faster than she normally would. Sheridan was tired of the conversation, and of Leon Bottom.
“Thank you for the beer,” she said again.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning, then.”
“Yes.”
“For breakfast,” he added. “I insist. Please come out for breakfast first. Then we can see if there are any more birds you need to scare away.”
“I might pass on that breakfast,” she said.
He was suddenly hurt. “Now, why would you do that?”
Sheridan chinned toward the house and he got it.
“Katy?” he said.
“She watched me all day, and not in a friendly way.”
“Well, she may not be friendly at first,” Bottom said. “I think she’s just protective of me—of the ranch. She doesn’t like to see me get cheated by the locals, and she’s sure they’re all up to no good. She probably considers you one of them.”
“Whatever,” Sheridan said. Then she dug in her jeans pocket and handed over the note that had been left on her windshield the night before.
Bottom read it and said, “Jeez, did you have a bad experience with her somewhere? Did you cut her off on the road or something?”
“I’ve never seen her in my life.” Sheridan left out the part that there was something oddly familiar about the woman.
“She’s not usually this nasty,” Bottom said. “Did I tell you she’s originally from Wyoming? Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe you ran into her up there.”
Sheridan said, “My dad is a game warden. Maybe he arrested her or something.”
Bottom laughed as he pulled out another beer for her. Sheridan declined to accept it.
“I don’t know much about her life in Wyoming,” he said. “All I know is she was originally from there, and her first husband was, too. When that fell apart, she met Ben Cotton and they moved to Michigan and she’s spent the rest of her life serving my family.”
“So you don’t know anything about her first husband? Like his name? Or where she’s from?” Sheridan asked. She thought if she heard the name and town, she might be able to establish a connection. As her dad as always told her, Wyoming was the last remaining state with “one degree of separation,” meaning that if you didn’t know someone else outright you knew someone who knew that person. The place was still that parochial.
“No,” Bottom said. “She never talks about her first husband. I don’t know if she had any kids with him or anything. Katy is very tight-lipped about her past. I wouldn’t even know about her first husband except that she told my mother something about him once—that he was a disaster and she had to get out for her own good. That’s all I know.”
Sheridan made a note to herself to ask her parents if they’d ever heard of the woman. But that could wait. It wasn’t urgent.
As she turned to reach for the door handle of her SUV, Bottom sidestepped in front of her and again held up the second can. “Another one for the road?”
“No, thank you.”
“Or,” he said, pressing toward her, “you could just stay here and help me finish this sixer. I also picked up a few edibles in Fort Collins. They’re legal here, you know.”
“Back off,” Sheridan said firmly.
The rancher responded as if he’d touched an electric fence. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said. “It just gets real lonely out here.”
As he said it, Sheridan got the impression that Leon Bottom was often successful with some women, even though he was no prize in any way. He had money, and he had a big dose of self-delusion.
“I’m out of here,” she said, shouldering around him. “I have birds to take care of.”
“Come out for breakfast and we’ll settle up,” he said, as if waving away the previous exchange. “Katy is a hell of a cook and breakfast has always been my favorite meal.”
Sheridan agreed to do it, although as she drove away from the Never Summer Ranch, she saw Katy Cotton framed in the kitchen window shooting twin laser beams at her from her tiny, squinted eyes.