From the book
Chapter One
Nate Romanowski knew trouble was on the way when he saw the falcon's wings suddenly flare in the distance. Something beyond his eyesight was coming fast.
It was cool and crisp in the desert and the light dawn breeze smelled of dust and the rotting carcasses of dead wild horses who had drunk at a poisoned spring.
The rising sun bathed the eastern sky ochre and silhouetted the rock haystacks and hoodoos into a dark snaggle-toothed horizon. It was the best time of day, he thought: the anticipatory moment before the morning light lifted the curtain on the terrain to reveal the reds, pinks, oranges and beiges of the striations in the bone-dry rock formations and revealed the rugged broken terrain. The desert was made up of canyons, arroyos, and vast sheets of hard-packed clay that had been sculpted through history first by magma, then water, now wind.
Nate had learned that in the morning the desert didn't wake up. Instead, it shut down. Herds of pronghorns moved from the sparse grassy bottoms where they'd been grazing through the night to the high desert plateaus where they could be seen for miles – and they could be on the lookout for predators. Herds of wild horses, with their cracked hooves and woolly jug-heads, trotted across openings headed for the shade of wind-formed rock oddities that looked in the right light like Doric columns that remained from ancient ruins.
It was the early morning hours when cottontails retreated to their dens and upland game birds moved from feeding on seeds and grass to structure and safety.
That was why Nate chose this time to hunt.
But he wasn't the only predator in the area.
The gyrfalcon, the largest and most formidable falcon of the species, was a horizontal hunter. Unlike the prairie falcon, which struck its prey fast and low and often in the air from a perch or promontory, or the peregrine that screamed down from the heavens at 200 miles an hour with balled fists and intercepted its target in a mid-flight explosion of meat and feathers, the huge gyr cruised silent and white above the desert floor. When the gyrfalcon sighted its prey — a rabbit, sage grouse, or gopher — it maneuvered its profile into the sun, then simply dropped down on it as if from the sun itself and pinned its prey to the ground. The gyr then used its weight and the powerful grip of its talons to crush the life out of its meal. If the prey continued to struggle or wouldn't die fast enough, the gyr bent over and severed the spinal cord with its hooked, razor-sharp beak.
Nate wasn't sure how long he'd been hunting with the new gyrfalcon. There were gaps in his memory. All he knew was that the big bird was his partner and had arrived as some kind of gift from the arctic where it thrived and now he was hunting with it.
The falcon was stocky and thick the first time he lifted it up on his glove, and it weighed more than any raptor he'd ever flown. It was smaller than a golden or bald eagle but not by much, maybe a pound or two less. When it was in the air, its five-foot wingspan and mottled white coloring reminded Nate of a flying white wolf. In the dawn of the desert, when the first shafts of the sun lit up the gyrfalcon in flight, its coloring made it look twice as big as it actually was. The gyrfalcon was a formidable weapon. If a peregrine was a cruise missile, Nate thought, the gyrfalcon was a Stealth bomber.
Gyrfalcons had been reserved for royalty in ancient times. Commoners couldn't fly them. It was a miracle that the big white bird had shown up. She was a big female, almost...