The boys raced through the darkening woods, the cool, damp, evening air invigorating as it swept past Jess’ muzzle. He took the beck in a single bound. His brother, he knew, would need to meet it halfway, slowing him, giving Jess a further advantage. Sensing something, Jess glanced over his flank and knew, even before Alfie did, that he wasn’t going to make it. He began to turn—the roe deer’s fore legs stretched tight, its powerful hind legs coming about—just as his brother’s high scream rend the chill air and echoed through the ancient oaks.
“Alfie?” Jess said, kneeling down at the water’s edge.
His little brother was lying on his right flank, his hind quarters still in the cold water. The broken leg was uppermost and bent at an unnatural angle. Mercifully there was no blood; the bone hadn’t pierced the surface of his fine, tawny coat. He cradled Alfie’s head, stroking his muzzle. Alfie’s nostrils flared open, then closed, sending jets of mist out into the cold air.
“Oh, Alfie,” Jess said, “I know it’s hard to concentrate, but you need to return. People will come.”
Dad will come.
Alfie closed his eyes. And changed.
“The pain, Jess, the pain.”
“I know, Alfie, I know.”
Jess lay in bed, on his stomach, his arse as raw as a cut of sirloin.
He listened to his brother’s steady, but shallow breathing from across the other side of the large room that they shared in the roof space. His mother had told him that Alfie would probable sleep for days; the amount of painkiller that the hospital had pumped into him. She’d joked that they now lived in an opium den, like those Chinese newidwyr.
His mother hadn’t been as hard on him as his father—in that she hadn’t screamed and shouted—but Jess knew; knew that he’d let her down. He had failed to look after his brother, her little boy. Jess fought back tears. He would have endured double his father’s beating to erase the look on his mother’s face when Pa had carried Alfie into the kitchen. It was just a fleeting glance, before her whole attention switched to Alfie, but it was burnt onto his mind like a branding iron.
Jess rolled out of bed—he needed to get out; he needed air. He crept across the bare, wooden floor. No chance of waking Alfie, of course, but his parents slept below them in the only other room in the house. Carefully, he opened the window. He lifted one bare foot onto the sill and, with a single, practiced push, the other, simultaneously spreading his wings and stretching them out, a single, soft hoot of satisfaction escaping before he had the chance to stifle it. Taking a deep breath, he tilted forwards and dropped into the night air.
Oh the joy. The whoosh in the pit of your stomach as, wings tucked, you plummet towards the ground; only to spread and rise, your guts remaining less than a foot from the gravel yard.
Jess needed a workout, a release, so he pumped hard, feeling the air’s resistance against the small bones in his wings, the stretching of the pectoralis across his breast and the rapid beating of his tiny heart. Now he permitted himself a loud chorus of approval, instantly responded to by his cousins all around him.
Sometimes, on clear evenings like this, Jess loved to soar effortlessly above the tree tops, the views south to the Welsh coast and the big cities magnificent. One evening he even went as far as Caerdyf. However, tonight he wanted to work, so he chose a route through the dense goedwig, needing the challenge of an aerial assault course.
He picked up speed, tilting and rolling, missing branches by inches. He dropped below a large oak lateral, banking sideways to avoid its offshoots. Then, a slight extension of the left wing to catch the air, and… up, the cold air stinging his lungs, his pectoralis running hot.
Rolling over the top of the next lateral he dropped almost vertically, now trimming the moss, only a few inches from the ground. Skimming maidenhead ferns, he recalled his father’s anger this afternoon. ‘How do ya think’—thwack—‘that we explained it to the nurse’—thwack—‘then the Doctor’—thwack—‘then the Radiologist’—thwack. How did you explain such a harsh break in the forearm of a dynol; a human? It was like a footballer’s broken leg; but in a forearm. Jess pushed even harder, briefly surfing a fast flowing beck, before rising again. Why couldn’t he be normal, like all the other dynol at school? Like Abigail.
Levelling out Jess glanced ahead… and found himself staring at an rapidly approaching tangle of Larch.
Shit.
Immediately, instinctively, his tail fanned, his wings flared—pull-up, pull-up.
Jess’ muscles burnt molten. He glanced up and ahead. Fuck, not enough. A little more on the pectoralis minor… a little more… more… he slowed, but not enough… more. Come on!
The topmost branches caught his belly. Pain as some secondary feathers dragged at the highest foliage. And then, he was clear, the starlit sky open above him
Song erupted from him; a full chorus of exhilaration, relief and triumph.
He heard the double hoot and a machine gun chirrup from behind him and, without needing the quick backward glance, knew that he’d been tailed. His father dipped his left wing and Jess followed him down a long, tight spiral towards a slither of beck running through long fell grass. Ringed by hazel, the full, bright moon gave the clearing an almost druidical quality; that of the ancients. Jess landed on a rock in the centre of the beck and drank. Sated, he sighted his father sitting on the bank a few feet away watching him, his eyes still slightly too large, but shrinking as Jess stared, trying to gauge the mood; another bollicking?
Jess fluttered over and landed on the grass next to him. He changed.
“I reckoned I’d find you out tonight,” his father said. “You was flying hard and true ‘til you let your attention wander.”
Jess nodded as he stared at a vole taking a drink from the water’s edge. He glanced up and his father smiled. “It’s OK son,” he said, patting Jess’ knee, “I’ve said my piece this afternoon. What’s done is done. And I can tell from your flying that you’re just as angry wi’ yourself.”
Jess looked away, blinking hard, his face ablaze. His hand was squeezed. He squeezed it back.
“Did I ever tell ya about your uncle Bart’s flying accident?”
Jess shook his head.
“Barty was drunk one night. At your grandpa’s place I think it was and, oh I don’t recall how it actually happened, but he got into this bet that he couldn’t fly down Brecon high street in broad daylight.”
Jess screwed up his face. “Nooo?”
“Oh yes. And it were a sunny day.”
“He’d ‘ave been blind.”
“Yep.”
Jess shook his head. He’d never met his Uncle Bart, he’d moved away well before Jess was born, but he must have been either very brave, or very stupid. “What happened?”
“He did alright, got all the way down from Castle Street, as far as St. Mary’s—you know, by the Wellington. Managed to avoid all the moving cars.” His father chuckled. “But it was the stationary one that did ‘im.”
“What? He flew into it.”
“Oh yeah, literally. Landed up on some old biddy’s lap.”
Jess threw his head back and laughed, imagining granny losing it as a large Long-eared landed on her tweed skirt. “That must ‘a’ been messy.”
“Well, thankfully Barty was quick to realise that he should just stay put. There was no way, with a three foot wingspan, that he was ganna flutter out of a Morris Minor without bustin’ something.”
“So they caught him?”
“Yep. They caught ‘im.”
Jess mind whirled. “But did he change?”
Pa shook his head. “No. Bart may have been a drunken old fool, but he was strong. Stayed as he was for three days.”
“Three days!”
“Yep.”
Christ. Jess had only ever managed one, and it took him a week to get over it; drained doesn’t even come close. But three days!
“What happened? What happened after three days?”
“Well, they assumed he was an escapee of some kind, so they took him to the sanctuary at Festival Park, ya know, down in Ebbw Vale, until they could find out where he came from. While he was there he sat on the keeper’s wrist as cool as you like. Took food out of her hands, cool as you like.” Pa chuckled. “So, on the second day, they untethered him.”
Jess laughed. “And he scarpered.”
“Yep. He even went back the next week to say hello to her.”
“As a Long-eared?”
“No. As a Dynol.” His father snorted. “And he swore blind the pretty lass recognised him. It was his eyebrows, he said, that gave ‘im away. He told this story in the front room of our ‘ouse. Everyone was in stitches.” His father paused, and Jess knew that a line of learning was coming. Pa always told stories with a purpose. “But it was what he said next, almost as an afterthought, that I’ll never forget.” Silence, except for a soft hoot in the distance, as Jess stared at his Pa’s sober expression. “He told the lass what he was. Even demonstrated.”
Jess’s mouth dropped open. “Jesus.”
His father shook his head. “I told you he was a fool. That shut the room up. No one took him serious after that.” He glanced across at Jess. “That’s why he moved away.”
Silence filled the clearing.
“Can you imagine what would have happened,” his father said, “if they’d believed him?”
Jess shivered. His father patted his knee. “Well, come on lad, let’s get back shall we. And pray that your ma’s stayed asleep, or there’ll be ‘ell to pay.” His lips twitched. “I’ll give you a head start.”
With that he leapt up, changed, and was off—some head start.
But Archie was never in the race. All the way back he couldn’t decide whether it was just an amusing story to cheer him up, or whether he knew about Abigail after all.
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