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  Carrie’s forearm emerges from the cage holding a nervous, adolescent six-pound female bald eagle with one wing unnaturally canted. “You’re becoming one of our prize show birds, aren’t you?” Like ninety percent of the injured birds here, Wanagi flew into man-made trouble, in her case a fence. With her permanently injured wing she has a short flight range, maybe ten yards.

  “How many birds on site these days?” The entire complex, including two net-covered flight cages that together comprise the area of a football field, occupies thirty acres. In this row of two dozen cages on stilts, the air is pretty acrid.

  “We’re up this week. Just shy of a hundred. The birds are on the move. We need to get busy with a baldy count. Hey, weren’t you supposed to be in Europe looking for somebody?” She attaches leather jesses to the eagle’s ankles while I explain what Blue Cross demanded. “You going back?”

  “Absolutely. I just don’t know when.”

  That last night in Prague, after the black light theater, Milada lit into me, shouting, “Nemožné! Impossible! You are impossible.” She was so incensed I had to ask her to calm down. I’d been telling her that I planned to spend time with the raptors, assuming she’d find this prospect exciting after what she’d written about the Skagit, but her reaction took me by surprise. “You speak always about dignity,” she said. “Even if you are sick you must keep dignity. Okay, but dignity is what my husband want. It is like living in cage. If you want freedom, dignity is burden.”

  She refused to explain what she meant and during that long silent metro ride out to Chodov I considered that maybe she was worried I would never come back, and that could only possibly matter if she wanted me to sponsor her.

  Over the next hour, waiting for Waters to finish a surgery, I walk around the complex and say hello to Mote Man, a Barn Owl who thinks he’s human, and to Bob, a blind American Kestrel hit by a car, and I manage to wake up Heyokee, a Harris hawk who makes a grinding noise in his throat to complain. I’m stalling. Isis is my bird, but I want Waters to be with me when I visit him.

  It was Waters who introduced me to Isis last spring. My first day as a volunteer, waiting on the lawn outside her cabin, recalling an argument I’d had with Milada over whether freedom is actually liberating or a burden, I speculated that Milada might have reacted adversely to this place. That impression was only reinforced when Waters made her grand appearance lighting up a cigarette and wearing the outfit she’s worn every day I’ve seen her since—a lab coat over a pearl-button shirt tucked into tight western-cut jeans and tooled cowboy boots—and you can’t miss the ice-blue eye makeup.

  Catching me staring, Waters laughed. “Hey, what can I say, I was a rancher’s kid before I had my Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment.” Assuming from my reaction that I was a skeptical volunteer, Waters forewent the speeches and led me to Isis’ cage.

  With a ruffled blue tawny and gray chest and hooded, hyper-alert eyes, Isis looked scruffy and paranoid. He jiggered from foot to foot when we drew near, refusing to give us the satisfaction of a look that would say I know why you’re here.

  “Cooperate,” I told him. “It’s for your own good.”

  That wariness was making it impossible for Waters to help him. I made a joking reference to Isis being a male with the name of an Egyptian Goddess. That prompted Waters to explain how he’d become her special project.

  Isis had been one of four young in an experimental nest seeded by wildlife biologists on the Washington Mutual Towers in Seattle, operating on the theory that downtown there are cliffs, and plump pigeons and tasty starlings, and we have to find a way to live together. The four nestlings were sickened by a protozoa from a pigeon fed to them by their mother. In the wild, they’d have died and that would have ended the affair. This could not be allowed to happen in front of nervous bank execs with noses pressed to the glass. The nestlings were whisked away to Woodland Park Zoo. Three of the four died soon after. Embarrassed by the bad press, the zoo biologist called Waters to say that one female nestling had survived and she promptly named her Isis.

  Waters identified the protozoa and the falcon’s true gender. The infection had very slightly widened the choanal slit in the roof of Isis’ mouth on one side. These birds, the fastest on earth, fly at an incredible 200 mph swept-wing diving speed when hunting, and that itty bitty widening would make controlled flight impossible. Her only hope was to keep him, and watch. Eventually the opening seemed to heal, but no trainer has yet successfully coaxed Isis into the flight cage for a test.

  Common wisdom in this business has it that the longer in captivity, the less likely they are to survive in the wild. We argued about what to do. Dragging on her cigarette, Waters admitted that Isis was too suspicious of humans to become one of her show birds. But she had a theory. If one volunteer could just spend enough time with Isis, the reprobate might actually calm down enough to be moved.

  The challenge interested me, but with the Wyroc hearing coming up—an appeal that had been pending for two years and that in August would come to a vote before the city council—I couldn’t give more than the occasional weekend at Sardis. The rock crushing plant sought rezoning permits that would allow them to move their operation into town where their trucks would have better road access and would not have to pay the county’s higher excise fees. Nothing in all my decade and a half in city government had caused such partisan acrimony. The pro faction licked their lips at the idea of collecting tipping fees on twelve trucks per hour. The anti faction complained about overloaded stack lanes blocking traffic, not to mention flyaway dust and the usual noise pollution. As the city attorney enjoined to interpret compliance with the law, I was caught in the middle with both sides lining up expert testimony for the August showdown. There was no way to know at the time that this would be my last hurrah.

  Wouldn’t it be something if I could have my sister here for his grand release?

  * * *

  The spacious ICU clinic occupies the downstairs of Waters’ cabin. In front is an exam room with a gurney donated by a hospital. In the back, an operating room with Plexiglas incubators, one operating table, overhead drop lights, trays of sterilized instruments. That’s where I find Waters.

  “Welcome back, stranger.” She’s moving an anesthetized Barred Owl into a meshed cage. Waters has on her usual ice blue eye makeup. After checking to see that the gas is turned off, she lights up. “Hey, you find your sister?”

  “Wasn’t time. I’m still having trouble with insurance.”

  “You heard there’s a rafting trip coming up?” I thank her for her card. “Last Saturday in September. We’ll do the count now, then count ’em again in February to find out what percentage are over-wintering.”

  “Sign me up.” A rafting trip on the Skagit to count baldies? What could be more perfect for Milada? “My friend in Prague, the doctor who’s helping me find my sister … I told you about her? She wrote that piece about the Skagit for the Herald.”

  “You say she’s a doc? Could be useful. I’ll sign her up. But don’t talk about this. We can only take fourteen.”

  “What if we find my sister? This could be really inspirational.”

  “There’s gonna be a lot of pissed off people as it is. Don’t push it.”

  “What about Isis? You said you had a plan?”

  “Same old plan. We take him downtown and hope he decides it’s time to hunt again. But first we gotta get him into the flight cage. And that requires …”

  “I might have some time. I’ll know soon.”

  Waters’ walkie-talkie squawks. “Sorry, another emergency coming in. Go get reacquainted with Isis. Make sure you get your name back on the sign-up board.”

  “Put two of us down for the raft,” I remind her as she hurries away. In comes Carrie bearing Torkey on her arm. The twenty-seven-year-old red-tailed hawk, the oldest bird on site, has to be brought inside every afternoon to prepare for spending the night in a covered cage, like a canary. Torkey has arthritis in her limbs and hops aroun
d in her cage mad with fear whenever a new volunteer forgets to bring her in. I like Torkey. It’s not a bad life, this captivity, and she’s making the best of it.

  “You driving again?” Carrie says. “That a good idea? Hey, I’ll check the schedule, see who’s commuting up from Seattle these days.”

  I stop by Isis’ cage, but soon realize I’m torturing him. Establishing a rapport will not be easy. I leave before they can convince me I’m not fit to drive.

  * * *

  Down Best Road through the Skagit flats, there’s not much traffic. Instead of white-knuckling it all the way, I glance over at Mt. Baker and the glacier-notched Cascade foothills and wave to itinerant workers out in the fields and wish it were tulip season. I count the red-tailed hawks perched on the power lines, stopping at a dozen. Last February, when I drove Milada up here to have a picnic by the river, we came across thousands of migrating long-necked, graceful snow geese nosing into a pelt of new grass. She shouted, “Fantastic! Fantastic! Thank you so much for bring me here.”

  She wanted to see another river otter and insisted we drive up as far as Rockport. A heavy mist clung to the Skagit. The February air was a few degrees colder than 40, close to the temp of the water. When the mist parted, we glimpsed a swollen river plunging over its banks into the underbrush. Despite the whiteout in the sky, the water ran gunmetal gray and boiled against the bridge, stacking up log jams. Excited by the wildness of the current, I impulsively asked Milada if she’d ever consider coming here to stay. There were no otters to be seen in the turbulent waters. “I will come back,” she said, “you can be sure.” Then she left me at the bridge and ran past a stand of alders and scrambled over nurse logs and disappeared into the woods.

  The river began to frighten me with its currents, its barely contained will. “It’s going to snow,” I remember telling her as an excuse to leave as soon as she returned. We hurried back to the car.

  * * *

  It was a fluke that I learned of her existence at all. This past January, my townhouse had become a lonely place with Kasia gone. My ex has Polish parents. Our shared fate as the progeny of exiles attracted us to each other in the first place, but over time the combination proved too volatile. I figured my father could use some company, too. Mom had died from diabetes complications two years earlier. From what I could gather from our phone conversations, Dad had reduced his life to work—he still owns Lenoch Home Design and Build—and the Sunday drive to mass at St. Wenceslas and after to Bohemie town for the thick-cut, nearly fatless bacon he gets from his Czech butcher. I flew to visit him in Cedar Rapids. While he had me home—he still lives in the bungalow he built on Fruitland Boulevard, the same house where he raised my older sister and me—he asked me to poke through Mom’s things in the attic, see if there was anything I wanted to keep before he purged.

  A steel washer hangs on the end of a string in the landing where the stairs come up from the carport. When the washer and string are pulled, a drop down ladder gives access to the attic. My father has arthritis in his knees and hasn’t climbed up there in years. Anne, who lives in Williamsburg, had sent her goth teen daughter—I get a real kick out of Megan—to pack Mom’s things and haul them up.

  In the freezing attic I found Mom’s old trunk. Buried under the fine linens that came out only for Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner, I found the brown leather-bound family Bible with gilt lettering, the one I loved to thumb through as a kid. That swirling vine motif of the capital letters spoke of hidden castles and monstrous forests. It had been my favorite book in the house and I’d wondered why from one day to the next it was no longer on the coffee table by the rocker in the living room.

  Pressed between pages of that Bible I found what might have been the explanation: fourteen letters, all addressed to my father, all posted during the year and a half after he escaped Czechoslovakia, all handwritten in neat cursive and signed by a young woman named Rosalie. I hid the letters in my suitcase without telling my father I’d done so. Later, feeling guilty, I asked if he knew the letters had been saved.

  “Tito lidé už nežijí,” he said without any inflection in his voice, essaying what would become his standard response whenever I made inquiries into his Czech past. “Those people are dead.”

  Unbeknownst to my father, or even to Anne, who would have objected, I decided to have the letters translated. I drove to Solon, a town just outside of Cedar Rapids with a convent where, I’d learned, there lived a nun related to our family on the side of the Kacalek woman my grandfather had married bigamously in Iowa.

  I dropped off the letters. A few days later we met again in the priest’s rectory. “Here is your packet,” she said dryly, handing me the same manila folder I’d dropped off with her. She averted her gaze. She paced the room.

  “What did you learn? Who was Rosalie?”

  Her penny loafers squeaked on the tiled linoleum floor. The light through the arched, leaded-glass rectory window was dim. Outside was overcast. A dreary winter day. Finally she stopped, brushed down her garments, looked at me, her brow furrowed in deepest concentration, and said, “There has been a mortal sin. A suicide. It was the first husband of Barbora Kacalka, Rosalie’s mother, the woman from Písečná who went to Iowa with your grandfather and then married him even though he had not divorced your grandmother.” She continued to pace, her gaze averted. “But, it’s not certain that the man who killed himself was Rosalie’s father. I can say nothing more about this. If you wish to know more, you must go to Písečná.

  “There is one thing more,” she added, before I could ask questions. “It seems that you have a sister, a half-sister, Anežka, daughter of Rosalie and your father. I give to you these letters and their translations. They are yours. I wish to speak of them no further.” Hands folded across her rosary, she made it plain that our conference was over. “Please, never trouble me with this matter again.” She waited for me to leave.

  Mom, I realized as I drove back to Cedar Rapids, had to have known about Anežka. That would explain the mysterious letter she sent me not long before she died, “You should go to Písečná one day, even if it means displeasing your father.”

  While I remained in Cedar Rapids, I called Anne to ask her to have her blood tested as a potential organ donor. She countered with a question, “How long are you home?” She’s a generous person. She gives of her time enormously and I consider myself fortunate to have her nearby to take care of my father now that he’s older. It’s not that. My request, rather, threw her off her routines—she is as rigid as our father.

  Upon returning to Seattle, I read and reread those translated letters. Written blandly to pass the scrutiny of censors, the letters revealed little about Rosalie beyond her demand that my father return to take his rightful place on the farm and raise their daughter. Not much use. Nothing for it but to go there.

  * * *

  Thanks to Blue Cross being willing to do anything to win that union contract, a few days after my drive to Sardis I receive an expedited phone call from Dr. Pomerantz. The new battery of tests convinced him that my condition has grown acute. I’m accepted for transplant surgery.

  “It’s official! I’m accepted!” I shout this out loud.

  There is, though, one more hurdle to leap. A home visit from an insurance rep must be scheduled to determine that they won’t spend money on a bad risk. Meanwhile, I’m to get my affairs in order. Once given my beeper, I have to stay on call within twenty-four hours from the medical center.

  I call Milada. She is guardedly ecstatic. This is great news, of course, but when does that mean I’ll be coming back to Prague?

  “First you’re coming back to Seattle,” I tell her. “I’ve got us both signed up for a rafting trip on the Skagit. The Skagit, can you believe it? We’re going to count bald eagles. You can’t say no. I’m buying your ticket. I’ll put it on my credit card, so don’t worry about it.”

  Soon as we hang up, I call SAS and make the reservation before she can change her mind.

&n
bsp; Chapter Four

  A Few Days Later in Seattle: Late September, 1994

  The day after Milada arrives from Prague, we drive north so I can introduce her to Waters and Isis before the rafting trip. We take the scenic detour over to Pioneer Road and then up Best Road through the Skagit flats. While we drive, Milada tells me about a famous radio series she and her friends listened to as kids in the sixties. To slip past censors, the series told what was claimed to be a fictional story of the Cimmermans, but Milada and her friends decided that the betrayal the Cimmermans suffered, the jail time, confessions forced by torture, seemed a little too authentic.

  “Our families suffered like Cimmerman family. Suffering changes people. People are not heroes when they suffer.”

  My father could have stayed, he could have slipped over the border into Poland—it wouldn’t have been far to go—and joined the partisans and slept in underground shelters in the forests and sniped at the occupiers. But, he left. If this illness has taught me anything, it’s to assume you know nothing. “Czech hero,” she adds, sensing my reticence to demote my father’s status, “is man who stay by workbench and wait when his day will come.” And how is that not being complicit? Of course I don’t say this.

  * * *

  When we arrive at Sardis, Carrie has just returned with the ambulance. Another farmer reported that a stunned owl had flown smack into the glass-walled porch of his farmhouse. “This is your lucky day,” Waters tells us. It’s a rare Boreal Owl, a denizen of the Canadian boreal forests that strayed south. “In seventeen years doing this I’ve never seen one of these guys.” Waters puts the bird on the scale. “A hundred and fifty-five grams. Weight fits the profile.” While Carrie holds our tiny patient on its back on a diaper stretched across the exam table, Waters starts a chart.