Free Bookends by Liz Curtis Higgs Page B

already plenty full.
    An amicable guy wearing jeans and a bulky army jacket was pointing in various directions, dispatching the faithful to their assigned positions with maps that showed the boundaries of their count areas. Jonas listened and nodded, then turned to find an owl-like Emilie standing behind him—eyes wide open, lips pursed shut in a fair imitation of a beak.
    He swallowed his second guffaw of the morning. “Ready to find a great horned? That’s what you’ve got on your tape there.” He steered her toward the stretch along Willow Point Trail that would be their stakeout.
    “I beg your pardon?” She followed along behind him, trying to keep up with his long strides yet maintain a safe distance from the jubilant Trix. “Did you say there’s a great horn on this tape?” She closed the gap, firing questions at him as she did. “What kind of horn? A trombone? A trumpet? Why would an owl respond to a brass instrument?”
    He stopped long enough to get her complete attention. “A great horned
owl,
Emilie. A bird, not a trumpet. You’ll hear your share of birdsong today, but none of them will be working from the Moravian hymnal. Got that?”
    “Well!” She shoved the tape recorder under her left arm and marched ahead of him. “First of all, I didn’t hear you properly. And second of all, my specialty is history not ornithology. A person has to learn these things.”
    “Yes, a person does.” He caught up with her in three strides and nabbed her coat at the elbow, careful to grip only fabric and not flesh. “You
do
have a lot to learn, and I’m just the man for the job. You’ll see. By day’s end, you’ll be more proficient than a mockingbird when it comes to mimicking bird calls.”
    Emilie looked doubtful. “I will?”
    “Would I steer you wrong, Doc?”
    Her only response was that V thing she did with her eyebrows.
    With Trix straining at the leash, Jonas waved toward a copse of trees, barely visible in the inky darkness. Separated from the others, he felt rather than heard the subtle sounds of nature awakening around them. Though a great horned was more likely to hoot at dusk, an early morning serenade wasn’t out of the question.
    “Here, on this log.” He sat down and patted a smooth spot next to him, then watched Emilie perch on a rougher patch of bark, putting more distance between them. “Wherever you’re comfortable, then.”
    Out of habit, he uncapped his binoculars, then remembered they were useless in the low light. “For later,” he explained, hoping she didn’t catch his mistake. “For now, press Play on that recorder, then listen closely. If we’re lucky, a great horned out there will hear our mechanical bird and call back.”
    Slipping off one glove to dutifully press the button, she shook her head. “I’ve heard of books on tape, but
birds
on tape? I’ll believe it when I see it.”
    “When you
hear
it, you mean.”
    “Humph.”
    The tape whirred in silence, then four low-pitched hoots droned out of the small speaker, each one less than a second long. Silence. Then another series of low hoots.
    He nudged her foot with his and whispered, “Turn it up.”
    A slight breeze carried the lone recording of a forlorn owl, hooting at who knew what.
    Hoot. Hoot. Hoot. Hoot.
    Minutes passed with no other sound but Trix’s subdued panting. Finally, in the endless stillness between the taped calls, an answer echoed from the invisible branch of a nearby tree.
    Hoot. Hoot. Hoot. Hoot.
    Emilie whirled around on the log, almost tipping over in her excitement. “Did you hear that?” She rose and moved in the direction of the sound, her light step barely snapping the twigs underneath her.
    He couldn’t resist the urge to swing his binoculars up and rest them on the bridge of his nose, adjusting the focus until he had a certain brown-haired woman captured in his sights. Even in the faint light of predawn, he saw the expectancy on her face, the touch of awe in her expression, the