Free Pepsi Bears and Other Stories by Anson Cameron

and it and two other raptors escaped. The Steppe Eagle and the Caledonian Osprey didn’t get far. They died of probable heartbreak in the endless geometries of industrialHamburg. Citizens found their remains and called the phone number on their leg bands to report the fatalities.
    But the young falcon took to the unfettered air, feeling bliss, I guess, at home at last in the grand architecture of the sky.
    It disappeared for a year, before a ranger with the Northern Territory Parks and Wildlife Service called from the bottom of the world to report its discovery. That ranger was me. The ornithologists at the Hamburg World Wildlife Park wouldn’t believe I was calling from Australia to report I had found their falcon. Likewise I could barely believe I had called Germany. I had to email them photographs of the leg band, still attached to the desiccated raptor, so they could read its identification number for themselves.
    How did that falcon get back to Australia from Germany? Falcons are not migratory birds. It had no electro-magnetic template of the world in its bones. It had no map of the world behind its eye. Alfven waves from the sun could not have charted its course. Global wind patterns, so orderly and knowable to some species, should have been a trackless mishmash to it. The stars of the north were not stars its ancestors had known. It had no instinct to serve it. It had no direction home. It had gone to Europe in the hold of a 747 as an egg. And flown home as a bird.
    I have come up with several theories, all of which smack of anthropomorphism, and none of which satisfy me. He may have flown blindly east on the prevailing September winds into Russia and the Arctic, where, bychance, he hooked up with the dwindling flocks of the Bar-tailed Godwit as they began their migration south. If this scenario is to hold water the Godwits must recognise an Australian accent and allow him to hitch a ride on their migration, for the wader is not happily accompanied by the raptor.
    He may have teamed up with the Eastern Curlew or Latham’s Snipe flying in ever-diminishing flocks out of China and Japan for the Australian summer. But, in truth, I am bestowing a national identity on creatures that have none. The Eastern Curlew and Latham’s Snipe are not Aussies abroad, and the lamb would sooner lie down with the lion than either of these two gentle birds hook up with a falcon. No. It is, looked at from any angle, a most singular migration. Singular enough to ignite a fevered email chatter among the ornithologists of the world.
    But if my wonder is deep, if my disbelief at this bird quickens my breath and furrows my brow – and it does – then imagine the shock Wolfi must have felt when he discovered it.
    So let it now be 2008. And Wolfgang Stemple, at face value a serial tourist and outback enthusiast, has returned to the Western Desert. In the pocket of his cargo pants is a Garmin eTrex GPS navigator and in this device are programmed two-hundred and twenty-eight sets of coordinates, each pinpointing the nest of a pair of birds. The coordinates remain valuable for the life of the breeding pair, because most birds out here use the same nest site year after year. The coordinates are theproduct of years of hunting and this GPS can walk Wolfi to any nest of any species of bird he has an order for. It is a modern-day treasure map.
    Already nestled in electric blankets in his room in the Oasis Hotel in Alice Springs incubating at a constant 34 degrees Celsius, Wolfi has the eggs of crimson chats, rainbow bee-eaters, pink cockatoos, whistling kites, wedge-tailed eagles, Australian hobbies, galahs, princess parrots, ringneck parrots, pied honey-eaters, dusky woodswallows, boobook owls and zebra finches. Loot worth probably two-hundred thousand euros on the EEC black market.
    This August day, wearing a slouch hat, Wolfi is riding a hire horse called Cards along the Larapinta Trail out west of Alice Springs to harvest