Free Hawkmaiden by Terry Mancour

arduous in that it was long, and every step took her a little higher in elevation.  The trail wound all over the western and southern slope of the mountain until, at the far eastern side of the southern slope, the path grew much narrower, and much rockier.
    From then on, Dara was sweating.  She was a strong girl well used to hard work, but the path was harder, more a staircase of rock with occasional patches of dirt than a proper trail.
    At a small clearing about half way up the eastern slope Dara rested and drank some water.  The climb was a lot harder than she’d anticipated, she realized.  She felt like she’d been hiking all day, yet the sun had yet to peek over the far eastern ridge.  Dara gave herself until the bright orb made an appearance, which also illuminated the trail helpfully.  But she also realized she needed more leverage if she was going to make it up the increasingly steep trail.
    She found a hickory sapling not too far off the trail, and she used her knife to score it enough to break it off.  It was tough work, but the difficulty she had in breaking the sapling loose gave testament to its strength, and Dara needed that strength.  Once she’d trimmed off the branches and topped the sapling off, the result was a pole just over an inch thick and five feet long.  A perfect walking stick, for a girl her size.
    Dara continued up the trail.  It was decidedly harder, after that lovely little clearing.  And much steeper.  The trail went from being less stair-like and more ladder-like, as she had to employ her hands more to pull herself up.
    A brief respite offered by a hundred-yard long game trail gave Dara some hope that the worst was behind her . . . until she came to the far western side of the mountain.  She realized she was already three-quarters of the way up, and she could even see the peak, from a few vantage points.  But when she reached the end of the game trail, she had to ascend a much, much steeper grade.  Nearly straight up.  It was a daunting task, but Dara rested a bit and then tore into it.  She had come this far up the mountain, she reasoned.  She didn’t see the point of coming back down without a bird.
    It was light enough to see clearly, now, and the mountaintop swarmed with life around her as she climbed.  Every tree she grasped for leverage seemed to have a bird or three in it, or a swarm of late autumn tid-gnats, and once she disturbed a sleepy old racquiel who was not happy with her trespassing through his neighborhood.
    And all around her the mountain was alive with birds.  This time of year, when the leaves were changing, there were armies of the things around the Westwood.  And first thing in the morning, they were all hungry for the night insects that had been lazy getting home.
    A perfect time for a mother Raptor to feed, Dara reasoned.
    Redoubling her efforts, she persisted at the climb until she came to the bottom of the final cliff face.  A small ledge gave her a little room – a very little room – to rest herself for a few moments on one of the last few tufts of grass and shrubbery before the mountain turned to dark rock. 
    Dara eyed the cliff nervously as she drank a few more swallows from her bottle.  It was almost gone, and she was barely at the top.  It didn’t look so bad, she reasoned.  It was a bit smooth, but the grade wasn’t that impossible, she decided.  In fact, the peak was less than fifty feet away, from where she sat.
    The ropes that had been such a burden on her shoulders the entire way up she piled into a long coil, before fastening one end to her body, tying a kind of harness around her waist and shoulders.  Donning her gloves and leaving her mantle behind, she began the last ascent.  She began searching for a good place to anchor the rope to, and almost at once she learned why the last fifty feet to the peak were so bad. 
    There were scant handholds, and the face of the rock was smooth and hard.  She hadn’t climbed ten feet