Free The Painted Tent by Victor Canning Page B

prey. The poisons from chemicals like Dieldrin, Aldrin, Heptachlor and DDT built up through the whole food chain of insects, rodents, small birds, wood pigeons and the fish in the seas and finally killed the preying birds at the end of the chain. Although he sometimes talked about this with Mr Samkin, and asked his advice about books, he never mentioned Fria to him or to Sandra. Not that he distrusted them but he knew now how a careless remark could spread and he wanted Fria left alone to take her chance of freedom if she chose to do so. So far she showed no sign of doing this.
    Every morning when he went out to the barn Fria would be sitting on her beam, either far out to enjoy the winter sun or drawn back under the small pent roof if the weather was bad. She ate and drank regularly now, and often, clinging to her beam, would raise and beat her wings as though she longed to let go and launch herself but could not find the courage. But some differences Smiler did notice in Fria. She ate more and her plumage was coming back into a better condition. She was so used to him, too, that when he came to the loft entrance she would move only the minimum distance along her beam to be out of his reach. Sometimes Smiler would stand and watch her for quite a long time, and he would talk to her in a soothing voice, but as the days went by there were times when he got angry with her and scolded her for not taking off and trying her wings. As an experiment he withheld her drinking and bath water for two days, hoping she would fly down to the brook, but Fria stayed where she was. Smiler, unable to be cruel, restored her water.
    Yet, in the end, it was water which made Fria leave her beam. For many days she had watched the world around the farm and was familiar with it and with the passage of human beings and the creatures of the ground and the air. So far few other animals had marked her presence on the beam. The starlings and sparrows and the odd jackdaw had seen her and recognized the menace which was written in her shape and stance. They kept away from the front of the barn now. If the cohorts of rooks that had taken to wild aerobatics over the valley wood as the time for repairing old nests crept on had seen her they might have been bold enough to come down in ragged company and mob her into moving. So far she had escaped their sight. Fria saw and knew them all.
    Most of all, though, she watched, particularly if the morning were sunny and there was a touch of added warmth in the air, the movement of the water in the brook. At the end of the first farm field the brook bank had been carried away by flood and the stream spread back in a wide half-moon over a gravelly shallow only a couple of inches deep. A restlessness which had been slowly growing in her was always more marked when she watched the sunlight rippling over the shallows, for although the air is the peregrines’ first love and true element they all have a love, too, of water, of bathing and cleanliness. Smiler had provided her with a bath but Fria, although she used it now and then, did not like it. Her feet slipped on the smooth metal of the tray and she found it difficult to bob and dip her head under and send the water rolling over her mantle in the way which instinct demanded of her.
    One windless, sunny morning in mid-February, Fria sat surveying the brook and the shallows. Suddenly, when no one was watching, she launched herself from the beam, gave a few slow beats of her scimitar-pointed wings and glided the two hundred yards down to the brook. She settled a little clumsily between two patches of cotton grass at the edge of the pool, raised her head to the sky, and then walked into the shallow water. With the gravel firm under her feet and nothing to block off her wide area of vision, she took a bath. The first she had ever known in freedom.
    She dipped and bobbed her head under, letting the water roll back over her neck and down her wings. She loosened her breast