Winterkill

some birds at a place out by the river.”

“Some birds?”

“Falcons,” her dad said. “I’m doing a guy a favor.”

Sheridan had never seen a hawk up close, and she’d always wanted to.

“You bet, Dad,” she said.

Sheridan noticed, however, that her dad wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were fixed on his rearview mirror, watching the two men enter the Forest Service office.

“Oh,” her dad said, as they cleared Saddlestring on the highway. “I’m sorry. How did tryouts go?”

“Bad, I think,” she said.

“Did you hustle?”

She smiled. “That’s the one thing I did right.”

He winked at her. “That’s the most important thing, Sheridan. Even if you’re just hustling inside, and anybody who looks at you just sees calm. Always be aware of what’s going on around you.”

The wind picked up as they drove west. The fresh snow from the day before mixed with the gritty snow from the first storm and whorled in kaleidoscopic ground blizzards. Snow in Wyoming never stays in one place, Sheridan thought. It just keeps moving and rearranging itself, as if it’s constantly looking for a better place to live. They turned off of the highway and drove several miles down a snow-packed gravel road. Drifts were high and sharp on both sides of the pickup.

“There it is,” her dad said, pointing through the windshield.

“Is this the house of the man who’s in jail?” Sheridan asked.

“Yes, it is. He’s a falconer, and he asked me if I would feed his birds.”

“Is he a bad man?”

“He’s accused of murder.”

Sheridan screwed up her face. “Then why are we helping him?”

“We’re not,” Joe said. “We’re keeping the birds alive. There’s no reason they should be punished. At least, I hope we’re helping them. I didn’t see them the last time I was out here to feed them.”

There was a broken-down fence, and beyond that a small stone house and a little building of some kind that had collapsed. It wasn’t much, she thought, although the steep red bluff on the other side of the river was beautiful and vibrant in the last half-hour of sunshine. Her dad drove into the ranch yard close to the house and turned off the truck. Before getting out, he pulled on a pair of leather gloves.

“It’s cold but it’s not too bad,” he said, opening his door and jumping out. “Nate Romanowski picked a good place here. It’s the only spot in the valley where the wind isn’t blowing.”

Sheridan patted Maxine and closed the door on her. Sheridan didn’t need to be told that Maxine should stay in the cab of the truck if they were going to try to feed the birds.

Her dad stood near the front of the truck, looking at the stone house and shaking his head. The house’s front door was flung open, and clothes and furniture had been tossed out. Books lay open and facedown in the snow, their pages swelled with moisture so that they were twice their normal size.

“It’s been ransacked,” her dad said. “They tore the place apart to find evidence.”

Sheridan nodded. She thought that maybe her dad was a little ashamed that law enforcement had done this. After all, he was law enforcement, too.

He picked up a few of the books out of the snow. “The Art of War, Mutiny on the Bounty, Wealth of Nations, Huckleberry Finn,” he said, looking at the spines. Sheridan picked up two from the ground and followed him toward the cabin. Both of the books she had were about falconry.

Inside, they stacked the books on a counter before looking around. It was a mess. Cupboard doors hung open, drawers sagged. Their contents littered the floor. The mattress in the bedroom had been sliced open, its innards of cotton and spring exposed. Even sections of the interior walls had been smashed open.

Sheridan watched as her dad went back outside and brought the furniture back in. Most of the pieces—clearly not all that great to begin with—were damaged. “The least we can do is get this stuff out of the weather,” he said. It took her dad eight trips to get everything back inside. She helped as much as she could. One thing she could not stop staring at was a framed photo with cracked glass. The photo was faded, but it was of four men standing shoulder to shoulder in the desert. The men wore white robes, and behind them was a camel. Three of the men looked like Arabs, with dark features and beards. The fourth man was fair, with piercing eyes and a slight smile.

Her dad saw her looking at the picture and picked it up.

“That’s Nate Romanowski, by God,” he said, pointing at the fourth man. Her dad sounded surprised. He nodded at the picture, and pursed his lips as if reaffirming something.

“What is it?” She asked.

“Nothing,” her dad answered, but in a way that she knew meant he didn’t want to talk about it.

They went outside, and her dad closed the door behind them. Then he scanned the sky.

“There’s one of them,” he said, pointing toward the river. She followed his sight line, and there it was, all right.

“That’s a red-tailed hawk,” he said. “He’s immature, not older than a year. You can tell because he’s still got a brown tail and a speckled dirty breast.”

She looked to her dad, and he smiled. “Go ahead and walk up to him, but give him plenty of space. He needs sort of a cushion between you and him, or he’ll get nervous. I’ll go get some of their food and be with you in a