“I’m not supposed to go into the park,” Nest advised him solemnly, and glanced furtively over her shoulder at the house again. “Gran says I can only go into the park with her.”
“Hnimm. Well, yes, I suppose that makes sense.” Pick rubbed at his beard and grimaced. “Parental rules. Don’t want to transgress.” He brightened. “But that’s just for another year or so, not forever. Just until you’re a little older. Your lessons could begin then. You’d be just about the right age, matter of fact. Meanwhile, I’ve got an idea. A little magic is all we need. Here, pick me up and put me in your hand. Gently, now. You’re not one of those clumsy children who drop things, are you?”
Nest reached down with her hands cupped together, and Pick stepped into them. Seating himself comfortably, he ordered her to lift him up in front of her face.
“There, hold me just like that.” His hands wove in feathery patterns before her eyes, and he began to mutter strange words. “Now close your eyes,” he told her. “Good, good. Keep them closed. Think about the park. Think about how it looks from your yard. Try to picture it in your mind. Don’t move …”
A warm, syrupy feeling slipped through Nest’s body, beginning from somewhere behind her eyes and flowing downward through her arms and legs. Time slowed.
Then abruptly she was flying, soaring through the twilight high over Sinnissippi Park, the wind rushing past her ears and across her face, the lights of Hopewell distant yellow pinpricks far below. She was seated astride an owl, the bird’s great brown-and-white feathered wings spread wide. Pick was seated in front of her, and she had her arms about his waist for support. Amazingly, they were the same size. Nest’s heart lodged in her throat as the owl banked and soared with the wind currents. What if she were to fall? But she quickly came to realize that the motion would not dislodge her, that her perch astride the bird was secure, and her fear turned to exhilaration.
“This is Daniel,” Pick called back to her over his shoulder. In spite of the rush of the wind, she could hear him clearly. “Daniel is a barn owl. He carries me from place to place in the park. It’s much quicker than trying to get about on my own. Owls and sylvans have a good working relationship in most places. Truth is, I’d never get anything done without Daniel.”
The owl responded to a nudge of Pick’s knees and dropped earthward. “What do you think of this, Nest Freemark?” Pick asked her, indicating with a sweep of his hand the park below.
Nest grinned broadly and clutched the sylvan tightly about the waist. “1 think it’s wonderful!”
They flew on through the twilight, crossing the playgrounds and the ballparks, the pavilions and the roadways. They soared west over the rows of granite and marble tombstones that dotted the verdant carpet of Riverside Cemetery, east to the tree-shaded houses of Mineral Springs, south to the precipitous cliffs and narrow banks of the sprawling Rock River, and north to the shabby, paint-worn town houses that fronted the entry to the park. They flew the broad expanse of the Sin-nissippi to the wooded sections farther in, skimming the tops of the old growth, of the oaks, elms, hickories, and maples that towered out of the growing darkness as if seeking to sweep the starry skies with their leafy branches. They found the long slide of the toboggan run, its lower section removed and stored beneath, waiting for winter and snow and ice. They discovered a doe and her fawn at the edge of the reedy waters of the bayou, back where no one else could see. Deep within the darkest part of the forest they tracked the furtive movement of shadows that, cloaked in twilight’s gray mystery, might have been something alive.
They swept past a massive old white oak, one much larger than its fellows, its trunk gnarled by age and weather, its limbs crooked and twisted in a way that suggested immense fury and desperation captured in midstride, as if a giant had been frozen in place and transformed one bare instant before it had fallen upon the world it now shadowed.