The Painted Tent Read Online Free PDF Page B

hind legs and thrust her muzzle between the bars and held out her plaster-bound foreleg for him to shake. Smiler fondled her muzzle, shook hands with her and sent her back to bed. In other pens and cages, all for some reason or other temporary lodgers, were animals from the menageries and children’s zoos which travelled with the circuses; a Barbary ram, a small honey bear, a porcupine and, in the end pen, a South American tapir which was stretched out on its side snoring like an old man.
    On the other side of the barn were the bird cages. All of these were empty except for three. One held a griffon vulture, huddled on its perch like a dejected old lady with a shabby boa of feathers around her neck. Another held a pair of Indian mynah birds. As Smiler stood in front of their cage one of them opened a sleepy but bright eye, surveyed him, and then, giving a drowsy whistle, said, ‘Lord, look at the time! Look at the time!’ whistled once more, and closed its eye. But of all the creatures in the barn, the bird in the third occupied cage was the one which interested Smiler most of all. It was a peregrine falcon.
    Her name was Fria and Bob had told him that she had been taken from an eyrie in Wales – before she could properly fly – by a falconer who intended to train her. But the circumstances of his own life had changed after a while and he had given her to the Duchess. He had felt that this was the best thing to do because to have loosed her to freedom would only have meant her death. She had had no training in how to hunt for her food and her wings were stiff and incapable of long flight from lack of the exercise she would have had in the wild state.
    Fria sat on her perch, eyes wide open, and watched Smiler. She was now over two years old and had long moulted into her adult plumage so that her whitish breast was streaked crosswise with grey, whereas before, her breast had been buff-coloured and streaked vertically with brown. Her back was now a deep blue-black. There was little gloss or shine to her feathers and she looked a sorry sight. But for all this there was still a fierce dignity in the way she stared from fixed eyes at Smiler as though to prove that for all her captivity her spirit was still far from broken.
    Smiler felt a lump rise in his throat as he eyed her. He didn’t like to see animals in captivity at all, though he knew that it was inevitable that some had to be, especially those to whom freedom would mean death. But Fria moved him more than all the others. Of all creatures he loved birds because they seemed to carry the real meaning of freedom in their lives. In Scotland he had watched the high-soaring of golden eagles and the lazy circling of buzzards, seen the strong, steady flight of geese and the wild aerobatics of green plovers, and before that, when he had first run away from approved school, watched the wing-trembling hover of kestrels over Salisbury Plain and the marauding swoop of sparrow-hawks along hedges and around trees as they chased their prey.
    Now, watching Fria, he wondered if she could remember back to the days of her eyrie life, to the moment when her wings were growing strong enough almost to the point of lifting her into flight alongside her falcon mother and her tiercel father … to take her up into the freedom of the air where she would be taught to stoop and prey and slowly gain a mastery of the air which would have been her real life. It was something he didn’t like to think about.
    He moved away, switched off the light and locked up the barn. As he went to his bed, because all his recently passed troubles and adventures had, without his knowing it, begun to mature him, to change the boy of near sixteen to the beginning of manhood, he told himself that although Nature was full of death and cruelty it was a savagery that was without real evil. But the cruelty of man towards animals came not from any natural law but from the stupidity and