The Summer of the Falcon by Jean Craighead George

boring work. She would bring a pillow and sit in the yard, whistling and holding up her hand until it ached. She was taunted by voices laughing at the creek’s edge and the sound of canoe paddles thumping gunnels. She wanted to run and play, but instead she tried to close her ears and concentrate on Zander.
    “Come on, come on,” she coaxed. “Please fly!” But the stubborn bird took his time. He would even lower his body, get ready to fly, and then straighten up and look at a moth in the air. After an hour he would answer her call, as he learned once again that the whistle meant food.
    June was slowly understanding that to train a falcon was to play “come and be rewarded.” A whistle is given, the bird flies. He is rewarded. This happens again and again, until the whistle is imprinted in his mind so deeply that when the bird hears it, without thinking “whistle equals food,” he spreads his wings and answers the sound.
    But to make this sequence of events possible takes, especially in a bird brain, endless practice and endless repetition—repeat, repeat, repeat, until Zander did not have to think what to do.
    It occurred to June as she sat in the field whistling and coaxing that she should have kept at the piano as faithfully as she was training Zander. She thought, I might have trained my hands until they played alone, without my head saying, “here’s the note on the paper, I put it in my head, then my head tells my hands and my hands hit the key.” But last year I didn’t understand what they meant by “practice.” It was just a nasty word designed to inconvenience and punish me. I wonder if Zander feels the same way about me?
    After ten long, determined days Zander was back in flying condition. June could set him free, swing the lure, and out of the sky he would wing, to clamp his talons on the bait.
    But this was only the first step. Now she must discipline him to hunt.
    Charles and Don had been working, too. They made a mouse out of gray felt, and on the day Zander was to start hunting, they tied a bite of beef on it and fastened it to a long string. June tossed Zander onto his wings, then hid behind the maple tree as she pulled the felt mouse. At first the falcon in the sky looked down at June and the strange mouse. He fluttered aloft and circled the house. June whistled, the whistle brought him at once to her fist. She was disappointed that he would not strike the mouse, but thrilled again to the bird’s return to her hand.
    Day after day June threw Zander into the sky and pulled the mouse, with little jerky movements, across the yard. Zander tried to understand what was happening, but the routine needed to be done over and over before he could react.
    “Pounce on it!” she cried to the bird above her head.
    “Close your wings and come down!” The little falcon only waited on until June whistled him down.
    “Haven’t you any falcon sense?” she said to him one evening in utter frustration, and she shook him on her fist. He fluffed in pleasure, for her movements were not understood. To him they were the wind rocking a tree.
    Then came the day June pulled the mouse across the grass—and Zander’s hunting sense was aroused. He looked down from the sky, cocked his eye and put the felt toy in acute focus. Two eyes give a bird visual distance, one eye, sharp focus. So it was one eye on the mouse, then two; and Zander dropped out of the sky to bull’s-eye the target.
    June was thrilled. She had brought the falcon to the bait alone. Her brothers were out fishing and she could only shout to the bird her feeling of glory.
    “We did it. We did it. Yippeee yi!”
    And again the next day he hit the mouse, and the next. The third day Don and Charles, sitting on the porch watching like coaches at a game, arose, and huddled. They turned to June, “Time to hunt him!” they said with proud grins.
    June laughed with joy, and, two-stepping in a circle, she lifted Zander overhead on her wrist.
    “Let’s