“Your strategy to place the Flow Hives with the older box hives is a good idea. That way, you can tell which works better for the bees and their keepers.”
Cari was wearing a ranch baseball cap along with her jeans, a pink top, and a light terry jacket. She had gone to Helen Dinkins at the Mariposa Hair Salon, a hairdresser in Silver Creek, and cut off her hair and gave it to Locks of Love, for women who had lost their hair during chemotherapy. And Helen had shown her how to use the henna, which was messy compared to the commercial rinses or dyes, but Cari wanted something natural. When she’d come back to the ranch, she saw how sad Chase looked at her cut hair, but he said nothing. Cari felt the loss, too. She loved her long, silky, straight hair. She’d grudgingly gotten used to her very short auburn-colored hair, sometimes still startled by it when she looked into her bathroom mirror. Now, she had a driver’s license with her new disguise, several ranch credit cards with her fake name on them, and her identity change was complete. Every day that she worked outdoors with the bees, Theresa, and Theresa’s children, the fear of Dirk was slowly beginning to dissolve.
Having Chase as her boss was heaven, and a special, growing hell for her. She’d never been drawn so instantly to a man, and that scared the bejesus out of her. There were few men in this world who treated a woman not only with respect, but as an equal. He was a rare find. The more she worked with Chase, the more her heart wanted a relationship with him. Argh.
“How’s things going with our Wild Child over at the raptor training grounds?” he asked, giving her a grin.
“Valkyrie is truly a very unique character.” Cari laughed. “Absolutely fearless and fierce. She’s scared of nothing.”
“I took Jenny to the airport the other morning and she was crowing about how well you and that young red-tailed hawk are getting along.”
Snorting, Cari muttered, “Oh, our Wild Child is a handful and she knows it. She’d been good flying back and forth on the T-stands, so I thought I’d get her off the creance line. So I flew her out in the oval flight meadow the other day.”
“Yeah, well, how’d that go?”
Scowling, she said, “Not well. The first place Valkyrie went was to fly over that grove of trees. She scared me to death! She dove into a tree at something, crashing through the treetops again, and when I found her by the radio receiver we had affixed to her tail feathers, she was on the forest floor with nothing to show for it.” Laughing, she said, “Apparently she went after a squirrel or something and it beat her to its safe place. She was shrieking, flapping her wings, stomping around on the pine needles around the base of that pine tree, totally pissed off. I saw the squirrel looking out of its hole, which was dug between two of its roots. The squirrel was scolding loudly, chut-chut-chutting at the hawk, who was pacing back and forth in front of her hole—just taunting her. Serves Valkyrie right. She hopped up on my glove and I put the jesses between my fingers, fed her some mouse meat from my pouch, and she was a happy bird.”
“That was a happy squirrel, too.”
“Yes, but I was terrified that she’d fractured her wing with that darned dive. I swear, she thinks she’s a peregrine falcon mated with a harpy eagle! She dove straight down into that treetop like it wasn’t even there, her whole focus on that squirrel she saw beneath the leaf cover.”
Chase walked her down to where the two ranch trucks were parked along the dirt road. “That’s a pretty interesting visual, if you ask me.”
She giggled. “Well, when I got back to the raptor module, I ran immediately to find Dr. Cathy. Valkyrie had skinned herself on that dive, and a bunch of small feathers around the front of her left wing were ripped off. Cathy took a look at her and said she was fine, just a bit of most probably a bruised ego, was all. She said to give Valkyrie a rest for about four days before taking her out again, and she suggested keeping her on the creance line. I agreed.”
“That hawk has the nine lives of a cat,” he muttered, shaking his head. They halted at the trucks.