Frightful's Mountain

Frightful is drawn by her peregrine instincts to follow Chup to his cliff ledge home. She is used to her mountain filled with trees, so the terrain feels unfamiliar, yet she has a distant memory that she was born in a similar cliff environment. Chup bows to Frightful, honoring her for her size and power. Frightful sees Chup’s young—three eyases, or baby falcons. They call out to be fed, but Frightful does not know what to do. She watches Chup feed them by picking up morsels of duck and placing it in the eyases’ mouths one at a time. Chup also offers duck to Frightful, who is quite hungry. He then leaves to hunt, and Frightful continues to eat while he is gone. Chup’s first mate, the chicks’ mother, left to exercise one day and never returned, presumably having been killed. Although Frightful does not know the typical peregrine way of life, when the eyases snuggle into Frightful for warmth, her brooding instinct kicks in. When they start to cry again for food with an insistent “[p]see, psee, psee” (26), Frightful feels overwhelmed and unsure of how to feed them. She thinks of Sam again and prepares to take flight when Chup returns with food.

Frightful does not know that she is supposed to pluck the duck Chup brings and feed the chicks, so Chup does so, first feeding the females, Lady and Duchess. Before he can feed Drum, Chup sees a pigeon and leaves to catch it. Frightful is left with the screaming Drum, who eventually starts taking bites of food from Frightful’s mouth. Before long, the chicks grow large enough to be left alone, and Frightful leaves to hunt. At first, she struggles. She is used to hunting rabbits and pheasants in open fields with Sam and doesn’t know how to hunt ducks. Eventually, though, Frightful finds a dog named Mole, who scares up game from below the tall grass the way that Sam used to do for her. Frightful catches a rabbit kicked up by Mole, and although the dog and bird briefly fight over it, Frightful emerges victorious and returns to the cliff in the Schoharie Valley with food for the eyases.

Drum, Duchess, and Lady are used to eating birds and therefore do not eat the rabbit. When Frightful starts to eat it, they attack her. This is part of their training for the competitive world of survival they will be entering soon. Frightful flies to a nearby tree and watches as Chup returns home, weakened by hunger. The eyases attack him, too, but he fends them off and eats the rabbit. Eventually, hunger forces all three chicks to try the rabbit. Frightful and Chup now leave the aerie to the young and perch in trees nearby. This is a natural process for a peregrine family as the eyases gradually gain independence from their parents.

Frightful continues to hunt with Mole, and the two become a team. Frightful takes the rabbits and pheasants that Mole kicks up by running through a field but leaves skunks, rats, and the like for Mole. As the number of animals in a field starts to decrease, Mole leads Frightful to another, thus allowing the animals to repopulate the original field. Meanwhile, the eyases gradually learn to fly as wind sometimes carries them off the ground when they spread their wings. Their sharp vision also begins to develop, and they can see far into the distance and memorize details about their environment. As the young start to fly in short spurts, Chup and Frightful refrain from bringing them food. They must learn to fly back to the aerie and the food source or face death if they stay in place. 

As the eyases grow hungry at their various locations away from the aerie, instinct tells Frightful not to feed them. Duchess and Drum eventually flap their wings and make it to the aerie and to the food there. Duchess chases Drum off the cliff, and he takes flight. Duchess then flies accidentally when an updraft catches her wings as she stands at the edge of the aerie. Meanwhile, Lady, who is on the ground beneath the cliff, is in danger of starvation. She starts to climb the cliff, awkwardly beating her wings, and Frightful defends her when a fox tries to attack. Struggling toward the aerie, Lady gathers the last of her strength to grab a pigeon that Chup had just dropped there. Toward the end of the summer, the young peregrines catch their own food and then find their own homes away from the aerie. When they begin to sense changes in the weather, they migrate south. Frightful, however, does not feel the signals to migrate. She still feels a pull to locate Sam and his hemlock tree home. However, if Frightful waits too long, the migration window will close, and she will likely not survive the harsh northern winter.