By late afternoon the razorback spine narrowed to a wind-scoured ledge no wider than a farm wagon, with a three-hundred-foot drop into the warm mist-gorge on the left and a sheer wall of fractured black slate rising on the right.
A sudden, violent shift in the weather came whistling down from the upper ice-fields. The steady cross-draft that the forkwing rookeries had been riding all day broke apart into a hammering squall of sleet and rotating downdrafts. Chaska called a halt, bracing her back against the cliff with one arm looped through Lilt’s harness while the big sandray flattened her body like a limpet against the shale.
Twenty paces ahead of them, on an exposed turret of rock jutting out over the left-hand abyss, three half-fledged forkwing nestlings were huddled in a shallow hollow of dry juniper sticks.
As the black squall slammed into the turret, the largest of the three nestlings panicked. Instead of crouching flat in the sticks with its siblings, the youngster tried to do what it had seen the adults do: it leaped onto the narrow rim of the nest and threw all four of its half-feathered wings wide open at the same instant.
The conflicting wind caught the clumsy four-winged spread like an open umbrella. With a shrill, terrified peep, the nestling was torn straight off the rock lip and pitched outward into the empty gulf of air above the jagged scree three hundred feet below.
