It was musty and dry inside. The air stank of birdlime, and there were feathers matted into the cage wire. His menagerie fluttered and warbled at his arrival. There were two Tarkoni tarkonil in the cage nearest the door, ailing creatures that he had found on his walks, one with a broken wing, the other matted with promethium. He was nursing them back to health, though he doubted either would ever be fit for release. Beside them, in the row of smaller cages, were various seabirds that had been grounded by a storm the previous winter, and seemed to have lost their migratory instincts. He’d fed them, and they’d stayed, pecking around the property, showing no signs of resuming their endogenous journeys. In his journal, he had written up each case, theorising that the electromagnetic fury of the storm had screwed up the magnetoceptive faculties that regulated their migratory behaviour. Either that, or it had caused some malfunction of the trigeminal system. They had lost the motivation to go on, and had forgotten why they were supposed to.

Sympathising acutely, he had taken them in.

In the end cage, beside the feed store, was the foul-tempered sea raptor, Gortus gortus gershomi. It hadn’t been foul tempered when he found it. It had been dead, hanging like a broken umbrella from a stretch of chain on the beach. It had tangled a foot in the wire, exhausted itself trying to flap free and died upside down, of thirst and starvation.

He’d taken it as a specimen, intending to mount the long wing feathers on an armature for study and reduce the carcass to bones for anatomical comparisons. Only when he had brought it back to his shack, and laid it on his work table, had he realised that a flicker of life remained. He had cleaned it and fed it by hand, using a pipette that, now he came to think of it, was definitely part of the cleaning kit Macks had given him for the gun.

As it regained strength, it did not express gratitude of any sort. Drusher had been disappointed, but not surprised. He was a magos biologis and knew from long experience that wild things remained wild, and would peck if he got too close. Setting aside his brief, foolish dream of a wise and saturnine companion who would perch around his home and watch him with cold eyes as he shuffled into old age, he had confined it to the cage, intending to release it when it was strong enough.

It was still there after six months. He had yet to work out a way of opening the cage to let it out without losing several fingers and his eyes.

Drusher stood in the pens, breathing hard. He heard the tarkonils chatter and flap, the seabirds yik with agitation, and the damn raptor clack its scissor beak with undisguised contempt.

He was as trapped as they were.