The Salamander Club and the Missing Hawk

The feather was perfect—russet-brown with cream bars, about as long as my hand. I held it up to the October sunlight streaming through the window of the Blue Ridge Raptor Rehabilitation Center, watching the way the light made the edges glow.

"That's a red-tailed hawk tail feather," Del said, not even looking up from the clipboard she was filling out. "Probably from Juniper's molt last month."

I added it to my field journal, pressing it between pages forty-seven and forty-eight, right after my notes on salamander egg masses and right before the blank pages I was saving for tomorrow. Tomorrow, when Juniper—the hawk who'd dropped this feather—would fly free over Mount Pisgah.

My name is Wren Castillo, which my parents thought was hilarious when I turned out to actually like birds. I'm eleven, I'm the founder and lead detective of the Salamander Club, and I have never met a mystery I didn't want to solve. Today's mystery was simpler than most: how do you teach a wild hawk to be wild again after humans have spent three months feeding it dead mice?

"You don't," Del said when I asked. She was wiping down a steel exam table with disinfectant that smelled like a swimming pool mixed with a dentist's office. Del volunteers here every Saturday, which is how the rest of us got invited. "That's the whole point. Juniper never forgot how to be wild. We just gave her time to heal."