It was just starting to get light when Jack pulled the Jeep up in the driveway of Vixen’s house. He could see from the light in the kitchen that someone was up and around; he thought he’d better go up and knock when the door opened and Vixen came out, carrying a small backpack. She looked around as she walked over to the Jeep.

“Wow, it’s foggy,” she commented as she climbed into the seat.

“Yeah, a little thick,” Jack replied as he watched her buckle her seat belt. “That’s probably going to delay things a little. I thought about calling and telling you we could put it off for another half an hour, but I figured you’d already be up, and besides, your folks probably wouldn’t appreciate a phone call this early.”

“It probably would have been all right,” Vixen said as she twisted around to pet Stas, who had his chin on her shoulder in greeting. “They’re getting up now, but I don’t really want to find out what they would have said. Everybody in our family gets a little grumpy in the morning.”

“Yeah, ours too,” he grinned. “Especially Mondays.”

“I don’t know,” she smiled, as she finished petting Stas and turned to him. “This Monday seems to have potential.” The kind of potential it had as quickly demonstrated by a nice, friendly good-morning kiss that went on for a few seconds. It was nothing real special, but there seemed to be a hint of more to come later.

Jack put the Jeep into reverse and backed out of the driveway. “Anyway,” he said, “I figured the fog would slow things down a little, so I thought we might run out to the Spearfish Lake Café and have a little breakfast before we head to the swamp.”

“Fine by me,” she said over the noise of the Jeep. “I sorta hit the snooze button on the clock one time too many, and I didn’t even have time for cereal.”

“Gotta get you used to this early-to-bed, early-to-rise stuff,” Jack snickered.

“What if I don’t want to get used to it?” she giggled. “I’ve always kind of liked it the other way around. You know, late to bed, late to rise.”

“Late to bed, late to rise, and you miss a lot of birds,” he told her. “Sorry that doesn’t rhyme or anything, but I’m a little thick this early in the morning, too.”

“Well, then I guess I’ll have to get used to getting up early. God, it’s what? Only four weeks and we’ll have to be doing it anyway.”

“Something like that,” he shook his head as he took the Jeep around a corner. “I’ll tell you what, school really cuts into the birding time, and right at the height of migration seasons, too. I don’t want to think how many birds I’ve missed putting on my life list because I’ve been hearing some teacher drone on about nouns and verbs or something.”

“Yeah, that sucks,” she said, “and it’s probably not going to be a bit better this year.”

“It’s not all bad,” he smiled. “I have life listed three birds from looking out the windows when I should have been listening to the teacher. No photos, though. Maybe someday.”

The atmosphere around the Spearfish Lake Café was a little different than it had been on Saturday morning. This morning, it consisted mostly of men having breakfast before heading off to work; there were a few women around, but not very many. There was a big table in the back of the room that had a dozen men or more sitting around it, talking about the NASCAR race the day before and other topics. The place was pretty full, but Jack and Vixen found an empty booth off in the corner, and waited for the busy waitress to come over with menus.

“Hey, Jack,” Vixen said as she settled into her seat. “I was going to ask you last night, but I forgot. What was it that Summer wanted to talk to you about? ”

“I don’t think I should tell you much about it. I promised her I wouldn’t tell anybody,” he said. “It’s a personal thing; she wanted the opinion of someone who wasn’t in her family. No big deal, though. I told her it was nothing to worry about.” There was considerable shading of the truth in that response and some outright lying, but maybe it would satisfy Vixen. At least, he hoped it would.

“I’d be curious,” Vixen said, “but I guess I won’t find out, huh?”

“Well, Summer wouldn’t want you to find out,” Jack said. “It might be a little embarrassing for someone. Like I said, I promised her I wouldn’t tell and I won’t.”

“You know, Jack,” she said. “That’s one of the things I like about you. You’re loyal, you keep your promises, and when you’re not going to tell me something you don’t beat around the bush, you just say so. That tells me that if I have some secret I need to have kept sometime, you’re not going to go blabbing it all over. Now tell me what she said, or I’ll cut you off from kissing for, oh, ten minutes.”

“This place is so busy that we’d be lucky to make it out of here in ten minutes, and I’m not going to kiss you in the middle of this crowd. God, we must be the youngest people here.”

“Yeah, that’d be about right,” she grinned. “That should be plenty of margin.”

The waitress came over at that point, serving coffee and leaving them their menus. Jack glanced at the menu, figuring that he’d have about what he’d had on Saturday morning, and Vixen chose a somewhat smaller breakfast. The waitress was back in a couple minutes to take their order. “It shouldn’t be long,” she said as she turned to go.

“I wonder how long it’ll really take,” Vixen grinned.

“Probably not long,” Jack said. “Most of these people here are heading to work, so they don’t have extra time if their meal runs late. Most of them are probably pretty much regulars, so I’d guess they staff up for the rush.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” she smiled. “So did your folks say anything about us when you got home?”

“No,” Jack smiled. “Not a word. I think they were still a little stunned by Howie.”

“Howie?” Vixen frowned. “Your brother? What did he do?’

“The bottom line is that he spent most of the evening playing Nintendo with a girl wearing only a bikini that wouldn’t make a good handkerchief.”

“What? Your brother? He’s only like fifteen, isn’t he?”

“Yep,” Jack smiled. “I wound up taking her home. She says they’re just pals, but I sure would have liked to have had a pal like that when I was his age. I suspect that by the time school starts they’re not going to be trying to look like they’re just pals. Just think, we could have figured it out then, but we were too dumb to realize it.”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “We both sure fucked that one up, didn’t we? But then, I guess we weren’t quite ready, either of us.”

“You’d have had a hell of a time convincing me that I wasn’t ready when I was that age,” Jack smiled. “But yeah, looking back, I wasn’t ready, at least not ready for you.”

“So who’s the girl?”

“Misty Frankovich,” Jack smiled. “I gotta admit, she’s pretty cute.”

“Yeah, she is,” Vixen grinned, “and in a tiny bikini? I’m surprised your brother didn’t bust his shorts.”

“Well, there’s more to the story than that,” Jack smiled. “Misty apparently looks at him like he should be riding a white horse wearing a sword and a tin suit. The kid even surprised me.” He gave Vixen a capsule version of the fight Howie had with Frenchy, and of Cody and Jan bringing him home with Misty.

“I guess LeDroit must have had a hair up his butt about someone flattening his tires, and wanted to flatten somebody just on general principles,” Vixen observed.

“I don’t know,” Jack shrugged. “From what little I know about it, the whole deal with Howie started out with Frenchy badmouthing Rusty. Since they’ve more or less been buddies, they must have had a falling out or something.”

“Maybe Frenchy thinks Rusty did it,” Vixen giggled. “But who knows? That crowd could all kick each other silly, and so long as they left me alone I’d be happy to stand around and watch.”

“Me, too,” Jack agreed. “I’m sorry Howie had to wind up getting in the middle of it, but considering the size of the bikini that Misty was wearing, I’d have to say he came out a winner in the long run. I just hope they don’t do something stupid. That could be a real bummer at their age. I had a little talk with him about it last night, and I’ll have a longer one the first chance I get.”

“Probably a good idea,” she nodded. “I think we need to have sort of the same talk, but not right here, not right now. There’s too many people around. It can wait till we’re out in the swamp.”

The place they were heading was even further back in the same swamps than Jack had taken them to the day before. They drove right past that place and continued along the grade for another couple miles, until the road climbed up onto the high ground south of the lake. Perhaps a mile after they left the grade through the swamp, Jack turned off onto a two-rut leading north to what passed for the south shore of the lake. The forest here had been cut over in recent memory; what was left was a scattering of stumps, the occasional spar that had been missed, and various bushes. Jack pine was getting established there, too, but it wasn’t really what you could call a pine barrens.

Eventually Jack came to a stop at a spot that looked just about like any other place around. Vixen could see the big lake faintly through the thin foliage. “We’ll have to walk from here,” Jack announced, “but it’s not far.”

“Fine with me,” Vixen said. “I could stand a little exercise. Do I need anything?”

“Just your binoculars,” he said. “We’re probably going to be here an hour or more, so let’s take that thermos we got from the café.”

“Are you taking the camera?”

“Might as well,” he said. “There probably won’t be anything worth a picture of, but if I don’t take it sure as hell something like an Ivory- billed Woodpecker will come sliding through.”

“Ivory-billed Woodpecker? What’s so special about that?”

“Until just recently they were thought to be extinct, but apparently they aren’t. No one’s gotten a really good photo of one since they’ve been rediscovered. I was just talking, don’t worry about it, because they’re down in Missouri or Arkansas or someplace like that.”

The hike was not difficult; only a couple of hundred yards through the brush, and down a little hill. There was a faint path to follow, and Stas led the way, since it seemed pretty likely that he knew where Jack wanted to go.

The path came out in a little grassy spot above the lake overlooking a small, wooded island that had somehow been missed when the area had been clear cut. When Vixen looked off to her right, she could see The Point, and the area where they’d been Saturday when they’d found Mr. Ordway. “This is the spot,” Jack announced, “and the show hasn’t started yet. We might as well sit down and make ourselves comfortable. This is one of my favorite spots, I don’t get out here very often. It’s nothing terribly special, but it is kind of interesting.”

“What are we going to be watching?”

“Turkey vultures,” Jack explained. “Some people say they’re an ugly bird with disgusting habits, but I think that when they fly they’re really beautiful. About the only thing I enjoy watching fly in a kettle more is hawks, and hawks don’t kettle this time of year.”

“Kettle?” she frowned as she sat down next to Jack; Stas lay down next to her feet and looked at the two of them for a moment.

“That’s a big flock of them circling in a patch of air that’s rising,” he explained. “Don’t ask me why they call it that, they just do. Usually there’s a bunch of them around here kettling late in the day, and we’ll have to check that out sometime, too. Anyway, this is where they spend their nights. I don’t know if you can call it a rookery, since they don’t build nests, but that’s pretty much what it is.”

“So what are we going to be watching this morning?”

“We’ll be watching them get ready to fly,” he said, pointing over at the island. “We won’t see any kettling at this time, but some interesting preliminary morning prep activity instead. As damp as it is, it looks like it’ll be a little while yet. Why don’t we have some of that coffee, and we can talk about whatever it was that you didn’t want to talk about at the café.”

“The coffee sounds good,” she said. “It’ll help to have a warm cup of something in our hands.”

“Fine with me,” he said, taking the lid from the thermos.

In a moment, they both had coffee in their hands, sitting cross-legged next to each other on the damp grass. “Jack,” she said. “I really don’t know where to start.”

“Why not start at the beginning?” he smiled.

“Because I don’t know where it is,” she snickered, then got serious again. “Jack, I know we’ve only been together a few days, but you know that I really like you, don’t you?”

“It’s been pretty clear to me,” he said. “I’ve come to like you a lot pretty quickly the last few days, too.”

“I don’t know how to say this,” she said, “but sometimes I think I sense that you think I’m coming on a little hard to you.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he replied, wondering where this was going. “There have been some times that you’ve made some suggestive statements that have surprised me.”

“Honest to God, they’ve surprised me, too,” she shook her head. “I’ve said things that I can’t believe it’s me saying them. That doesn’t mean I mean them any less, but I’m surprised I got around to them this quickly. I mean, stuff that sort of hints that I’m eager to have sex, eager to get in bed with you.”

“And you’re not?” he surmised. Somehow it didn’t surprise him; his luck sometimes had a tendency to run that way.

“No, I really am,” she sighed. “Now you’re going to think that I’m some kind of slut or nympho or something, and I’m really not, at least I don’t think I am. Jack, I’m still a virgin. I don’t know if that’s something to be ashamed of in this day and age or what.”

“Not if you want to be,” he replied.

“That’s just it,” she said. “I don’t want to be. Jack, I’ve dreamed of having a lover for years, making love, having sex, you name it. I may be the horniest virgin in Spearfish Lake, mostly because I felt like having a lover was something that wasn’t going to happen. And now, well, that’s not quite so true anymore. I mean, like when we were making out at Alan’s last night, I could feel your thing pressing up against my belly and it felt so good that I could barely believe it. I wanted to feel it in me so bad it wasn’t funny. You wouldn’t have had to say much and you could have had my virginity right there on Alan’s living room floor.”

“I’d been wondering about that,” Jack said. “And you might like to know that I think we’re talking about my virginity, too. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a lot less hot for you, but I think maybe we’ve been moving a little fast in that area.”

“I’ve been thinking about the same,” she said. “But Jack, it feels so good to have a guy that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hold back, or what.”

“Wasn’t?”

“Give me a break, Jack. This isn’t easy to explain. Look, you know that a week ago I’d have been willing to bet that if my mother had her way I’d be locked in a chastity belt from now until she gave the key to my husband after the wedding, right?”

“I’ve sort of had that impression, but you’ve never quite said it in those words. But your mother doesn’t seem like that to me at all.”

“Like I told you, you don’t have my history with her,” she sighed. “So last night, after you dropped me off, I went up, got a shower, and was getting set for bed when she came into my room and closed the door. I figured, like well, this is where she tells me the chastity belt is on order, after seeing us sleeping on the couch yesterday afternoon.”

“Yeah, maybe we shouldn’t have done that,” he admitted, “but it just happened.”

“Well, my mother shocked the living hell out of me,” Vixen smiled. “Look, I don’t want to go into everything we talked about, but I guess seeing us like that got her thinking. I don’t remember it, I was asleep, but I guess I was holding onto your dick while I was lying there, and I guess for a while your hand was on my boob.”

“I don’t have any memory of it,” Jack said. “I know you felt awful good up next to me.”

“Well, I enjoyed it, too,” she grinned. “I’m not going to repeat everything we talked about, but I got the lecture again. You know, the one about being a good girl, and being careful to not have a baby too soon since it would louse up a lot of things. When you get right down to it, I agree with her. I don’t want to get caught with a baby, at least not right now. I want to go to college so I can get out of this town. You remember the other night talking about being a housewife with three screaming kids and a husband who beats her up whether she needs it or not? Well, I sure as hell don’t want to be that woman.”

“I wouldn’t want you to be, either, and I would hate it like hell if I was responsible for that happening.”

“I know you would,” she said, “and I also know you well enough now that I think you’d stand up to the responsibility if it did happen, even if it meant the end of college for you. I wouldn’t want that to happen.”

“So, the safest thing to do is not go all the way,” Jack said, a little disappointed at this turn of events.

“I figured that was where it was leading,” she smirked. “I mean, considering Mom, that’s about where it always goes. Then was when she shocked the living hell out of me. I guess she looked at the two of us and figured that we were going to go all the way, it was going to happen sooner or later, and trying to stop it would be about like trying to hold back the wind. And, let’s face it, the way we feel about each other it would be.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “Jack, I don’t know if you know it,” she continued. “But when a woman goes on birth control pills, it takes a while before she’s really protected. Even then, it isn’t a hundred percent effective, but at least she’s pretty safe and can be a lot safer if she’s even a little careful about some other things.”

“I guess I didn’t know that,” he said. “I figured it would take a little time to take hold, but I never really investigated the details.”

“You’re not a girl; you haven’t had much reason to look into it,” she smiled. “So, anyway, Mom said that while she’d rather that you and I didn’t go all the way, if we’d promise to hold off for a couple months she’d take me to the doctor and get me put on the pill.”

“I think it’s a hell of a good idea,” Jack smiled. “Like you said, I’ve been a little concerned that maybe we’re going a little too fast, anyway. A couple of months seems like a good period to wait.”

“Right,” she said. “It seems like it to me, too. At least that way I won’t feel like I’m rushing into things faster than I want to and becoming some kind of a slut in the process. Look, Jack, I like you, and I know you like me. But let’s face it, we’re in high school, things happen, and it really is a little early on both of our parts for any kind of commitment. We may have something that won’t last beyond our heading off to college a year from now, or it may last a lot longer. We don’t know, and shit happens in high school. But if we’re still together in a couple months, well, she also offered to sort of look the other way, or maybe help out so our first time together doesn’t have to be in the back seat of the Jeep. Maybe my room, maybe a motel, I don’t know. I mean, it’d be kind of a reward for us holding off that long.”

“It sounds perfectly reasonable to me,” he said. “I’d toyed with that question myself, since I didn’t particularly want our first time to be in the back of the Jeep, either. The only thing I’ve been able to think of was maybe going out to Dad’s hunting cabin, and I’m not sure that’s a whole lot better. A nice motel room seems a lot better to me.”

“Me, too,” she smiled. “Maybe a motel with a pool and a Jacuzzi or something.”

“You’re getting me horny already,” he grinned. “That’ll be something to look forward to.”

“Me, too,” she grinned, “but I think it’s worth the wait to have my mother more or less on our side.”

“I think it’s worth the wait anyway,” he smiled. “Hey, look,” he changed the subject”, “we’ve been so busy talking we’ve missed the start of the show.”

“Huh?” She looked across the hundred yards or so of open water, and up at the top of the trees. While there were plenty of live ones covered in green foliage, there were a number of tall dead ones near the shore, where the water probably hadn’t helped them. On the branches of one of the dead trees there were a number of the elongated black bodies sitting, and some of them faced away from the sun with their wings spread. She checked the scene with her binoculars. “What are they doing?” she asked.

“Letting the sun dry out their feathers, after the heavy dew last night,” Jack smiled. “If it’s like I’ve seen in the past, there’ll be a hundred or more of them sunning themselves before too much longer.”

“Oh, my God, that’s neat!” she said, scanning her binoculars around the trees. “Jack, I’ve never seen that. I mean, I’ve never, ever seen anything like it.”

“It happens a lot,” Jack said, “most dewy mornings, in fact. I find it hard to believe that there’s enough road kill around here to support a colony of vultures that size, but there they are, so I guess they must find something to eat. But the fact I find fascinating is that there probably aren’t half a dozen people in Spearfish Lake who know that something like this happens, or even care.”

“That’s kind of sad,” she said. “I never knew about it. I mean, it’s logical, I guess, but I never really thought about it.” More birds were spreading their wings now. “That’s a really neat sight, it’s almost like it’s out of a fantasy book or something. Jack, thanks for showing me this.”

“I wanted you to see it,” he said. “There’s a lot more to birding than just getting identifications. Some of them are spectacular things like this, or when a huge flock of waterfowl takes flight, or, well, lots of things. Others are more subtle but no less interesting.”

“Are you going to show me more of them?” she asked.

“Since you got off on that sight I know I’m dealing with a real birder in the making,” he smiled. “I’ll show you some other things, but there’s going to be some things we discover together. And I’m not just talking about birds.”

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.