Eagle head and feather on an upper arm

My uncle Dennis said eagles had not nested on the Wyre side since his father's day, so nobody believed me when I said one had taken to the old perry pear. He came up with me the next morning with a flask in his coat, and we stood at the gate and watched it hang over the trees, grey-brown and patient, its pale eye fixed on the wood pigeons in the hedge. Somewhere higher, a smaller bird rode the same current, and a thin cloud sat behind them both like a coin held up to the light. The bird dropped a feather onto the path below us, long and dark as a rook's wing, and it drifted down slower than seemed possible.

Dennis picked it up and turned it against the sky. He said his mother had kept one pressed in the family Bible to mark the year the harvest failed, and that a feather like this was not a thing you found by accident. Then he pressed it into my hand and told me to keep it. I did not tell him I had been thinking the same thing, or that I had already decided the bird was waiting for something from us.

We picked the last of the Discovery apples before the rain came in. I left the feather tucked into the rung of the ladder, meaning to take it home. When I came back in October it was gone, and so was the eagle, though a single pigeon feather lay on the gatepost where something had been eating.