Station Of Seers : 32
The secret of the alegoyle chick could not be kept for long and when she found out Orietta was predictably furious with her son. Whilst Crinomu backed her up, he was somewhat more sympathetic and acted as a peacemaker so that gradually her anger cooled.
"The chick has imprinted on you," he told Asanka when they were alone later. "It thinks you are its mother because you were the first living creature it saw when it hatched from the egg and because you fed it."
"What can we do now?" the subdued boy asked. "I don't want to kill it!"
Crinomu thought for a long moment but then he smiled. "There is one possibility but no one has ever tried it before with an alegoyle. In ancient times, royalty used to train hunting birds to work with them. An alegoyle chick is something like one of those hawks. Perhaps the same techniques would work? You could ask Hirrilow if he has any books about it."
"But even if there was a book and it worked, mom would never let me!"
"Leave that problem to me!"
Whatever Crinomu said to Orietta it worked because to Asanka's great surprise she was somehow persuaded that he could keep the chick and try to train it. He called the fledgling alegoyle, "Suak" in a kind of imitation of the burbling satisfied croak it made when it had just been fed. Crinomu helped him construct a tether and a perch and to read the one book they had found concerning the rearing, conditioning and care of hunting birds.
"To start with, you must teach Suak to fly to your glove and reward him with some meat when he comes to you," Crinomu explained. "The tether will keep him from flying free. Over time you will be able to make the distances between the perch and your arm longer and longer and eventually he will be able to fly without the tether and still come back to you. Then you can begin more advanced training."
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