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Roger coaxed, "Come fly with me."
James could have. He had been through resting and healing, all three of his siblings taking turns to lick his wounds. The owl's talons had injured him in an awkward place to wash himself, his back and the base of one wing.
He was adapting to his injury, without being altogether grounded. Roger flew back and forth over the creek, quicker than James could fly, quicker perhaps than he would ever match pace with again.
When Roger landed neatly on the bank beside him, James said, displeased, "Your shadow warned dinner." When the fish forgot, as fish quickly do, James would dip his paw in to catch one.
While waiting for that, he told his brother, "I'd rather walk today. Mother always walked." Their mother, after all, had no wings. The kittens had taught themselves to fly, above the alley that was their birthplace. They had escaped the city at her urging.
It had been a hard flight, onwards far past the only environs they had known, to this forest. This forest full of trees, and birds, and full too of that one angry owl, who had thought long before swooping on James.
James could manage the up and down flight from their tree well enough, the down better than the up. He got about on his paws once he was down, and he did not complain of it. Cats are patient.
Besides, he was the only one of them who fished.
Hunting was difficult in the daytime; dusk and dawn would have been the best, but the owl was abroad then and for the whole of every night. James, Harriet, and Thelma all caught what prey they could. But their most reliable dinners were now the fish that James caught and shared with them.
Allowing himself a moment of impatience, James stepped back from the creek and stretched out his wings—as best he could, for the left although almost healed still didn't move nearly as well.
Roger had started washing his paws, but looked up, stretched his head towards James in a wordless offer to groom the feathers. Angling his ears in not-entirely-polite refusal, James re-folded his wings before he crept back to the bank of the creek. After the owl, the way James flew was lame and slowly, might always be, but he was just as good at fishing as before.