MAN VERSUS HAWK
I walked into the woods on that quiet spring day because I was restless. I had come home from college a few days earlier than anyone else in my inner circle of friends and I was marking time before the serious business of socializing began. In those days a simple walk in the woods did not offer a lot of excitement for me; so by carrying my discount store rifle and keeping a sharp eye out for anything that moved, I had created a sufficient degree of purpose and risk. What happened that day went well beyond my expectations.
Our family house was set several hundred yards above the Connecticut River in the midst of an old New England forest. Long ago the oldest parts of the house were a small farm and wayside inn on a stagecoach road that followed the river up from Holyoke to Northampton. I walked up the long-abandoned road for a quarter mile and then angled off into the woods on the river side. It was the middle part of a clear day, and warm enough so that my windbreaker was soon off and tied around my waist. The neon-green color of the leaves advertised their newness and was made even more dramatic by being set against an equally intense blue sky. I was impressed with the beauty and lush fecundity of spring, and it brought to mind some of the lines from the Wordsworth poems that we had been studying in English class. Had we gotten to the “Modern Period”, I probably would have been silently repeating the lines by e.e. cummings: “for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky”, but those lines were still a year and many pages into the future.
My destination was a grove of mixed evergreens about half-a-mile from the house. It was the type of place where one was likely to find something interesting. To get there I needed to cross a shallow ravine with a small stream running along its bottom. In its mysterious wanderings over countless years, the stream had carved out this ravine as rain, snow melt and spring water flowed down the mountain behind the house, sensing its way to the river. The tiny stream nurtured a sinuous, emerald microcosm of thick moss and luxuriant ferns amid a desert of desiccated leaves from the previous Fall. I would guess that the ravine was about 150 yards across, from North rim to South rim, and about a third as deep.
I made my way down the north slope slowly since there were a considerable number of discarded tree limbs and plenty of reddish-brown river shale from the time of the dinosaurs. Actual dinosaur footprints had been discovered about a mile upriver, so I was always on the lookout for the next big find. I crossed the little stream and began the more challenging work of scrambling up the somewhat steeper south side of the ravine. By the time I had crested the southern rim, every animal within miles must have been alerted to my presence in the woods by the sounds of badly sung Beatles tunes, the crackling of leaves and Anglo-Saxon expressions that were brief and to the point.
I was halfway between the southern rim and the clump of evergreens when I heard a piercing cry and saw a large red-tailed hawk flying in the direction from which I had come. Taken by surprise, I stared wide-eyed at this “exotic” bird-of-prey. This was nothing like the menagerie of commonplace woodland creatures that I had previously hunted. I sensed the possibility of a genuine hunting adventure and felt a heightening of emotions that reminded me of the times I hunted small birds with my first store-bought slingshot. What did I want? I suppose I wanted to use wit and skill in order to attain victory in a rather lop-sided competition. Maybe I also thought of possessing some impressive wing and tail feathers as proof and spoils of the victory, but I didn’t analyze the situation all that closely. In fact, if the truth be told, I didn’t really think much at all. Hunting induces primal feelings, vestigial instincts from our long evolutionary past. I no longer needed them, but there they were — powerful enough to drown out any logical or moral arguments against hunting.
The hawk flew north over the ravine and landed in the crown of a large oak tree near the northern rim of the ravine. Though I could not see exactly where it had landed in the canopy, I mentally marked its approximate position and began to retrace my path across the ravine. Now I was fully engaged — a Mohawk huntsman in deerskin moccasins masterfully stalking his prey. I moved stealthily toward the big oak tree and my eyes scanned its upper reaches for any sign of movement. Aware that I was holding the rifle far too tightly, I told myself to relax and thought of Clint Eastwood’s steely cool screen persona. Halfway up the north side of the ravine, I began searching the old oak’s crown more carefully for the hawk’s exact position. The hawk obligingly announced its position with another “KIREEE!”, but it was not in the old oak. The hawk was flying above the southern rim of the ravine, where I had just come from! It disappeared into the top of another huge tree on the south rim, a bit further down towards the river. “How did it do that?”, I said to myself, though not in those exact words.
Disgruntled, mystified, but nowhere near willing to concede, I made a stealthy descent back to the little emerald stream, and a slow climb up the southern side of the ravine. I crept under the hawk’s new perch with rifle at the ready position. While I surveyed the upper branches for its dark silhouette, the hawk mocked me again. From all the way across the ravine came the familiar KIREEE and the hawk soared into the top of a tree on the opposite rim. Apparently, while I was scrambling over a log, or busy with some other maneuver that required lowered eyes and diverted attention, the hawk had moved again. Or perhaps, while I thought the hawk was sitting in one of the tree crowns, he was really exiting the far side of a tree, flying a long circuitous route that kept him out of sight and brought him full round to his previous starting point. I even briefly considered some weirder theories, such as that I was dealing with some sort of magical creature that could disappear from one place and appear in another. If electrons and Carlos Casteneda’s shamans could do it, why not a hawk? I was pretty desperate for an explanation.
Too stubborn to accept defeat, I decided to try again. This time I would not take my eyes off the hawk’s position for even an instant. I no longer cared so much if the hawk knew what I was up to; I was now just as interested in figuring out the hawk’s trick as I was in hunting. By going slowly, crouching down at times and using my free hand to feel my way over obstacles, I groped my way down the south side of the ravine and crossed the little green divide a third time. I moved up the North slope, concentrating hard, determined not to be fooled again.
Having seen absolutely no movement from the tree’s top, I moved under it with rising confidence. Invoking a chess analogy, I thought of my unbroken monitoring of its position as having put the hawk into “check”. Alas, it was not to be. From the other side of the ravine came the now all-too-familiar KIREEE!, and the hawk soared into the trees on the South rim. This time I felt the full shock and confusion that comes with seeing something that is totally impossible. Between the warmth of the day, the trudging back and forth across the ravine, and the emotional intensity that had been building, my clothes were now uncomfortably damp and I was feeling somewhat dazed. I was reconsidering my quantum theory of the hawk’s behavior when I had a flash of exasperating insight, the kind one experiences when the answer to a particularly troublesome crossword puzzle clue turns out to be something obvious. There were two hawks, working as a team. What a fool I had been! What a dupe! Whenever I got close to one, the other would vocalize from a distance and lead me in the opposite direction.
With this revelation came a few quick deductions. If there were two hawks, then it was almost certainly a male/female pair. If they were playing this elaborate deception, then it was neither for sport nor primarily to protect themselves, but rather to protect a nest. From the original direction in which I was lured, I guessed that they did not want me going toward the stand of evergreens. I immediately did so, walking forthrightly in that direction with an exaggerated lack of concern for where the hawks were. I had little doubt that they would follow me.
As I approached the evergreens the hawks changed tactics. They shadowed me closely and the male would occasionally make a swooping pass at me, veering off when he got within about 10 feet. With each pass I would hear the disconcerting rustle of feathers from what seemed like only inches behind the back of my head. Now it was my turn to mock them. I informed them, out loud and in no uncertain terms, that I was in control now and that revenge for their duplicity would not be long in coming. For their part, the hawks did not appear to consider escape or surrender.
If they had just flown off into high treetops in any other direction and ignored me, I never would have found their relatively small nest among so many large trees, but one of the hawks flew past me and continued straight into the evergreens. “Well, that’s very helpful!” I thought as I followed, and before long I came upon the female sitting on a nest that was about 30 feet off the ground. I stood back a bit, on the uphill side of the grade, so that I had a clear view of the nest. The male hawk took up a position in another tree not far behind me and now we were all arrayed in a line. My confidence in the superiority of my position was temporarily shaken as I realized that I was “surrounded” by two fairly desperate creatures whose weapons were not to be scoffed at. The hair on the back of my neck tingled as I envisioned the male silently gliding toward me from behind, sinking its talons into my nape and removing a piece of my scalp with his beak. However, after a few moments I had convinced myself that I was in far less danger than they were. If the male attacked, I was ready to subdue it quickly in hand-to-talon combat. Still, as I faced the female, I listened very carefully for the slightest sound from behind me. Then I turned, raised the rifle slowly and pointed it at the male. Checkmate!
We remained in that configuration for what seemed like a full two minutes. Our small private world wobbled on an organic axis, nudged by conflicting whispers of instinct, emotion and reason. Then, somewhat to my own surprise, I lowered the rifle slowly and, ever so carefully so as not to spoil the moment, side-stepped toward the house for about 10 yards. When I thought I was out of the critical zone, I turned full and walked away, quickening my pace as I got further from the nest. How urgently I wanted to tell others about my adventure!
There are rare occasions when a person’s core beliefs can be modified by a unique event: a brush with death, an unexpected kindness or misfortune, an enigmatic experience. Entities intersect briefly in spacetime and their paths are fundamentally altered ever after. Although I did not immediately know it, my chess game with the hawks was such an event. Something changed that afternoon. Perhaps some group of previously unacquainted neurons connected their dendrites and began a new colloquy that day. Or more likely, some group of neurons that had been hard-wired for a very long time decided to quit their alliance, or had that decided for them by a stronger coalition. Something must have changed, because I never went hunting again. The amount of time I spent walking in the woods has steadily increased, but I have never brought a gun along since that day.