by Jana Barkley
“You could say that.” He pretended to be absorbed in the paperwork but watched her out of the corner of his eye.
Instead of crouching down and towering over the hawk like most beginners would, she walked past Remo to the side and sat down. She didn’t face him, but she turned enough so she could see him. This was going to be interesting.
Remo began to fidget and make unhappy “utches” the minute Sam sat down. Now that she was ignoring him, he fidgeted more from curiosity than anxiety. Hank fought back a smile. Sam appeared to be doing something out of Remo’s range of vision. Well done. She had been around animals before. He dropped his pen and turned his body to watch the game.
Remo was ravenous for distraction. He spent hours entertaining himself with the dog and cat toys Hank collected for him. In Remo’s mind, this scary woman might have something fun to play with, and that could be worth tolerating her.
“Utch, utch,” came his charming, inquisitive squeak.
Sam acknowledged his response. “Hi, Remo.” Then she returned to playing with whatever it was he couldn’t see. She was playing with the tassel on her glove, but for all Remo knew she could have food or something fun to attack. He danced on his perch, stretched tall, and bobbed his head back and forth. Hank had to turn his head to hide his amusement. The worst thing would be to distract the bird by laughing at him.
“Utch-utch?” Remo’s upward inflection told Hank that the hawk was not worried about Sam, anymore. He stood up and pulled a plastic container from his coat pocket. Inside were small tidbits of jackrabbit he kept handy throughout the day to reward Remo for good behaviors. Standing where Remo wouldn’t notice him, he took two small pieces out of the container and kneeled down on Sam’s other side.
Leaning in to whisper in her ear, he placed the meat in her free right hand and told her to stash it inside the glove so the bird wouldn’t see it. Then he stood and walked away.
“When you’re ready,” he said, “turn to him and raise your glove. He can’t see the meat, but if he comes to you, you can open your glove and give it to him as a reward for responding. We want to encourage this behavior.”
When Remo utched again, Sam turned toward him and raised the glove. The little bird stopped dancing and pulled back, remembering this scary female was not to be trusted. Sam continued to hold the glove there, but looked away.
“Okay, now, with your right hand, I want you to reach up and push a little bit of the meat up so it’s peeking out over the top of the glove so he can see it.”
Sam obeyed. The Harris hawk stood taller to see. He wanted it. After a couple of dancing movements on the perch, he landed on Sam’s glove in a flap of wings.
“Hold still. Don’t look him in the eyes, yet. Okay, now open the glove up so he can see the other piece.”
Sam did so, and the bird attacked the meat. When he was done, he flew back to his perch as if to say, “Ha, ha, you didn’t get me.”
Sam laughed, and Hank knew she had read the bird’s behavior. She dropped the gloved hand and glanced over her shoulder at him for further instructions.
“Now you’re going to pick him up. Offer the glove like before. If he doesn’t come to you, then I want you to move in. He has no business jumping away from you.”
As Sam offered the glove, Remo danced but wouldn’t come. Sam leaned in and placed the glove in front of his feet. For a moment, Hank was sure the little hawk would bate away from her, but something happened, and he stepped up onto the glove.
“Good,” he cooed, as if the skittish bird had been on his own glove. “Good boy. Now, Sam, thread the jesses between the third and fourth fingers of the glove so you have a good hold on him.”
With all of a newcomer’s awkwardness, she did so.
“Did you learn how to tie the falconer’s knot?”
“I’ve been practicing every day.”
“All right, then, untie him from the perch and then tie the leash to your glove with a falconer’s knot.”
She struggled with the tying as every new apprentice did the first time they held a real live hawk on the fist, but she managed to get it.
Remo seemed his usual self by then. He had decided this female wasn’t a female at all because she didn’t act like the others, and he even tried to tuck a foot while standing on Sam’s glove, the ultimate proof of a relaxed hawk.
Hank retrieved his glove and showed it to her. “You see this cord with a clip hanging from my glove? You need to attach something like this to yours. For now, while you’re learning, when you place a hawk on his perch, he should be clipped to your glove by something like this. Don’t trust the leash to do it all, especially when you have to untie that leash from the glove to tie it to something else.”
He couldn’t help admiring the expression on her face. She had worked hard to get to this point, and seeing her amazement at holding a hawk on the glove for the first time was priceless.
“This is a captive-bred Harris hawk. He’s pretty easy to deal with. When you capture your wild red tail, it’s not going to be this easy.”
He gave her some space to take in this first moment. Packing up his gear, he was surprised to feel the way he did. They’d both accomplished something good today.
“Stay and have lunch,” she invited, still glowing with the happiness of having a hawk on her glove. Hank declined after a pause, all the while wondering what in the hell his problem was, but he felt an urgent need to go. He mumbled something about other plans and instead asked Sam to carry Remo out to his truck while he brought the rest of the gear.
Sam agreed to call him when she got her license. A stray look in his rear view mirror showed her watching him as he drove away. He knew he should take her hunting with him during the interim, but he reasoned work was going to dominate his time for the next few weeks. Instead, he had given her the homework assignment of walking the vacant fields outside of town to see if they might be full of displaced jackrabbits from the heavy housing development activity.
Turning the corner, he took a deep breath and sighed, puzzled by how different he felt about the morning. Coming into it, he’d been averse to this relationship. Now, he was intrigued by how far this woman might go. Her parting comment to him still rankled: I bet you never thought I’d make it this far. She had said it with humor, but he wondered at the truth of it. Reading women, let alone cohabiting with them, had never been a strong point for him. Yet something about this woman touched a familiar nerve and left him uneasy.
Hank raked a worn hand through his bushy blond hair as he drove down the freeway. Well, it made sense, didn’t it? She was a little too much like Tasha for comfort. They were physical opposites, but something about their inner makeup bore a striking resemblance. Tasha was a strong woman—pigheaded, more like. She always got what she wanted one way or another. At least she had with him for years. She had come on to him when he had never expected it, green and spoiled by a wealthy family, but ravenous for hawking. Her energy and enthusiasm had made up for her impositions and mercenary methods. She’d been the best apprentice he’d ever had, and the only woman he had ever loved. But falconry was her only love, and it dominated her to this day.
Now, Hank was no longer part of that picture. Tasha lived on a wealthy ranch in Southern California, where most of the serious long wingers lived because of the wide-open spaces needed to fly the large, far-ranging falcons. She’d taken what she could from Hank, and when someone else offered her more—more money and more opportunities to fly the higher-profile gyrfalcons and gyr-hybrids, she’d left without any regrets. If she had just gone and never looked back, he might have adjusted better. Instead, when life was rough with her fellow long winger husband, Grant, she came calling for emotional support. A couple years of this, and Hank had changed his number to get away from the wretchedness of it all. Still, he saw her every year at the annual field meet given by the California Falconers Association. Unlike the folks she hung out with now, who owned the most expensive telemetry units, vehicles geared up for falc
onry, and anything that spoke of wealth and ease when it came to flying long wings, Hank still practiced his sport as he always had, out of the back of his SUV or his working truck and without all the fancy gadgets. At the meets, she would place possessive arms around him while she introduced him to her newer friends, who had the money to get into the sport easily—too easily. Then she’d waltz off with them, apparently without a second thought about the two years they had lived and breathed falconry together and been inseparable. It destroyed him every time.
Now, here was a beautiful woman with the same in-your-face attitude about getting what she wanted, and he had been soft and relented about taking her on.
Yet, he knew there were subtle differences. Sam had an inner life that she didn’t always let others in on. He recognized it because he lived that way himself. And he sensed scruples, something that Tasha had never been capable of feeling.
“Utch,” Remo gurgled, reminding Hank that he was still there.
“A man could go crazy from all this thinking.”
Remo’s dark head continued to bob back and forth, following the landscape as it zoomed by.
Hank smiled at the Harris hawk and shook his head. “You’re right, buddy. You’re at weight. Let’s say you and I stop by that industrial-park field on the way home. It’s time to go hawking.”
“Utch.”
Passager: A wild hawk less than a year old, captured on its first migration
Chapter Eleven
“Hold those binoculars down. It can see you.”
Sam jumped about six inches in her seat. It wasn’t the first time he’d snapped at her that morning. Part of her wanted to fling the binoculars at him, but he was driving, and that might be bad for both of them.
They were in his truck, Sam in the passenger seat, balancing the “BC,” or bal-chatri trap, in her lap. The BC was a simple, hardware cloth cylindrical cage Hank had taught her to construct, painted black, and sporting hundreds of small monofilament nooses on every surface. She knew there were hundreds because Hank had also made her tie every last one of them instead of purchasing them pre-tied from a falconry outfitter. Loading it into the car had been a nightmare. Anything brushing up against it got ensnared, including your fingers, and it took both hands to free yourself. Inside the cage was a small coturnix quail from Hank’s breeding stock, which he raised as feeder birds for his raptors.
The plan was for one person to drive the vehicle while the other held the binoculars and spotted the hawk. Sam’s job was spotter, but like any new apprentice, she was not experienced in eyeing what a mature hawk, which was called a haggard, looked like, versus the juvenile or passage bird she was allowed to trap.
Four times they had driven at a crawl past the lone telephone pole on this godforsaken country road. But unlike the previous three passes, this time Hank did a U-turn about a quarter of a mile past it and pulled off onto the dirt shoulder, facing the pole.
Since his first visit to her house to inspect her mew, they’d talked on the phone, and everything between them had remained civil. After a couple of hours of driving up and down the same roads, however, he had turned more than a little surly.
“Bring the binoculars up slow and see if you can tell if it’s a hag or a juvy.”
Now the truck wasn’t moving, it was easier to focus, but she was worried Hank was getting impatient with her. She’d already snagged herself on the trap when she tried to throw it out the door, bungling the last drop. The red tail had taken wing to move away from the suspicious people in the truck.
Hank’s voice was impassive. As if he could read her mind, he said, “Take a deep breath, and then look. She’s not going anywhere.”
“She?” It amazed her he could tell so much about the bird from far away. Maybe all falconers got used to spotting raptors and assessing them fast.
“Look at the size of her.”
It was big. She filed the image away for future reference: this was what a “big” red tail looked like. Female. Okay.
“What color is the tail?”
It was hard to tell because of the angle at which the bird was sitting, but Sam felt pretty sure it wasn’t red.
“No red.”
“Good. Let’s see if we can catch this one.” Before starting the truck, he glanced over at her and the trap. “Ready this time?” He didn’t try to hide the edge of annoyance.
Sam colored. “Yes.” Damn his surliness. She was nervous enough about how she was going to handle a wild hawk when she did catch one without having to deal with his attitude.
Hank eased the truck gently into gear; the slightest noise might spook the hawk off. Sam cracked the passenger door open and held it steady as they crept forward onto the road and toward the hawk, going about five miles per hour.
“Don’t look her in the eye. Don’t make any sudden moves.”
Hawk and telephone pole were on the driver’s side of the road.
“Get ready.” Her fingers tensed around the BC, and she kept her eyes glued to the road as it crawled by beneath her. Another deep breath, and she braced herself to drop the wire cage onto the shoulder of the road.
There was an interminable pause, and then his voice made her start.
“Get ready…get ready…Now.”
He did not yell, but the intensity of his voice propelled the trap from her nervous hands down to the side of the road. Having failed three practice runs, Sam didn’t need to be told to sit up and hold the door closed rather than slam it shut until they had driven farther down the road.
Hank sped up after half a mile, and then did a U-turn and parked facing the trap.
Sam knew what to do this time before he said anything. The binoculars told her the large hawk was still perched on the pole.
“Well, what’s she doing?”
“She’s…looking…I think. Yes! Yes, she’s definitely looking!”
“Let me see.” Hank commandeered the binoculars. “Yes, she is.”
Sam threw him a glance. It was the first time he’d sounded like he was enjoying this exercise. He handed the binoculars back.
“Keep watching. The instant—and I mean instant—she goes down on that trap, you holler. We don’t want to waste time getting to her.”
As Sam watched, the hawk started to snake her head and neck sideways.
“I think she’s going to go for it.”
“I can see that without the lenses. Here we go.” He placed his hand on the ignition in readiness.
But something startled the hawk; she was no longer watching the trap.
“Hold on,” said Hank, and swore. A large semi came rumbling from the other direction. It was large enough and loud enough to convince the female she didn’t want to hang around to see what it was all about. Up she flew and then turned to flap down the valley about a hundred yards off, coming to land high up in a eucalyptus tree in some farmer’s yard. Both humans collapsed in their seats from the letdown. Sam dared to glance at Hank, afraid he was going to call it a day.
Hank’s eyes narrowed as he gazed back down the road, and Sam followed him. She didn’t see what he was seeing.
“What? What is it?”
He leaned forward, his arms folded on the steering wheel, and craned his neck to look up and then ahead of them.
“Use those binoculars and keep your eyes on the trap.”
Sam jumped to obey. Only the little quail was there, scratching at the grass poking up through the bottom of the trap. She waited, and still nothing happened. She was about to ask again when Hank said, “Here he comes…he’s going for it.”
When the hawk hit the trap, it didn’t just land on it as Sam had imagined. It slammed into it so hard the trap bounced up a few inches, making the quail inside flap crazily, even though it was safe in its tubular cage. Seconds later, Hank started the engine, and she knew the bird was caught in the nooses.
“We got it!”
Hank gave an uncharacteristic “yip” that made Sam turn hard to stare at him. She laughed. They raise
d a dust cloud as they tore down the shoulder of the road and stopped in front of the trap.
Hank yelled at her to get her glove as he flew out of the truck, not bothering to close the door. Sam slid out and ran around the other side to join him.
A beautiful, rusty-brown-and-white speckled dragon lay back on the trap, hackles raised and mouth open, trying to make itself appear as fierce as possible. Hank reached in to grab the dangerous feet in his gloved hand and worked with his other to disentangle the nooses ensnaring the bird.
“Kneel down here and hold the feet in your gloved hand, like I am. Whatever you do, don’t let go. He’s not noosed anymore.”
“Got ʼem.”
Hank kneeled behind the hawk to gather its wings and close them into the body. He cradled the hawk in his large, rough hands, and they carried it between them to the back of his SUV.
“You’re a handsome boy,” he said, gentler than Sam had ever heard him speak. He motioned for Sam to open the back door with her free hand and laid the fierce but constrained body down. His face softened as he brought his energy low and non-volatile to quiet the terrified raptor.
“You see,” he said in the same soothing voice, “in his mind, anything he captures is food. Since we captured him, he thinks we intend to eat him.”
She hadn’t thought of it that way.
“Take a look at his feet, Sam. Are they healthy?”
The hawk’s feet were greenish-blue in hue and the bottoms seemed okay as far as her inexperienced eyes could tell.
“I think so.”
“No cuts or sores? No swelling? Remember the pictures of bumblefoot from your study guide?”
She did. “Nothing like that. His feet seem a bit scratched up.”
“Well, we can deal with that. Now, let’s look at his feathers. The way a bird keeps his flight gear in shape tells us a lot about what condition he’s in.” Hank extended one wing, and then the other, showing the hawk had immaculate plumage.
“Yuck!” It was too late to take her reaction back, and Sam cringed at Hank’s expression. She was acting like a teenage girl, again. But instead of biting her head off, he seemed to reconsider and laughed.