Raptor

by Judith Van GIeson

  In the outer world there is always imbalance, every measure requires a countermeasure, every relationship, another, a check, a balance. My students take excitement in each new romance, each new adventure and when it ends, another comes that is to be everything the previous adventure was not. My niece, Neil, how busy she is with her law practice, her romances, caught up in the turning wheel. She smokes, she drinks too much, she has inappropriate lovers. If she were my daughter, I would tell her that I worry. If she were my daughter, she wouldn’t listen. Her way is her way, not mine. So be it.

  Ultimately it is not so important what fate one has, as that one truly lives it. All paths have merit, all paths lead to the same end. Any life has meaning, if it is lived fully. I am an observer, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t lived. I have seen a sunrise on the ocean, I have heard the cañon wren, I have smelled a cedar in the forest, I have touched the green velvet moss on a rock.

  I have watched peregrines—those rockets of birds—fly at Burnt Mountain, the female saw-toothing along the escarpment and inscribing vertical eights in the air turning upside down at the top of the loops. I saw her rise up and up until she was only a speck in the sky and then fold her wings and stoop with breathtaking speed and grace. I heard the wind rip through her feathers as she plunged by. I saw her diving into the wind, rolling over and over, reveling in the turmoil of the air, the power of her flight. The falcon lived these moments without thinking. I, who observed them, live them again.

  The falcon can spot me at a distance, long before I am able to see her, but what does she see? An aging lady with silver hair and binoculars, who moves carefully, but never carefully enough. She fears me and flies away. Younger people see a woman with an unlived life. Maybe they see their future in me and fear me, too. But all around me I see adventure, risk, daring. I don’t fear, I don’t envy, I am content to be me.

  It was the end of the journal. I closed it and laid it on the floor. One question had been answered anyway—on Joan’s terms she had lived.

  As for me, I had a murder to solve, a cliff to climb and an early morning wake-up call. I finished my drink, ground my cigarette out, hugged the pillow that my absent and inappropriate lover had slept on and turned out the light. The wheel would be spinning when I woke up tomorrow. So be it.

  Let it be.

  20

  I WAS STILL asleep when Avery called. I didn’t mind being woken up by him, but he wasn’t pleased with himself.

  “It’s late, Neil. Damn it. I’ve slept in.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ve earned the right to sleep late now and then.”

  “But not on a day when I’m going to see a gyrfalcon.”

  “What time is it, anyway?”

  “Seven-fifteen.”

  Late to him, but early to me. “We’ve got lots of time,” I said.

  “Not enough,” he grumbled.

  We agreed to meet in the lobby in forty-five minutes. Everybody gets grumpy now and then, even those with a “still, clear center.” But it probably happened to Avery less than most; maybe he’d had a bad dream.

  He was waiting for me by the coffee urn wearing a pair of serious hiking boots and a white nylon poncho over a wool sweater, a down vest and wide wale corduroy pants. His electrically charged hair made a white aureole around his head. Behind his thick glasses his eyes were keen. He looked fine, but just to be sure, I asked him. “Are you all right?”

  “All the better for seeing you,” he replied.

  “Didn’t you sleep well?”

  “It was nothing, a heavy foot stomping on a dream. That’s all.”

  “Whose foot?”

  “Ah, if you could tell me that, we’d have something. There’s nothing wrong that being outside for five minutes won’t cure. Have you looked out yet?”

  “I usually don’t until I’ve had a Red Zinger.”

  “Would you settle for coffee?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Here.” He poured me a styrofoam cupful. “Sugar?”

  “Never.”

  “Cream?”

  “A little.” I took a couple of sips and picked up a muffin for the road. “Let’s go.”

  Avery had a large overnight pack with a metal frame and he hoisted it on his back. I picked up my fanny pack and we stepped outside. The sky over the Aspen Inn parking lot was as big as ever, maybe bigger, but it was a watercolor gray, with light streaks where the paint had washed and dark ones where it had settled. The air was heavy, still and ominous; winter was coming in. “Snow,” I said.

  “It’s a fast-moving storm. Now they’re saying it will hit after midnight tonight or early tomorrow morning and predicting a couple of feet in the higher elevations. If that happens, it’d be rough to ski in there, so it’s probably now or never. What do you say?”

  “Now.”

  “I’m with you.”

  We took the no-frills Rent A Wreck and I drove, thinking that would give Avery a chance to go back to sleep if he wanted to. He did eventually but first he talked. “I’m glad to see you’re wearing your down parka today,” he said. “In iffy weather like this, it’s wise to be prepared.”

  It was colder than it had been on our first hike, but still November and not as cold as it could get, so I hadn’t worn my down vest. “Is that why you brought the big pack?” I asked him.

  “It is.”

  “What have you got in there anyway?”

  “Food, of course, I have some cheese and bread, fruit and trail mix and some freeze-dried beef stroganoff just in case and a pot to cook it in. I have water, a down sleeping bag, my Swiss army knife, a tarp, waterproof matches, a flashlight, USGS maps…”

  “Avery, we’re only going for the day.”

  “Now you’re talking like a New Mexican. You get too much sun down there to have any respect for the weather. Spend a lot of time outdoors in a state like Montana and you learn about bad weather. How often have you heard of people dying suddenly in the Sangre de Cristos or the Jemez?”

  “Often enough. There was a boy who walked up a trail from the Santa Fe Ski Basin last winter wearing nothing warmer than a windbreaker. It was sixty degrees when he left. When they found his body a few days later his tracks had led round and round in a circle.”

  “Hypothermia. It causes irrational thinking. It probably wasn’t any colder than twenty or thirty when he froze to death. You can survive easily in those temperatures, but you have to be prepared. People don’t often freeze to death in Montana and the reason is they are prepared. We probably won’t see any snow or have any problems, but we’re ready if we do.” He looked at my New Balance light hiking boots, cleat bottoms, fabric uppers.

  “I wish you’d worn something heavier on your feet.”

  “I don’t have anything heavier.”

  “I bet you don’t have a hat either.”

  “Nope.”

  “You’d be amazed how much heat escapes from the head. Well, not to worry, I’ve got an extra hat and wool socks, too.” He opened up a package of trail mix and poured me some. For a few minutes he stared silently at the big gray sky and the clouds hanging over the Rockies, and then he said, “ ‘But thou know’st winter tames man, woman and beast…’ ” His brain was like one of those new computers that come equipped with the complete works of Shakespeare. All you have to do is tap in a word, and they pop up an appropriate quote.

  “Shakespeare?” I said.

  “You’re right. Taming of the Shrew.”

  “Easy guess. Shakespeare was wrong, however. Winter may have tamed the man, but it hasn’t tamed the woman, and probably not the beast either.”

  “You’re not talking about Katharine, are you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t much like her, do you?”

  “Running around throwing foreign objects into jet engines isn’t going to help me get March out of jail.”

  “Suppose you do get him out and Katharine goes back to jail, what then?”

  “He’ll probably go back to r
unning his guide business; the falconer will become the falcon.”

  “You’re not thinking like the falcon Diana of taking her place, are you?”

  Of sleeping in the handcrafted bed with the white spread, with a naturalist’s soft red beard hanging over me? “Of course not.”

  “I liked the Kid. He’s a good person.”

  A sweet person, a decisive person, a person who would use a condom if you asked him, a person maybe you shouldn’t need to ask. “You’re right,” I said. “He liked you, too.” But what had we come out here for anyway? To resolve the unresolvable contradictions of love? To catch a snow cloud and put it in a jar? We’d come out here to see a bird.

  “Do you think we’ll find the gyr when we get there?” I asked him.

  “She’s hung around this long. I think our chances are good she’s stayed a while longer. Let’s hope we can convince her to move on.”

  “That’s not what I mean, Avery. Pedersen’s dead, Betts has pulled in his net, but there are still people out there who want that bird badly.”

  “Poaching, the scourge of wildlife. When will it ever end?”

  “March told me he thought the trophy hunters were the worst of all; there was no justification for what they did.”

  “He’s got a point. It is a little harder to blame a starving African village. A white gyrfalcon is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. I’ll be very disappointed if you don’t get to see her, sick if someone has taken her.”

  “So will I.”

  Avery yawned, rested his head against the seat and fell asleep. I drove the rest of the way in silence and woke him when we reached Freezeout. He blinked his eyes, shook his head and recharged his hair. “Here already?” he asked.

  He directed me to a different access road than the one March had taken. It was a bumpy and rutted one-lane dirt road, heavily wooded on both sides, a road where you wouldn’t want to meet another vehicle because it was so narrow one of you’d have to back out before you’d find a place wide enough to pass.

  “I know it’s not much fun driving this road,” he said, as we bounced off a rut, and I yanked the steering wheel in an attempt to keep us out of the ditch, “but it’s the best way to get to the aerie. We’re going to take the Spider Woman trail, which will bring us out at the top of the ledge. March took us by the scenic route where we had the lake view and the gyr across it. Also, I don’t think he wanted people to know that the gyr’s nesting place is accessible. This trail is shorter and will get us there faster.”

  The trailhead was about a mile up the access road marked by the omnipresent Freezeout sign to watch out for bears and an indentation between trees, room for the Pontiac and one or two other vehicles. We parked and got the packs out of the trunk. It was cold, colder than downtown Fire Pond, the kind of cold that bites your nose and makes your eyes tear. The kind of cold where your breath precedes you and your brain waves escape out of the top of your head, that focuses what’s left of your mind on one thing—comfort. The sky was as gray here in the mountains as it was in Fire Pond, but not nearly as big, only patches of it were visible between the green branches of the red cedars and the bare black arms of the tamaracks that scratched at the sky. The drabness of the sky muted the colors of the forest. The trail itself was kind of a brown earth bled to neutral. The lack of visual stimuli seemed to heighten the other senses. The cedars smelled pungently, the silence was deep and heavily laden.

  “It’s unbelievably quiet here today,” I said.

  “Maybe the depth of the silence correlates to the strength of an upcoming storm,” Avery replied. “The Indians have a saying that a wolf’s hearing is so acute it can hear the clouds passing overhead. I bet an animal whose life depends on it has a very good idea what kind of weather is coming. Their senses are so much sharper than ours. It could be they’re all hiding already.”

  He zipped open one of the flaps on his pack, pulled out a knit hat and a pair of Thinsulate gloves. “Here,” he said, handing them to me.

  To set a good example, he put a hat on his own head. It was (or had once been) white, sheepskin with fleece-lined ear pieces that flapped over his ears. The sheepskin came to a point on the top of his head.

  “This is my Peruvian Andes winter bird watching hat,” he told me. With the hat on and his white poncho flapping around his arms and knees, he looked like a snowflake. He lifted his pack, hitched it over his shoulders, shook himself to settle it, set the bear bells attached to the metal frame jingling, took a few quick two-steps and started down the trail. He hadn’t gotten very far before he turned around and said: “ ‘I have always known that at last I would take this road / But yesterday I did not know / It would be today.’ ”

  The words dropped into the silence as precisely and delicately as needles from a tamarack tree.

  “Zen Master Dogen, thirteenth-century Japan?” I asked.

  “Narihara, eleventh.”

  “ ‘The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.’ ” It was my turn to scare the bears away.

  “Shakespeare?”

  “Oscar Wilde, nineteenth-century England.”

  “What was he talking about? Poaching?”

  “Fox hunting.”

  “That’s good, I like that.” We began to hike, slowly at first because the beginning of the trail was uphill and steep. It helped to keep warm, but slowed down the conversation. I could see the wisdom of dressing in thin layers, like all the outdoorsmen recommend. My down parka soon got too warm. I wished I could take it off, but I didn’t have room to stuff it into my fanny pack, and Avery’s pack was already full. I unzipped it, took off Avery’s hat and put it in my pocket. He marched on ahead of me, the bells on his backpack jingling. I hoped the bears were all off in a den somewhere preparing for a long winter’s sleep because it was hard to imagine anything being frightened by Avery or his bells. We strode on one foot then the next, up one steep incline after another through a Little Red Riding Hood kind of forest, full of intrigue and imagined danger with big bad villains skulking behind the trees. The trail was lined with cedar trees and behind them more cedar trees, perfect cover for anything that was lurking or hiding or watching. The only sound other than footsteps and jingle bells was an occasional bitching squirrel. This trail was three miles to the aerie, Avery had told me, half a mile less than the other route, a full mile round-trip, not that big a difference. It was after noon when we stopped. We sat on a log and ate some trail mix, some hunks of cheese and bread and an apple each. Avery consulted a map.

  “Pretty soon we’re going to break out of this cedar forest,” he said, “and when we do we will be at the top of the ridge. From then on we will be in the open. Move slowly and carefully. Try not to do anything sudden or unpredictable that would startle the gyr should she be watching. Be as quiet as possible and always remember she fears you. I’ll climb along the top of the ledge and look for the best place to descend. When I find it, I’ll wave you on. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  When we got to the top, an enormous view opened up. Over the edge of the ridge I could see the lake and the opposite ridge where we had stood with March. The lake, reflecting the cold gray sky, had lost its jewellike brilliance. The clouds had closed in and the tops of nearby peaks were disappearing into the gray. The snow seemed very close to falling. I felt that if I held out my tongue, a flake would drop on it. I did, it didn’t. Avery took out his binoculars and slowly scanned the sky. “She’s not there,” he whispered. Considering my last experience with binoculars, I let him be the eyes. He put out his hand and motioned me to be still and then he walked out of the forest in stalker mode, alert as a predator, but not as hungry. The years, which had a tenuous hold on him anyway, fell away as he skirted the ledge.

  The precipitousness of this place reminded me of the Mayan temples in Central America where the jungle rolls away like ocean swells and you don’t dare look down. The steps of those temples are so steep, you could put your foot down solidly on the first one and still have the
sensation you were stepping into the abyss. Supposedly an elevated level of consciousness is connected with high places, but the pleasures of living in them escape me. I suddenly remembered a dream I had as a child where someone was annoying me with a toy that buzzed at my heels. To escape it I jumped up and sat on the sky. I wanted to tell Avery about this dream, but he had disappeared over the edge. The tip of his Peruvian hat poked up and then a gloved hand waved at me to follow.

  It wasn’t quite as bad as it looked and I wasn’t eighty-two years old and carrying supplies for a winter bivouac on my back either. There was a trail of sorts, and when there was no trail, there were rocks to climb over and latch onto, and when there were neither of these, there were foot holes in the rock, and branches of those bushes that grow in the most inaccessible places to grab.

  “If Avery can do this, so can I,” I told myself. It kept me occupied and finally we landed on a ledge about as wide as Avery’s pack. On one side of us was a rock wall, on the other a sheer drop that I’d say was about five hundred feet. It ended in the rocky pool where Pedersen had taken a dive. Avery gave me a thumbs-up. “Good work,” he whispered.

  He began negotiating his way around the narrow ledge, trying to find some way to get the pack off because the next step was to crawl under the overhang where the wolf-wiper trap had been. He twisted and danced around, moving dangerously close to the edge. Finally, he backed up to the abyss, turned around, slid the pack down his back over the edge and pulled it back up. He found a place to lean it against the wall and we scrambled around it. He’d kept his binoculars with him, of course, and he scanned the gray sky once more. He shook his head—no gyr. Maybe she was long gone and this was a fool’s errand. Maybe there would be no traces, no black line that led out of the rug, no evidence that would change the already made-up mind of Wayne Betts. There wouldn’t be any footprints on the rock, I could see that.