The hawks don’t like to be captured, even on film.
They will show themselves to us readily enough, sometimes even traveling along with me as I walk, making big, swooping circles in the sky directly overhead, drifting lazily to match the pace of the much slower, clumsier two-legged creature bound to earth. They seem to enjoy being seen, admired. They don’t often speak, but when they do, the sound is unmistakable.
But bring out a camera, and they turn suddenly skittish and shy.
We have a pair of red-tails who make their home more or less with us. So, too, with a Cooper’s hawk who lost its mate to a larger raptor a few years ago, in the pair’s first year of maturity. If you wonder, the answer is yes: They do mourn.
But here, on this land, the prairie dogs and voles and deer mice make for an abundant food supply — sufficiently so, in fact, that they don’t seem to pay particular attention to the chickens. They leave that to Coyote.
They disappear, of course — for days or even weeks at a time. When you view the world from their perspective, what need is there to be confined to a small land area? Particularly when, a few minutes’ flight away in nearly any direction, there are watersheds teeming with food.
But they always return.
Normally, they don’t come too close. They visit from a distance they’ve adjudged to be safe: atop an aspen directly across the road; perched in a small tree at the far south boundary fence; when they’re feeling particularly secure, perhaps in the upper branches of the weeping willows by the pond. So it’s a rare blessing, a moment of grace, to come outside in the morning to find one perched on the tallest pole of a section of latilla fence only yards away.
When I’m lucky, Hawk will stay there long enough for me to greet him. But I know better than go back for the camera, because he will be gone before I return. Better simply to experience being in the presence of a spirit bird for the few seconds afforded me.
Perhaps it’s less fear than mindfulness on his part. After all, in our old stories, there is one about Hawk neglecting his duties, preferring instead to play a ball game with the Thunder Beings, and being disciplined for it. The way he follows me sometimes from overhead, advancing in great swooping circles that keep pace exactly, seem to me to demonstrate a sense of joy in playing on the currents, and a desire to communicate with those outside his own clan. I like to think of his visits as his way of letting us know that, while Spirit has given him his world of the sky and ours is much more a world of the earth, he recognizes us as relatives . . . and that it is his way of giving us a glimpse into his own world, one to which we are only rarely afforded entry, and for which we need to help of such wingéd messengers to mediate our passage.
Hawk may not come today, but it appears that he may have sent emissaries. As I write this, two of the young red-shafted flickers have indeed returned, as I hoped they might: They are trading places inside the feeder directly outside the window before darting back to branches of a nearby aspen. Three weeks on, they’re larger, more obviously flickers, with clearly-delineated color bars; the male has proud new patches of red beneath his beak.
Like their larger uncle, they appear in flashes of color and feathers, alighting briefly and just as quickly vanishing again, leaving us with only a glimpse of their beauty and power to sustain us until the next time.
In any other month, the photo above would have appeared last week, but last Monday’s legal “holiday” required a change in the order of things — in a lot of ways. It turns out to be appropriate for today, though, on a very personal level. It’s a shot Wings captured on a winter day probably seven or eight years ago, before he bought his first digital camera. Photography was much less flexible: When a sudden image such as the hawk above presented itself, you grabbed it and hoped against hope that it would turn out upon developing. There was no possibility of editing the light or exposure or focus on a laptop.
Predictably, Hawk wasn’t inclined to sit still for a portrait. Still, he gave Wings a small gift before taking flight. Only a glimpse, true, but of what strength, power, possibility. A glimpse of hope and even joy. A glimpse of Spirit. From its description of the Wingéd Ones section of the Photography Gallery:
Alighting on an old and weathered post amid the stillness of Winter
He waits, watches, patient, silent.
Some small movement, a sudden soft sound, and he gathers himself in one swift motion.
Feathers fanned, wings spread, he takes flight, leaving behind
A glimpse
Of strength, of power, of hope.
Of Spirit in the Winter silence.
Ships signed and matted in a wood frame
$625 + $100 shipping, handling, and insurance
Today is a marker for me, a milestone of sorts. Oh, not in the usual sense of the term; it’s not one of the days marking a nice round decade, which is what passes for milestones in the dominant culture. It’s merely a personal marker, much like the fencepost in the photo — in this case, of a day I had no expectation of seeing, of a future that seemed foreclosed entirely.
Today, I am here to see not only this day, but the possibility of a future newly open, of a new day in a better world, one filled with hope and joy.
It’s only a glimpse . . . but as with Hawk’s visits, it’s enough.
~ Aji
UPDATE:
Apparently the emissaries weren’t sufficient. Today of all days, Hawk himself decided to return, if only for ten minutes or so. He seems to paying tribute to his old friends (and perhaps to my name):
What a gift.
