The red-tails have returned early.
They are always with us in the winter, at least our mated pair, but they typically spend very little time here until well into the depths of the season — mid-January into February. Then we usually have them solidly in residence for a couple of months, and they move on when spring has taken hold of the land again.
Not so this year.
The one I think of as “my girl” — a giant of a bird, near as big as an eagle — first showed up before summer was even over, at least by any formal reckoning. Since then, she has appeared intermittently but with increasing regularity, often in the company of her smaller mate, occasionally both with a third red-tail that appears to be a relative, since they accept and even seem to welcome his presence in their soaring sorties overhead.
They have all been with us for several years now; this is their land, as surely as it is anyone’s at all.
The hawks are more visible, less rare, than their larger counterparts, more willing to approach human habitation. Ours have lived here long enough to recognize our voices, to understand laughter and shifts in mood, and will sometimes come and circle or hover directly overhead as though to be part of whatever is occurring on the ground, whether as fellow celebrants or merely ensuring that we know they are with us. It has gone on for enough years now to be established as fact, not mere anthropomorphism or magical thinking, and our relationship of attenuated but mutual trust extends to the safety of our chickens, who they allow to range free and unmolested.
Whether she has been gone a year or a day, the return of the red-tail always fills me with joy, with a sense of well-being, too. It is as though her presence means that our world is essentially in proper order: Whatever the chaos of colonial world outside, she is a sign that our world and ways are fundamentally sound, that our dreams and prophecies, the words of the ancestors and the teachings of the spirits, will hold us in good stead through it all.
Such confidence has proven well-grounded, despite its vesting in a spirit of the air, else we would not still be here. Neither, for that matter, would she, in all likelihood; the wilder spirits know that they can trust the spaces we inhabit in ways that they cannot with regard to the overly developed and colonized world outside. Even so, that world is a wolf at the door, not nearly far enough removed from our own fencelines for indigenous safety. The hawks know this as well as we, and however at home they may be in our world, they nonetheless keep a safe distance from the rest of it. Even so, they afford us the occasional glimpse of their power . . . and with it, our freedom.
And that is, perhaps, one of Hawk’s greatest gifts to us: the lesson of finding freedom. In some stories, he was cast down to the lower atmosphere, a penalty for neglecting his duties in favor of playing lacrosse, or stickball, with the more powerful Thunderbirds. Instead of sharing time and space with spirit beings, Hawk now shares them with us mere mortals.
And yet, Hawk flies. She leaps, soars, circles, lands, and leaps again onto the winds, in search of prey or of prayer or of pure and simple joy in the freedom of flight. I watch her come to me and circle overhead, and I feel myself swept along upon her wings; I catch only a glimpse out of the corner of my eye before she vanishes, and yet it is enough to know that she was there and is flying free, because she will return to do it all over again. For us, earthbound creatures that we are, such cosmic heights are beyond our reach, and yet they are part of the world we inhabit all the same: We are in them, if not soaring upon them, and subject to gravity’s constraints, we are free to move beneath and among and through them.
As we enter this week of colonial celebration, a week in which we can be sure our stories and our spirits and our very selves will be erased, constrained, locked away safely behind walls that history shall not be permitted to breach, lest the festivities lose their self-congratulatory gloss, we go about work but keep an eye out for a glimpse of Hawk, in her relentless pursuit of liberation.
She is bent on finding freedom, and she can show us how to soar within our own.
~ Aji
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