It's the song I've been trying to sing...

There was the lonely pine on one side and the willow sticks bare on the other, with you just behind as I crouched there in the snow over that scatter of feathers-- dappled, yellow-tipped, and mingled with the red of life recently taken.  There was little trace of the vanished raptor aside from the blood which had dripped from its beak, and it had taken the larger part of its meal with it when it flew.  As you joined me in that small cloister picking through the shafts and down, I wondered if you felt it too--the need for some connection which I still couldn't then name or understand.  The hawk's feather, a mark left by the wings, or the outline of a talon in the snow-- I would have taken anything then and everything else had receded.

We had found the lake shifting calmly on that dim winter's morning after days of storms, the water sighing up to the snow-banked shores and breathing back out.  A mallard pair drifted lazily across the glassy, dark surface ahead and a gull wheeled lazily beneath the low-hung stratus.  To our left the cheery noise of a feeding flock enlivened the willow bushes and the pines above.  We tried to follow their quick movements and pick out the ones we knew: Ruby-crowned Kinglets, Dark-eyed Juncos, Mountain Chickadees and Yellow-rumped Warblers, here a Steller's Jay, there a Robin, and beyond them the year's first trilling of Red-winged Blackbirds.  With flicking tail feathers, in nimble dives and hops, they went about their foraging with little songs, making a haphazard chorus which flowed and trailed and then subtly rose into an agitation we hadn't understood at the time.

It was then, from behind, that the bird-scream broke from a throat made for singing as we turned to see the outstretched wings pulling back and the kicking stretch of the talon seizing a Meadowlark with desperate grace.  There was a feral control in the young hawk's strike, the sharp driving down into the clearing of snow, and the adamant holding there beneath the mantling wings.  In the background, seeming far away, a few Jays scolded and all the smaller birds called out in alarm as the feathers were sliced and torn in small brown tufts let drift across the sparkling white with, here and there, a downy yellow tip catching the light.

I, of course, did not see the spirit leave the lark.  There was only the stilled reach of its wingtips fanning up out of the snowy crater towards the mantling wings of the hawk as if to ward off its fate.  Then there was simply the small bursts of feathers, and the slick red of the hunter's hooked beak as it came up from that hollow of snow.  The lark had been a creature of the tall grass, sand, willows and sage.  Wild, beautiful, and now gone-- it was being taken up into the heart of another, more fierce beauty.  Likely neither had eaten much for days due to the storms and such a thing is hunger that it had led them to each other, one driven careless and the other single-minded.

It must have been that inner gnawing which made the little hawk tolerant enough to share that clearing which now seemed at the very center of things.  In the stratus-diffused morning light its eyes flared with the saffron of its youth as it alternately scanned for trouble and quickly put its beak down to the ruined black V over those lemon feathers and the spreading salmon and scarlet of its work.  And I wondered what that hawk knew of peace in the life given to it.  Would it be a vague meaning hidden somewhere between a full stomach, the cessation of scolding and calls of alarm, the wind and sun on outspread wings, the breeze and the tremble of dappling shade over a secluded perch? Or maybe its peace was simply and only here, in the hunt and its culmination.  With its spirit as dilated and focused as its pupils, it could have been most alive in the headlong diving through branches, the sharp finality of the strike and its strewn-feather coda.  And then it was also possible that, in a way
I little understand, from first fledging it knew nothing but peace in all the movements of its life so long as they carried it ever forward.

And what can be said of the Meadowlark?  It had hatched who-knows-when from its brown-splotched egg in the nest made for it of the same grass where it would grow, learning to fly and to hide, to sing and to hunt.  It must have spent all summer and fall foraging along hidden paths among the willows, spiking its head up towards the sun from the sea of beach grass, and singing brave from the fence posts or sage tips its whistling song against rivals and for any female in earshot.  Or maybe it had been the one listening, its interest piqued by the song of another as it started to think of building its own nest in the grass.  And what should it mean that it met its end violently at the dim tail of a vast winter in the talons of a famished hawk?  Where should we find the notion of peace in the rising of its partially stripped and reddened body, seized up out of that clearing of snow and carried a short distance, gliding to that lonely hollow between willow and pine?  Would its spirit have then lingered plaintively, sung out in some bittersweet species of joy, or just slipped off unspeakably silent and gentle into the land it had always known?

The hawk had savored its work for a while in seclusion then, picking and rending more carefully now, before it abruptly rose with its meal and flickered out of sight.  As the two of us bent under those branches and over the feathers, what came back to me first was the great lake nearby, gently meeting that small strip of sand which the wind and water themselves had brought down from the mountains.  Worn from the granite then sifted and rushed down streams and falls and out into the open, the unceasing waves had lapped it back onto the beach over thousands of years.  When viewed in its own scale, this same weather may have violently scoured the ridges and peaks and ripped these same grains of sand down from the heights to the valley, their cycles entwined, creating and breaking down in the same action and meeting here simply on a different turn of the wheel.  Life and its opposite surely have their courses as well, meeting in a multitude of different formations, partnerships, and oppositions which only seem wilder because they can more clearly be seen.  This hawk had met that meadowlark in the winter morning light, one beauty now carrying another, and they had both continued on in their own particular ways.  I could not see a true end to any of it at all and it was maybe that connection which I was searching for in the snow.  Wasn't there the promise in these things that damage can be redeemed, that from ugliness can come beauty, that meaning is always there whether we see it or not?

I am sure that every living thing hears those waves too as a constant refrain and, though it must be different for each of them, there has to be something in it of the heartbeat of their world, sometimes wildly pounding and then sure and serene as though there was a certain, unshakable peace running through it, deeper and without fear.  When you looked back out from under the branches, I did too.  And all around the clearing each little bird was again taking up their part in the ever-changing chorus, hopping and flitting, now and again stretching their small wings to wheel out in an arcing path through the slowly brightening sky-- little circles in a larger turning.

 

 

 

Upper Truckee Marsh, January 30th

You won't see the gull fly but can still hear its call
with the world closed in pogonip, simple and small.

It's all dim-lit somehow, though still thoroughly white.
Just hoarfrost on willow sticks in gently chill light.

You'll sink steps through deep snow to that crescent of sand
and the murmuring swell of the lake come to land.

Still half-held in sleep, geese just drift out of the fog.
They float and they dabble in peaceful dialogue

Which you can't understand but can follow its tone,
Stood only glad to be here and not here alone

While each plash and ripple talks to each quiet wave
And those black, wary eyes wonder how you'll behave.

Conjunct and quiet, you are then part of it too,
That plain melody of day reduced and made new.

You cannot define it though its right at the fore.
You still heard it inside, walking back down the shore

While the mist started to clear as if from a spell
And slow from the willows, the ice crystals fell.

Was the day brightening then or being obscured?

Soon that small, delicate song might no longer be heard.

And if it goes silent, can it still be a refrain?
Because maybe the answer might help to explain

 Why you would see, walking home in that second dawn,

 A once playful raven chasing after a swan.

"Would that be a life to disregard?"

I have been turning this poem about in my head for something like a month now:

The Rabbit

Scatterghost,
it can’t float away.
And the rain, everybody’s brother,
won’t help. And the wind all these days
flying like ten crazy sisters everywhere
can’t seem to do a thing. No one but me,
and my hands like fire,
to lift him to a last burrow. I wait

days, while the body opens and begins
to boil. I remember

the leaping in the moonlight, and can’t touch it,
wanting it miraculously to heal
and spring up
joyful. But finally

I do. And the day after I’ve shoveled
the earth over, in a field nearby

I find a small bird’s nest lined pale
and silvery and the chicks—

are you listening, death?—warm in the rabbit’s fur.

~Mary Oliver

 ~       ~       ~

Last week at the library, we all watched a juvenile Robin perched outside the window, shivering and breathing heavily from the exertion of flight which must have been new to it.  With the glass in between, it didn't notice as one got so close as to see its delicately squinting eyes and the tiny feathers on its rapidly pulsing breast.  It stayed there awhile and someone said they saw a parent Robin fly down to feed to its young.  One could see the small glow of wonder on others' faces as they watched something new to them and realized that it was also something familiar.

The next day, I came home from the library to a rabbit in my driveway.  I sat and watched for a bit as it picked out dandelion stalks to eat, ears alert and eyes fixed.  It would start at the bottom, pulling the stalk in with its lips until it got to the top and let the flower husk drop to the sand.  I slowly and deliberately got out, walking around the back of my car away from the rabbit.  It froze but it did not leave.  I quietly went inside and sat by the window to take a few pictures before it hopped up the short woodpile and disappeared through the small, hidden gap in the fence.

Today at the library, I was called into the break-room by a coworker to look at little bits of down sticking to the window and, on the other side of the glass, a juvenile Robin lifeless on the ground.  She had seen it hit, fall, and convulse and I was sorry that she had.  She told me that a Steller's Jay had also watched and hopped down to the body afterwards.  She had needed to tell someone and assumed I would understand, drawn to birds as I am.  It looked unnaturally peaceful there in the afternoon light and I didn't know what to say.

Later, I forced myself to go outside and take care of the little bird.  A graceful companion came out to help me and brought with her a shovel painted gold, of all things, from a different ceremony.  She helped me to raise it up from the moss where it had fallen and let me carry it alone, that little dark weight resting on a plane of glittering metal, to a nearby bush at the foot of a pine.  There I laid it, as beautifully as I could manage in a patch of light among the pine needles and little white flowers I couldn't name.  I thought briefly of burying it but it felt a strange thing to give to something so recently belonging to the air.  Somewhere above, a Jay was still hopping from branch to branch in an anchored way, as if trying to see from every angle the scene laid out below and maybe to understand.  

It seems disordered somehow to hate death, a natural part of life and the world, as much as I sometimes do.  I suppose that I, as a living thing, am naturally in opposition to it and so it makes sense to feel that pull of defiance-- to know its weakness and to gently work against its uglier qualities.  If only one could always be able to answer that revulsion, anger, and pain inside with beauty and the knowledge that life will come back in all its forms, strong and clever and joyful enough that nothing could stop it even if it wanted to.

Though it's difficult, maybe it is good to look at it as one can look at the mountains.  There is beauty in the wind and rain, the snow and ice, even as they scrape and eat away at stone and soil, destructively balancing erosion against the steady rise of the earth.  And it is only together that they make the rivers and waterfalls, scattering life as they go and gathering up what isn't used into glittering beaches on the shores of the vast lake which they hold between them.  A taking away is a necessary part of that process.  It helps to remember, when there is suffering, that even a short life taken is still a part of that greater economy of life and connected to the sustaining cycle in which we are all held.  For me, today, there was a young Robin left still and the memory of a rabbit stealing safely away.  Earlier, for Mary Oliver, it was the other way around.  Though there was ugliness and sadness in both cases, there was also the mitigating grace of beauty.  Despite loss, there is always an enduring joy of life, safe under cover again among the flowers and smiling irrepressibly back at its old sparring partner.

Thank you...

The Windhover

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-  
  dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding  
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding  
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing  
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding  
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding  
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!  
  
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here  
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!  
  
  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion  
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,  
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877

 *     *     *

How to bend our words to apprehend the movements of the world?  The bouncing, consonant stutter of the wind, the end rhyme of its rise and fall.  The abrupt rise in exclamation and suddenly smooth turn of wing upon the sky.  The intensely grateful waver of flame re-awakened by these gifts.

The heart held in despair or tedium, when given reason, leaps up with such sublime intensity that all the headwind in the world is nothing to its joyous grace.  Though not simply erased, the winds are taken up and transmuted into a part of that joy.  With something of a falcon's heart we come by the means to understand, accept, and embrace this inevitable turbulence, becoming nimble and light enough to float upon it unbowed.  The gift of this endlessly beautiful world.

 *     *     *

*grainy, grey day pictures are mine, .gif is not*

A Peaceful Morning Explore

Tiny, tenuous steps along the sand--
grains undisturbed by their gentle passing

A delicate, endearing nervousness--
and yet an effortless lightness and grace

If one's heart could move like this all the time...
Maybe it will find its way after all.

Sketchin' 4: Slow Going

 "Somebody Needs to Work on his Perspective and Shading"

-     -     -

"My Killdeer is Plotting Something"
-     -     -

 "Overly Dignified Black Phoebe with Terrible Pine Needles"

*     *     *

"You May Notice This Isn't a Bird"

Taken on a beautiful morning.  Not pictured- a beautiful sketch.

Something Centripetal

When I go out specifically to see birds, I will often go out in the morning without having eaten and spend a few hours or more wandering in marshes or meadows, along creeks or the shore of the Lake.  I have noticed that hunger of this order helps to sharpen alertness while firmly easing me out of the self-focused state I so easily slip into. It brings me a useful diffusion of thought as the body starts to pay more strict attention and the mind freely drifts.  Somewhat in line with the spiritual and religious uses of fasting, this bodily hunger helps me to understand an existential hunger as well.  We all have a need for something, however ill-defined which will sustain our spirit, calm us and help to move us through our lives.  In the way that most of us live, it is easy to feel distracted or disconnected from the world around us-- out of place, without roots and restless.  When I go out into the natural world to see birds, there is the physical reconnection with the natural world but there is also the act of encountering another life that is in place, deeply rooted in the world around it and at rest in that, no matter how much it worries about predators and finding food, it is not struggling against itself-- the bird simply exists in its natural state.

For me, hawks most clearly express this idea in that they create a deep resonance within me.  Something in the back of my mind responds automatically-- an inner compass pulled to and shivering towards its object.  Owing to a few lovely conversations in which I displayed my own inelegance with the spoken word, I have been trying to understand and become more able to express this connection.

First these are fairly measured, elegant birds living under a well-defined, vigilant tension.  There is to them a kind of feral constancy which I mean in the sense of steadiness of temperament but which is also pleasantly tied to notions of faithfulness, loyalty, and love.  My own name is derived from Gawain, the name of a knight of the round table which is most closely thought to mean "Hawk of May".  This speaks to the nobility that has tended to be attached to hawks because of their well-controlled bearing but also hints at the fierceness and violence with which they hunt.  Our words for these animals mostly tend to focus on this violence with the word "hawk" coming from roots meaning "to seize" from which has also grown the word havoc.  "Falx" is Latin for sickle, with it's own attendant associations with reaping and death, and came to refer to sickle-shaped weapons which morphed into "falcon".  "Raptor", only fairly lately applied to birds, means "robber or plunderer" and comes from the root "rapere" which means "to seize and carry off" and unfortunately is closely related to "rape".  But it is also closely related to rapt and rapture which maybe makes it an apt name in that it points out the odd mix in which these birds have been viewed throughout Western thought.  At times, they have been associated with royalty and virtue, used in heraldry and as symbols across cultures.  And then they have also been shot and killed as vermin as they prey on livestock, poultry, and game-- hated simply for hunger and a will to live.

 I have written before about "seeing the bird in two ways" and it is difficult to dissociate the actual birds that you see before you with the resonance they have for us, the associations we feel that give rise to these names and symbols-- these metaphors.  Metaphor is what we use to reach out and try to grasp something that we either cannot directly express or directly understand.  It is our way of seizing an idea, to carry it away, take it apart and digest what sustains our lives, what then becomes a part of us.  Metaphor, in art, spirituality, and thought, is a way in which we sustain ourselves and are able to feed that existential hunger and find connection with things which we cannot fully understand.

Metaphors can be seen as a guiding pattern or constellation-- something by which we orient ourselves in a complex world. The most important part of a constellation is the point of observation, or the location of the viewer themselves. If your point of view is changed, then the entire constellation is different. Astronomy in this simple way is deeply rooted in place while yearning for farther reaches and in this way shares territory with spiritual faith.  This speaks to the importance of knowing where we are and the significance of our place in the world while also illustrating the versatility of metaphor across mental disciplines.

Hawks can be seen symbolically as spirits of the forest and open field, a representative gestalt of the natural world itself.   As birds they can point us toward an expression of everything which soars within us and, as raptors, those emotions and ideas waiting to seize us.  As with most things, close observation of their lives can help us to recognize patterns and contours in our own.  They are there for a reason, both in a biological and a metaphorical sense, as all things are in the natural world and that reason is fully their own.  They are in place, simply and strongly connected with the world around them.

There is then Wendell Berry's idea, of which I have written before, where one can understand the world as "a music so subtle and vast no ear hears it except in fragments".  The metaphor is aptly made as we use music to give voice to that which we find difficult to give words.  It takes so many things all joined together, moving sometimes in harmony and sometimes in discord, to make up even the tiniest beauty which we see in the world around us.  It is my belief that by loving this world well and connecting with it, we come to recognize our place in it and to know what is ours to add to this vast music.

These hawks, these avian hunters and seekers, help me to connect with this music of the world.  They help me to understand and remedy this inner hunger.  They help me to read these constellations and to find my place.

   

Pen and Rethink...

Slow week at the Urban Trailhead...

"Common Merganser?  I hardly knew her!"

This looks decent as an experiment with colored pencils (on loan from the Explore Tahoe Collection)

Lest you think I've made progress though, let me present:

"The Western Bluebird of Crappiness"

"The Western Bluebird of Sappiness"

"Western Bluebird Sad to See How I Must Think He Looks"

Super Bonus Sketch:

 

"Cedar "Sweet Berry" Waxwing"

 Looks a little yokel somehow.  I guess I just unconsciously like to make fun of birds.

Clowns of the Forest

Acorn Woodpecker; Meladerpes formicidorkus

Acorn Woodpecker; Melanerpes formicivorus

So I'm playing around with planning a kids Nature Club, ideally to be offered at the Library.  It's something that I am actually pretty excited about and it's been fairly motivating for me.  A loose outline of the idea would be to get the kids each a nature journal, talk to them about different ways that they can experience the wilderness and all the different media and modes that they can use to express what they've encountered and how they've felt with subsequent meetings allowing them to share what they've seen and made while giving interpretive guidance on narrower subjects such as birds, geology, trees and forests, etc..  The idea would be to encourage them towards a creative interest in the wilderness and to subtly instill a deep wonder in and care for the natural world and the desire to become better stewards of such an integral part of our community.

In this spirit, I thought it might be a good idea to teach myself to draw in a more realistic mode than my usual cartoon mess so that I could talk at least somewhat convincingly about the ways in which one can improve one's skills from even abysmal beginnings.  Above you will have seen my first attempt, knocked out in a few minutes between extemporizing to visitors at E.T. about the beauty of the Lake.  I picked an Acorn Woodpecker for its impeccably well-defined lines, thinking this would make it simpler.  It did, and at least I was able to put forth something that was at least identifiable as  the species it was intended to depict.  I thought I'd put it out here as kind of a marker of my first attempt and as I practice and hopefully improve, I can loosely document my progress and have some tips I can share with kids.  So check back in... 7 years... maybe... and you should see some fairly passable bird sketches going on.

That little Woodpecker I drew just looked a little sad and uncomfortable though, so I figured I would research a bit of its Life History in order to practice evoking a little of the bird's natural personality in my "art".  Combining this with my own personal observations when I took the above picture I came up with something that I think makes rudimentary steps, at least, towards portraying the Acorn Woodpecker's relationship to the world around it including it's unfailing sense of style and personal struggles with a social drinking habit slowly creeping into early stage alcoholism.  Nature really can be unforgiving at times.

Acorn Woodpecker; Smoothanerpas formicivelourus

Placerville 4/24/15

Female Bushtit; Psaltriparus minimus

In an overcast lunch hour break from out-of-town meetings I could forgo my food and just slip out the door, going hungry down a roadside slope into tangled vegetation, through tall weeds, past barbed wire and across the limbs of a tree long since downed, into a small clearing. Nearby might be a homeless bed in dense undergrowth and a feeling of forgotten life on the margins of something half understood, close to daily life but far removed. There I could stand under a foreign tree and watch little yellow-eyed birds flicker among the budding twigs of a shrub I cannot name. A scrub jay might call out from where I had entered this space, which could be a calling back from a world no one knows I left or a scolding reminder that I don't belong to this overgrown side either. It would be easier than going back to stoop under these low branches and trail down through the knee-deep grass of a hillside, past a lone snag riddled with the work of birds, through an impromptu gate ripped in a rusted fence and into the bright and noise of a crowded parking lot.

    Out in the human open I would feel less a wanderer and more a stranger, drifting down sidewalks where others are hurrying.  It would be a relief to cut across lawns under the oak trees where squirrels are busy stealing acorns cached by woodpeckers who call at them in anger and swoop with little effect.  This conspicuous feeling would draw me on though, and down a curving dirt road which trails along past thorn bushes where mockingbirds sing and a cat, black, feral and thin, sighs away, at my passing, into a pile of rock and concrete debris.  On past a disused shed, around piles of wood slash and dried out bush trimmings, I might come to a kind of rest alone in the open where an abandoned warehouse barely stands there on the other side of a wide ravine which is choked with vegetation and scattered with trash blown by the wind. Here, at the edge of several places, I might encounter a small, quick species of bird I had never seen before and wonder if they feel this too-- this tenuous solitude and this free but restless spirit. Do they seek these places out the same as me or do they simply enjoy the indirect protection from predators one finds in a closer proximity to humans?  Their appetite and need for safety certainly leads them most places but their heart must also pull them forward just as mine does for me.  In the end, I suppose these places help my spirit as well to avoid its own predators and perhaps this is something else we share-- species more comfortable with the ambiguity of the borders between.  And upon returning, as I will have to, who but those little gray birds with their tiny black eyes and all the other small things out there would know the lonely world I have returned from and just what I have kept with me from that place?

Oak Titmouse; Baeolophus inornatus

Woods Lake

2010

2012

2011

"The tiercel glides up to the trees, like a shadow.  He calls once: a sound as final as the closing of a portcullis.  The glaring eyes squint up, and are sheathed in sleep.  The hawk puffs out his feathers, looking cuddly and harmless.  Only the armour-plated legs and the sickled toes do not relax, will never relax in life."
J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

      Since I started birding (about 3 1/2 years ago), I have been intensely interested and joyful on some level at being able to observe just about any bird-- even pigeons have their charm.   But to see a raptor holds something different altogether for me.  First off, I believe in symbols and signs and the strange resonance that they cause.  I don't necessarily mean this on a metaphysical level but I'm sure that most people have seen, heard and or experienced something at some time in their life which, on some level, immediately connected with them so strongly that they were stopped cold and made to feel as if something was communicating directly to them.  Maybe it was a beautiful painting or person, a song or scene in a movie, or a passage in a book that hit just right.  When this has happened to me, it feels as if something in the experience is hitting just the right frequency that my mind resonates back, as if it's moving in harmony with something and everything within is freed somehow and makes sense, if only elliptically.  What you experience may or may not have "a meaning" but there is deep meaning within it--the meaning we recognize in things that might never be explained or fully understood.  It is a resonance awake with mystery and wonder and the joy of ideas and emotions connecting in the mind to make sense of the world.

      For me, this is what the best art creates within you.  I've experienced it most often through literature, movies and music but also in drawings, paintings and photography.  It's rarer that it happens in the "real world" but all the more special for it.  It happens for me more often out in the wilderness than among people and out in the wilderness it happens most often when I am able to closely observe a raptor.  I'm not sure that I can articulate what it is about these hawks and owls and eagles- something about encountering such intense intelligence and life so different from our own but deeply recognizable.  I can say that it is calming, that my thoughts tend to immediately slow or stop until there is only a muted me there alone with the fierce dignity of a beautiful animal.

      The first Cooper's Hawk I saw was dead but it also brought on this intense feeling.  Layla and I were hiking, on a very windy day, up between Woods Lake and Winnemucca Lake on a trail that runs through old mining country.  About halfway up the trail you start to see decent sized pits in the ground made by the miners for reasons beyond my ability to guess.  One pit was slightly hidden by a bend and rise in the trail and I detoured over to explore it.  Mules Ear and Paintbrush grew around the rim and I wanted to photograph this scar being taken back over by vegetation.  As I came up and could see down to its floor, I saw the body of a hawk laying in a shaft of light coming through the trees, framed by the pit and bordered with wildflowers.  It was unnaturally bent as if fallen from the sky onto a bed of pine needles, its talons clenched and downy feathers moving with the lighter breeze that found is way down to that lower place.  The instinctual excitement of seeing a hawk mixed with the sadness of its death and the old fear I have had since I was a child at the sight of any dead animal.  It was like stumbling onto a secret grave of the forest, lonely and beautiful.

      I began taking photos while hiking in order to document our experiences mostly as a guard against my poor memory.  I constantly see things out in the wilderness that are so arresting as to be completely beyond my skill to convey in a photograph and I end up taking thousands in a year just attempting to get closer to that ideal.  So, even though it felt like something of an intrusion, I tried my best to record details so that I could remember.  Later, we determined that this must have been a young Cooper's Hawk, a species known for hunting at top speed even through dense forests, a behavior which results in fairly high injury and mortality rates as they miscalculate and slam into trunks and branches.  Judging from the strength of the wind and the state of the feathers, it felt to me as if the hawk must have crashed and fallen there within the last few days if not that same day.  It made me think then of all that had to happen for me to encounter that scene- all in both of our lives and the world that had to come together for me to be standing there looking down at a dead hawk and feeling thankful towards whatever had brought me to it.

      After a few clumsy benedictory thoughts for the bird, we hiked on.  We saw many beautiful wildflowers, a few birds, some ground squirrels and a gorgeous granite lake, but for me the center of gravity of that mountainside had shifted to the flower-lined pit and now revolved around the body of the fallen hawk.  As we hiked up and back past and down to our car and even when we got home, I had the desire to go back and make sure that it was still there, irrationally to stay and see that it would not be disturbed-- to preserve it for a reason I'm not sure I can explain.

      We went back a year later and I didn't say anything but what was drawing me was the question of whether the hawk would still be there and what state it would be in now.  When I got as far as the pit, I saw it still there though on another side of the pit floor, the body more decayed, the feathers matted and dusted with pine pollen but the talons still remarkably well preserved and clenched in the same position.  The wildflowers that year had begun to advance down the banks of the pit to just the edge of its floor and though I know that these things are more the work of fungus, insects and other forms of life, it made me think of this vibrant green of life coming slowly and sadly to take the hawk back into the earth.

        A year later I returned a bit earlier in the season and the pit was then a lonelier place.  The snow had thawed and pooled at the bottom of the pit which was overtaken by mosquitoes.  The hawk was still there but in an uglier state, now some half-floating, algaed mass of shapeless feather there in the water, a few of its tail feathers finally separated and floating on the clouded surface of the water.  You could just see down into the pool past the pollen and dirt and I could still see the clenched talons looking nearly the same as two years earlier and I wondered how long they would remain.  It reminded me of an idea I had read in a book by Gary Snyder where, in talking about trees, he wondered how odd it must be to die and go on standing there for decades and centuries in some cases.  I thought of how odd it must be for one's body to fade away, all reclaimed except for your clenched fists.  And then I thought about all the other hawks that would have died in the wilderness and wondered if all of those talons too were out there still sifting down into the strata of the earth.

      Once, in a rock shop in the desert, I saw the petrified talon of an ancient hawk on display. It was reconstructed from small joints so that I couldn't tell whether it had been clenched where it was buried, but at times I think of the avian fist of that Cooper's Hawk sinking down into that pit, merging then with the mountain and locked there, wildflowers blooming over it, other birds above singing in the pines and other hawks hunting them-- a great cycle continuing with only the smallest traces of its passing left sharp and curled and hidden away beneath the forest floor.

      I'm not sure what this really means but it keeps alive in me that sense of mystery and wonder at the world.  It's comforting somehow to think that there are things out there that I will never fully understand and that may never be understood, that exist on their own and for themselves but to which we are all still inextricably connected.