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.
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.
