Raptor Page 10

  “What happened to the first female?”

  “We released her when she was healed, but she disappeared, too. Diana stayed and she and the male came back the following year and nested again.”

  “It’s a good story.” And the essence of wildlife’s appeal: to do so naturally all the things humans try to repress.

  “Isn’t it? You see why I am content to observe. But falconers seek more intimate contact. It’s not enough for them to watch. They want to control the wild spirit. They’re the ultimate romantics.”

  But not the only ones. There was Avery himself, who bid me good-night then and would have bent over and kissed my hand if I’d offered it. A nocturnal being, his eyes widened as the night deepened, and he probably went out and scanned the hallways until he found someone else to watch and talk to. Avery seemed to be peaking at his present age of eighty-two, but he’d probably excelled at every age he’d been through.

  I picked up Joan’s journal and thought about the role models that were available to me. I didn’t know any eighty-year-old women lawyers. I didn’t even know any forty-five-year-old women lawyers and very few my own age either. Close at hand there were the Rebekahs, ladies who’d taken one great big risk in their lives—gotten married. And then there was Gloria, who probably risked what little she had daily on the keno machine. A woman could grow old soft and protected or hard and on the edge, a plump hen, a hungry hawk. Or like Joan, soft and malleable on the surface, but with a secret, flinty dream. Single older women were in an interesting position these days. They were becoming the risk takers, maybe because they had nothing left to lose.

  I was getting near the end of the Raptor section, close to the Personal. I read:

  The Falcon Fund is making a major effort to reintroduce peregrines into the wild and should be commended for it; they are doing an excellent job. They breed the birds in captivity and raise them until they are about four weeks old when they are placed in a box at a cliff site. Until they are ready to fly and hunt for themselves, they are fed by the staff who are very capable and careful not to let the birds see them. They call this hacking. Even with no adult role model, the young peregrines instinctively know how to fly. Flying comes easily to them, but landing is hard.

  Like athletes or knights, falcons perfect their skills by lengthy practice. But even when they are mature and skilled flyers they reenact their adolescence every day by repeating the steps they went through when they first learned to fly. Like knights or sportsmen there is a code they follow. Those who adapt to the code survive, those who break it don’t.

  The older birds, the haggards, are glad to be free of the young once they are raised. They like their solitude.

  Falconry has always been a male sport, that is, the falconers have been male, the preferred falcons female. Men seem to be fascinated by wild, passionate, abandoned females; they want to control them. Falconry gives them that opportunity. Traditionally when women abandoned themselves to their own passions, they were considered to have broken the code.

  In The Peregrine Falcon Robert Murphy wrote about the capture of a female: “The wide sky and its safety net were gone, the men were staring at her. In her world a stare was preliminary to an attack, and for a moment she was prepared to withstand it; her feathers stood out, her eyes burned with fury, and she hissed at them.”

  “Hawks are psychic,” T. H. White wrote in The Goshawk. They sense the mood of those around them, and “rage is contagious between unconscious hearts.”

  Falconers become very fond of their birds, a deep rapport develops. Some have kept and flown a peregrine for as long as thirty years. Some people think falconry is a master-slave relationship, but in my experience with falconers, the master becomes the slave.

  It’s an obsession I can understand. Once you start observing falcons, it is impossible to see enough. The best passage I’ve read on that subject is from The Peregrine by J. A. Baker: “To be recognized and accepted by a peregrine you must wear the same clothes, travel by the same way, perform actions in the same order. Like all birds, it fears the unpredictable…. Hood the glare of the eyes, hide the white tremor of the hands, shade the stark reflecting face, assume the stillness of a tree. A peregrine fears nothing he can see clearly and far off. Approach him across open ground with a steady unfaltering movement. Let your shape grow in size but do not alter its outline…. Be alone. Shun the furtive oddity of man, cringe from the hostile eyes of farms. Learn to fear. To share fear is the greatest bond of all. The hunter must become the thing he hunts. What is, is now, must have the quivering intensity of an arrow thudding into a tree. Yesterday is dim and monochrome. A week ago you were not born. Persist, endure, follow, watch.”

  10

  THE NEXT MORNING the Rebekahs, still in their pastel evening gowns, were having breakfast in the coffee shop, noisy and irritating as songbirds that sit in a tree outside your window and warble until you’re forced to throw something at them or get up. Either they put their evening gowns back on in the morning, or they’d been up all night.

  “Good morning,” the hostess said, but I knew my morning would be a whole lot better without a roomful of Rebekahs.

  “Do they always dress like that?” I asked her. “It seems kind of impractical.”

  “They had an initiation ceremony, so they stayed up all night. Care for a table or a booth?”

  “Neither, thanks.”

  I left the coffee shop, drove down the road to McDonald’s and had an Egg McMuffin. You could count on two things at McDonald’s, the food was full of cholesterol and no one was cheerful. It was a little after nine when I finished. Time for Betts to be in his office so I called from a pay phone in the parking lot.

  “I can see you only if you come by immediately,” he said. “I’ve got the press coming at ten and a full day after that.”

  “I’m on my way,” I replied. It didn’t leave me any time to get to the post office and mail the Kid’s postcard Express Mail, but as long as I got it in by late afternoon I’d be all right. Betts sat at his desk with a big smile on his sun-dappled face. He was pleased with himself and why shouldn’t he be? The federal government had just spent millions of dollars to stop a few-hundred-thousand-dollar trade in raptors, a cost-effective operation from their point of view. His name would soon be in the papers and some nameless superior in D.C. was no doubt pleased with his performance. He was a lot calmer, his eyes darted more slowly, he cracked his knuckles less. His success had put him in a talkative mood.

  “We had one hundred agents in twelve states over the weekend. I’ve pulled in thirty falconers, all of whom were negotiating illegally for birds of prey. There’s a large international trade in these birds.” He smiled and his butterfly eyes had a new luster, as if a storm had blown up and washed off a layer of prairie dust.

  “I suppose a lot of your evidence came from Pedersen,” I said.

  “He was instrumental.”

  “I can see why you were so upset by his untimely death.”

  “We missed a few falconers that we hadn’t collected enough evidence on yet, but we got the major offenders, including Heinz Hoffman, an international dealer. You may be sure he won’t be getting out on bail.”

  “What happened to the prince?”

  He blinked. “We had to let him go.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked just to see his eyeballs flutter.

  “He has diplomatic immunity,” Betts said.

  “Too bad. Wasn’t he your biggest purchaser, the one who kept the prices up?”

  Betts slowly cracked the knuckles on his left hand, then the right. The lizard ran up, down and spun around in the middle of my back. “I am aware that you were in touch with the prince and Hoffman. I wish you had left the investigation to us.”

  “Actually, it was the prince who got in touch with me. It would have helped if you had told me what Pedersen was up to. As I said before, there are rules of discovery.”

  “I was about to close down the sting operation. I couldn’t jeopard
ize the government’s position.”

  “It wasn’t exactly the world’s best-kept secret.”

  He let that one go by.

  “We lost the prince but we still have thirty other falconers to prosecute. The government feels very strongly about raptors,” he said. “After all, the bald eagle is our national symbol.”

  “It does seem a little unfair to use one felon to lure in some more.”

  “What’s unfair about it? They committed a crime, they ought to pay. I’ve learned something about falconers from this operation. I’ve learned how they think and how they feel and I’ll tell you something. Most of them have gone off the deep end. They become obsessed with these birds; it’s all they think about and care about. We pulled in a state biologist in Wyoming who risked his career to buy a peregrine.” He shook his head, a careerist himself, certainly not a romantic.

  “Most passions are absurd when you stand outside them, aren’t they?” I said. “Besides, the criminal is probably no more obsessed with what he does than the cop who’s obsessed with catching him. If you think like them, what’s so different from being them?”

  He didn’t answer me, just laid his swollen-knuckled hands on the table. My back tensed, the lizard approached the starting gate, but Betts picked up a pencil instead.

  “I gather you are relying on evidence you received from Pedersen to prosecute your case against the falconers,” I continued.

  “I’ve got what I need.”

  “You must know that he didn’t have the best reputation around town—not only was he considered a crook, he was considered an incompetent as well. A knave and a fool.”

  “Maybe, but he was ours.”

  “You’ve pulled in thirty falconers, you said.”

  “Right.”

  “You know, any one of them could have figured out he was being entrapped and had more of a motive to kill Pedersen than my client did, and probably the means and opportunity besides. I’ve been told that Pedersen was about as subtle as a buffalo. Don’t you think it’s time to let up on March?”

  “Aren’t you forgetting some very important pieces of evidence? March Augusta had wolf-wipers in his shed; his prints were on the trap that killed Pedersen. Now if you will excuse me, I have reporters waiting outside.” He began to arrange his hair and straighten his tie in preparation for the media event.

  “You’re excused,” I said.

  I went next to the stone fortress in downtown Fire Pond where my client was incarcerated, a building created in the pioneer spirit to withstand the vicissitudes of time. For a prisoner under Betts’s control, March was in a rare good mood. He knew as much about the sting as anybody—news traveled fast in the Fire Pond County Jail.

  “My status has gone up a lot here,” he said, “now that I am suspected of killing a government operative rather than just another poacher. A sting operation. Who would have believed it? You know what the Fish and Wildlife Service was doing? They were taking endangered species from the wild to use them to entrap people. Does that make any sense? And they were letting Pedersen take an extremely rare bird to use as bait for some poacher. I hate to say this, but the birds are probably in better hands with the falconers than with the feds. At least falconers know how to care for their birds. You can count on the government to screw things up. They probably killed more birds than they sold. Well, at least the prince won’t get the gyr. She won’t be living out her life in a hostile habitat—the Saudi desert.”

  “Maybe they would have air-conditioned the desert to keep her comfortable. The prince could probably afford to. I went up to Freezeout East yesterday to visit him. He’d rented the whole place just for himself and his buddy, Heinz, who told me a touching story about how the prince wanted the gyr as a gift for his dying father,” I said.

  “I bet. How did you make out with Leo, by the way?”

  “Okay. He had some nice things to say about you and he showed me Mimi, his falcon. Pedersen had been to see him and offered him the gyr. Leo says that he guessed what Pedersen was up to and he didn’t bite.”

  “Leo’s pretty cagey.”

  “Do you think he would have bought the gyr if he’d thought he could get away with it?”

  “I don’t think he’d keep an illegal bird.” It seemed to be March’s nature to believe the best of people. “I’ve met Heinz Hoffman in here, by the way. He’s a piece of work—he still thinks if he throws enough money around he’ll get us both out of here and end up with the gyr.”

  “No doubt he’ll have the very best legal representation. The prince was released. He has diplomatic immunity, you know.”

  “I heard. With all those falconers out there being set up and Pedersen being the incompetent he was, any number of them could have guessed what was going on. Do you think Betts will lighten up on me now? Seems like any falconer the feds were trying to entrap had a lot better motive than I did.”

  “I made that point with Betts, but it didn’t get me anywhere. Your fingerprints were on the trap that killed Pedersen.”

  “It was concealed by brush, and I touched it accidentally when I crawled through the cedars.”

  “So far you’re the only one with wolf-wipers in your shed.”

  March looked down at his hands, hands that would soon be beading earrings if I didn’t get him out of here, hands with cuticles that had been bitten raw. “I wish I’d detonated or buried the damn things.”

  “How many did you have anyway?”

  “Four.”

  “Betts got one. Would you mind if I went out there and took a look at the others?”

  “Please, go right ahead. Katharine will be there this afternoon, she’ll be glad to show you around.”

  I had my doubts about that, but when it comes to evidence there’s nothing like examining it firsthand.

  “Thanks. I’ll be by tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be looking forward to it,” he said.

  11

  WHAT KIND OF a place would March and Katharine live in? I wondered on my way out there. I’d seen the tip, but what would the submerged iceberg of their life be like? Katharine was probably a crafts-person, March a photographer. There might be a loom in the living room, or a potter’s wheel in the barn. Or maybe she was a painter. If Katharine painted she’d paint oversized canvases with swirls of red pierced by black lines. Nature photographs that March had taken might be hanging on the walls, but the walls themselves would be unfinished. The whole place would be unfinished: an old house where layers of wallpaper peeled like onion skin to reveal more old paper, or a new house where the walls shimmered like tinfoil because no one had gotten around to covering the insulation with Sheetrock. A visit to someone’s house could be seen as a peek into his or her secret heart, but then if you lived in a motel-modern apartment with gold shag carpeting and fake stucco walls what did that say? You had no heart?

  Their house was about ten miles out of town on the mountain side and, fortunately, on a dust-free paved road. It was a place where the directions had to do with landmarks instead of numbers and signs. March was good at directions and I found it on my first go-by. It turned out to be a log home nestled in a clump of evergreens, a miniature Freezeout East. The house was two stories with a peaked roof; it had a sun deck on the upper level. In the yard a scarecrow watched over the dead stalks and dry remnants of a large, unkempt vegetable garden. There was a shed where the rakes and hoes were probably kept along with wolf-wipers and other instruments of destruction. The Toyota pickup that was parked in the driveway wore bumper stickers that read DON’T BUY EXXON and SAY YES TO WILDERNESS. I was driving his vehicle, that one must be hers.

  I parked the van, walked up to the door on the lower level and knocked. No one answered so I pulled the clapper on a nearby bell. Katharine leaned over the railing above my head and yelled, “Come on up.”

  The lower level was a mess. There were signs that it had been used as a darkroom, an artist’s studio, a workroom, a trash barrel. I followed the path through the clutter. Was this
the jewel in the heart of their iceberg? The foul mess where dreams start? I climbed the spiral staircase, already wishing I were back in my motel room. When you have nothing, you’ve got nothing to mess up. But entering the living room was like stepping from the dark, messy subconscious into daylight. It was spacious and well lit under a beamed ceiling. A glass wall looked into the trees and the blue sky beyond. It was done naturally, log walls, pine floors, beautiful rustic furniture with white cushions and pillows made from scraps of Indian rugs, a cast-iron wood stove. There were, as I expected, a few exquisite nature photographs on the walls. There were, as I had not expected, no potted plants or cats, although the anticipated crystal hanging in the window bounced rainbows around the room. The effect was warm, serene—not entirely finished, but close to it. Someone had carved a woman’s face on a post at the top of the stairs, Katharine in a calm and contemplative mood. It was a loved and tended nest, a carefully crafted lure, and if you had created it, you might never want—or need—to fly any higher or farther.

  Even Katharine seemed content in this room. Her mass of hair curled around her head. She wore a long denim skirt and a lavender sweater, and a chunk of crystal on a velvet rope hung from her neck.

  “You have a beautiful place,” I told her.

  “We’ve put a lot of work into it.”

  “The furniture is great.”

  “March made it. Can I get you a cup of tea?”

  “What do you have?

  “Orange Zinger, chamomile, mint, maybe some Almond Sunrise.”

  “Orange Zinger.”

  “Honey?”

  “Why not?”

  It was a house with no visible ashtrays and a “no smoking” aura; besides, I hate to have to ask. I left my Marlboros where they were in my purse and followed Katharine into the kitchen, past the bedroom where a white bedspread was sliding off a four-poster log bed that had probably been handmade, too. What would it be like, I wondered, to be living in Montana with someone who could make you a four-poster bed? And what would it be like to be sleeping with that someone in the bed he had made? To look up and see his amber eyes and feel his soft beard? An unworthy thought and unprofessional besides so I banished it, but not before I’d wondered if there were any condoms in the nightstand beside the bed.