Raptor Read online

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “The pleasure is mine.”

  Avery introduced me to the wren, Muriel, and the blue jay, Bea, and a couple from southern Montana, the Colliers. Marcia, the wife, seemed plump and contented. The husband, Burt, looked like he had spent some hard years in the saddle, but his eyes twinkled and so did his mind. He knew a straight man when he saw one.

  “Do you know how to tell a raven from a crow?” he asked me.

  “Are you kidding? The only bird I can identify is a robin. I’m here strictly as a gesture to my aunt Joan.”

  A cluck came from someone, probably Bea.

  “It’s easy,” Burt said. “The wings have notches in them that mark the pinions. A crow’s wing has eight and a raven’s has nine.”

  “Got it.”

  Burt smiled, the crevices in his face deepened, his eyes crinkled up. “So you see, it’s a matter of a pinion.”

  Bea groaned. Marcia laughed although she had probably heard this joke a hundred times before. “I’ll remember that,” I said.

  “I hope so,” he replied.

  Someone was coming toward us, a man, late thirties I guessed, with a nice Western walk, sort of ambling and purposeful at the same time. He wasn’t too tall, but he had a lot of hair and a full beard that made up for the lack of height. His hair was curly and thick, reddish brown with golden highlights. He was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, a denim shirt, a down vest: a worn, comfortable Western look, often imitated, never duplicated. He had warm amber eyes, the kind of eyes that focus sharply on the far away, see clearly in the middle range, get soft and dreamy close up.

  “Hi,” he said, “I’m March.”

  Those of us who didn’t already know our leader introduced ourselves and he checked us off on his clipboard list, greeting each person kindly, thoughtfully. There was a gentleness to the naturalist.

  “Neil,” he said when he got to me. “I’m glad you could come.”

  “My pleasure,” I replied.

  “We’re missing two,” he finished up, tapping the pencil against his list. “Cortland James and John King.”

  “Cortland, Senior or Junior?” asked Avery.

  “Junior,” said March.

  “‘Cortland, Junior’ spends his time birding around the world. I understand his life list is full of rare and exotic birds,” Avery said.

  “With the money in that family,” sniffed Bea, “he can afford it.”

  “That’s how he used to spend his time,” said March. “His father retired last year as head of the Conservation Committee and appointed Cortland to replace him. This looks like him coming now.”

  The person approaching came from a place where there are a lot of people and few of them are friendly—the East. I’d say his native habitat was icy ski slopes, sailboats in the rain, Connecticut. He was about five-foot-six with a slight, boyish build and ready for prep school in khaki pants with a baggy rear end, a striped button-down shirt, beige crew-neck sweater and tweedy jacket. Dressed like a boy, he shuffled like an old man in the deck shoes he wore, Top-Siders with no socks, even though this was Montana in November.

  “Cortland James?” asked March.

  “Yes,” replied the person whose first and last names were mixed up. He sneezed into a white linen handkerchief that probably had his initials embroidered on it somewhere in navy blue letters.

  March shook his hand, apparently not worried about the possibility of contagion. “Good to see you. How was your flight?”

  “About what you’d expect from Frontier. It’s been a long haul from Connecticut today.”

  March checked his clipboard again. “We’re still missing John King. He was due in on Flight 220 from Portland. John is the resident expert from the Raptor Center in Oregon. He is going to give a lecture and a slide show tomorrow in Fire Pond High. John has some outstanding shots of the gyr taken from his trip to Alaska last summer. I’d like to give you a day to get acclimated to Montana before we go out into the field. Avery, would you mind introducing Cortland around while I look for John?”

  “Glad to,” said Avery. When he had finished the introductions, he turned to the prep. “Congratulations on your appointment. The CC does good work.”

  “Thanks,” said Cortland in a flat voice. Maybe he was tired out from his trip or debilitated from his cold or just plain bored. He looked like he was in his early thirties, which would make him the youngest birder on this field trip, but his elders showed a lot more zip and enthusiasm than he did.

  “I guess this will cut back on your birding activities, but I’ve heard you’ve already sighted many of the world’s rarest birds,” Avery continued.

  “I’ve seen a number of them.”

  “Have you ever seen a quetzal? I went to Guatemala all the way into the Biotopo preserve in the rain forest, but it was so misty I never got to see one,” Avery said wistfully. “It’s a bird that absolutely cannot live in captivity, and there are so few left, I’m afraid I will never get another opportunity.”

  “A lot of birders go to great lengths and never get to see a quetzal, but, as a matter of fact, I did see one. The feathers are the most extraordinary color. Are you familiar with the legend of the plumed serpent?” Cortland asked, brushing at the blond bangs that had fallen across his forehead.

  Avery nodded. Even I had heard of the plumed serpent, the legendary and contradictory symbol in Central America, half bird, half serpent, sometimes depicted as a bird carrying a snake in its talons.

  “Having seen the quetzal in flight, I have a different interpretation of the legend. The quetzal has an extremely long tail with luminous green feathers. I saw it fly down over a mountainside with its tail waving behind it in a serpentine motion so it actually looked like a flying serpent.” His hand began to make a slithering motion through the air, but he checked himself. His eyes, however, came alive. They were a pale gray color, but they lit up when he talked about the quetzal. “My personal feeling is that is the source of the legend.”

  “Very interesting,” Avery replied.

  “Isn’t it,” said Cortland.

  March returned. “John’s flight has been held up by a snowstorm and the front is moving our way. This is not the best time to go birding in Montana, but, unfortunately, it’s the only time we get to see the gyr,” he said. “There’s no way of telling when John will get in and no point in all of us waiting here, so why don’t I get you folks to your hotel and come back later. I left a message for John with his airline.”

  We picked up our gear and began moving out.

  “Did anyone notice the Sparhawk, the private jet on the runway?” March asked. “It’s a beauty. We don’t see many of those in Fire Pond.”

  “I noticed,” Cortland replied.

  3

  I WAS AWAKENED from the very depths of sleep, the winter solstice of sleep, by a ringing phone, deep into a dream that I was skating on the Irish pond near Ithaca, New York, where I grew up. It was late on a cold day and I was alone etching circles on the black ice. Christmas lights glittered on a tree on an island on the pond. The ice expanded beneath my skates with a loud crack like rippling gunshot. I skated faster and faster. Joan and my father, her brother, stood on the shore, their faces lit by the blinking lights, yelling something, but what? If you’re treading on thin ice then you might as well dance? “Neil, it’s March. Sorry to wake you up.”

  “No problem. I didn’t like where the dream was headed anyway.”

  “John King didn’t make it last night. Portland was socked in. The storm is expected to hit here late tomorrow, but in the meantime we’ve got a beautiful clear day coming up.”

  Couldn’t prove that by me; it looked like midnight from where I sat.

  “Instead of hanging around waiting for the front to move in, I’d like to rouse everybody and get out in the field. What do you think?”

  Sweet of him to ask. “Okay by me.”

  “Great. See you in the lobby? Six-thirty?”

  “I’ll be there.
”

  There are places in America where weather is a factor, where you wait until morning to make your plans for the day, and the skies determine if you go out or stay in, are in a good mood or bad. It gives people a certain flexibility, some might say driftiness, to be ready to change plans at the last minute. Albuquerque isn’t like that. People rise and sink in Albuquerque for different reasons; you can’t blame it on low pressure.

  I sat up, turned on the light and found myself in an efficiency unit at the Aspen Inn in Fire Pond, Montana, sleeping on a plaid sofa that had folded out. There was brown wall-to-wall mottled with yellow spots that were either spilled eggs or an embellishment to the pattern, beige polyester drapes, fake stucco walls, an efficiency kitchen with a refrigerator the size of a Little Playmate cooler. I felt right at home.

  A front was coming in, March said. That meant cold and in Montana they know what cold is; I dressed for it.

  He was waiting in the lobby at six-thirty next to a table with a coffee urn and some hard, crusted muffins for the road. The other birders were with him, keen-eyed and ready to go. March dressed just as he did yesterday, faded jeans, down vest. Either he was wearing the same clothes or their exact replica.

  “If you dress like that in November,” he said when he saw me, down parka over my down vest, “what are you going to wear when it gets cold?” I laughed and took off the parka.

  “Where’s Cortland?” I asked, noticing that the prep was not among us.

  “Sleeping in. His cold was worse this morning.”

  “He’s going to miss the gyr.”

  “Maybe not. We may get a few more trips out there before this expedition is finished, if the storm blows over or turns to rain.”

  It was a two-hour drive to Freezeout and we left in darkness in a gray van. The aggressive jay pushed her way into the front seat next to March. I got elbowed back to second-row aisle. The talk was about birds, birds and more birds. Avery, who sat behind me, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I hope you will forgive us for being so one-sided.”

  “I guess most people are one-sided about something,” I replied, eyeing the back of March’s thick and curly head.

  “The gyrfalcon is an exceptional bird.”

  I turned around to face his incredible, all-seeing eyes. “So I have been reading in Joan’s journal.”

  “Nothing in the air can compare with the speed and power of a falcon, and it is very rare that one gets to see a gyr so far south. The Arctic is their natural habitat. I don’t know of any case where such a white gyr has ever been sighted before, particularly such a young one. The young birds ordinarily have black or brown markings but this one is almost pure white. She is extremely unusual and we are very, very fortunate indeed to have her here. In my youth, I would think nothing of traveling to the Arctic to see a rare bird, but at this stage I have to content myself with the lower forty-eight. I love Montana, though. Next to my farm in Kentucky, it’s the best place in the world.” He had what many wanted, a cozy place to nest in, wilderness in which to roam.

  “You don’t look like you’re doing so bad,” I said. His eyes were alert to every motion. Even his white hair was alert; it stuck out in an aureole around his head, each strand a quivering receptor.

  He leaned close and whispered confidentially, “I’m eighty-two years old. Would you believe it?”

  “Not for one minute.”

  “I don’t believe it either.” He winked, and a wink from him was like an eclipse of the full moon. “In addition to their speed and beauty, falcons are that rare wild creature that can be tamed. In fact they have been trained for thousands of years. From the Egyptians to the Middle Ages, before the discovery of gunpowder, they were the most efficient means of hunting. Falcons can be trained to hunt, to stun if not to kill, animals as big as a wolf. Gyrfalcons are the biggest of all falcons; the falcons of kings. Even today they are highly prized.”

  “Falconry still exists? I thought that went out with damsels in distress and chivalry.”

  “It exists. In fact…”

  The jay turned around from her enviable position. “Avery,” she hissed, fixing him with a cold stare, “you are not going to ruin our day by talking about that subject.”

  “Now, Bea, there might not be any peregrines today—another magnificent falcon”—he said in an aside to me—“if it weren’t for falconers. The native peregrine population was decimated by DDT in the fifties and sixties. Birds are indicators, you know. The early Greek soothsayers read their entrails to see the future. Now their deaths tell us when something is going wrong with the environment. It’s a tough way to learn. When the Falcon Fund began to reintroduce the peregrine after DDT was finally banned, the breeding stock came from falconers and so did the expertise in raising and releasing them. The peregrine is a high-tech bird, one of the few wild creatures capable of surviving in cities and in close proximity to man. You must admit that its return is one of the rare occasions where man has been able to undo some of the harm he has done; it wouldn’t have been possible without falconers.”

  “I don’t approve of imprisoning wild creatures.” Bea flapped her wings.

  “Did anyone see the full moon last night?” March asked, attempting to change the sore subject. “It was awesome. Katharine said it was the hunter’s moon.”

  Katharine? Who was this Katharine?

  Burt Collier, who was either sleeping loudly on his wife’s shoulder or pretending to be, snored. “It’s a beautiful morning,” the wren said. It was, indeed. The sun had just come up and the Rockies were in view on our left, more rugged, jagged and massive than their siblings in New Mexico. Some wispy clouds hovered over the tops of the snow-covered peaks and the sun was working its way up. In New Mexico they call the mountains the Sangre de Cristos, named for the blood of Christ, because that was the color the conquistadors saw as the sun descended the sky; blood was something the conquistadors knew a lot about. But the sun-splashed peaks always looked more like sangria than sangre to me, a stain of spilled and spreading wine.

  It was magnificent country, Ansel Adams scenery, and the mountains were not nearly as far away as they appeared because half an hour later we were in the park. The high road was already closed by snow but the lower elevations where the gyr was hadn’t been frosted yet.

  We parked the van at McNamara Campground, got out, stretched a bit and breathed visibly into the frosty morning air, which reminded me of cigarette smoke, something I was trying not to think about in this crowd. Cliffs shimmered in the distance. Georgia O’Keeffe talked about the near far away, and the far far away. I’d put these cliffs in the medium far category.

  “That’s where we’re going,” said Avery.

  “Great, how do we get there?” I asked.

  “We walk.”

  “It’s got to be miles.”

  “Only three and a half.”

  Three and a half in, three and a half out. That made seven in my book, seven miles of up-and-down terrain. It was eight-thirty, and it would probably be dark by four-thirty. Allowing a few hours to look at the bird, it didn’t leave much time for dawdling.

  March was staring intently at the sky. It was deep blue, Montana blue, but he was frowning as if behind the blue he saw something darker.

  “You look like you see something lurking,” I said. “Can you see bad weather coming?”

  “There’s always something lurking in nature.” He smiled. “You can’t really see the weather, but you can feel it. I think it’s the change in the barometric pressure when a front comes in. You can subtly feel the drop in pressure. Birds and animals do it all the time. But we lose these senses because we don’t use them. You know there are Indians here who can still see Venus? Venus is a bright planet, it should be visible all day, but most of us have lost the ability to see it. Can you see Venus?”

  “No, but I know when it’s lurking,” I said.

  “Let’s get going, we haven’t got all day,” snapped the jay, starting off at a brisk pace, a pace which
made it hard to keep up a conversation, but didn’t stop anybody from trying. I soon learned why. We were walking through a forest that had dropped a carpet of needles and a hundred years of silence beneath our feet.

  “What is that delicious smell?” I asked.

  “Red cedar,” said Bea.

  Scattered among the red cedars were trees with dried-out burnt-orange needles that fell silently to the ground. It looked like a fatal virus was creeping through the forest. “Why are so many trees dying?” I asked.

  Bea laughed … loudly.

  “That tree is one of the few conifers that sheds its needles. It happens every fall,” said Muriel, the wren. “It’s a tamarack.”

  “Larch,” snapped Bea.

  “Tamarack, larch.” Avery winked at me. “A tree by either name will shed its needles.”

  Soon we came to the trailhead, where there was an ominous Sign. GRIZZLY COUNTRY, it said. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK. BEARS PREFER TO KEEP THEIR DISTANCE BUT THEY HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO ATTACK HUMANS. DO NOT HIKE ALONE. BACKPACKERS LEAVE YOUR ROUTE AT THE RANGER STATION.

  “You have grizzlies in this part of the park?” I asked casually.

  “Nah, they never come down here,” said Burt, “they just say that to scare off the tenderfeet.”

  “It’s very unlikely you’ll ever see, much less have contact with, a bear,” said March. “There are two million visitors to this park every year. Only seven of them have ever been killed by grizzlies and some of them were asking for it. One got a photographer a few years back. The guy was filming a sow and her cubs through his telephoto lens and didn’t realize how close they had come. You do have to exercise a little caution.”

  “What happened to the bear?” I asked.

  “They shot a bear. They missed one of her cubs, but they got the other one in the jaw. It was left to fend for itself with a gaping wound. It didn’t make it,” he said, with more than a touch of bitterness in his mellow voice. He hitched up his pack and his scope and strode ahead.

  “You see someone in the wilderness alone with bells on his pack singing to himself, he’s not an escapee from a mental hospital, he’s just trying to scare the bears away,” Burt told me.