My Rite of Passage

My Rite of Passage

an essay
by
Jim Morice

Late in the 12th Century, King Richard the First of Robin Hood fame tried to return home after crusading in the Holy Land.  On the way, he was taken prisoner by Leopold V of Austria and turned over to Leopold's boss, the Holy Roman Emperor.  Eventually the English were obliged to produce an extravagant ransom to secure the return of their lion-hearted monarch, and prominent among the treasures they gathered were a pair of gyrfalcons-rare, gray and white predators from above the Arctic Circle. 

That episode of Medieval extortion hardly qualifies as news.  But it was one of the arcane and-not to put too fine a point on it-utterly useless facts that got me interested in falconry, and birds of prey, when I was a boy of thirteen.  Like the sport itself, the story of Richard Coeur de Lion was magnificently beside the point, and totally unrelated to anything else that was going on in my life, or the life of anyone I knew.  That seemed to be a mighty desirable thing at the time. 

And then, of course, there were the birds themselves, soaring through gray skies over stubble-filled fields, a line of bare trees faint in the distance; or sitting on telephone wires, almost completely still, looking at the world through their dark, lusterless eyes.  Who knows what they saw as they turned their heads so slowly from side to side?  Who knows what they thought?  They seemed to be almost Biblical, like the horse that God describes to Job in the midst of all his troubles, who hears the clash of battle from afar, and cries "Ha, Ha!"

The first bird of prey I ever met in a formal sort of way was the star performer in a falconry exhibition at our local science museum   The event took place on a sunny, early autumn morning, in a clearing among some pine trees.  It must have been a Saturday, because my Dad was able to drive me to the show.  I babbled a fair amount, I'm sure, and my father mostly listened, mildly interested, smelling of the cigars he enjoyed back then, before he had his first heart attack.  I imagine both he and my mother thought my fascination with birds of prey was somewhat strange, but essentially harmless.  Perhaps they even hoped it might divert my attention away from smoking cigarettes, wearing my pants too low, greasing down my hair or indulging in any of the other sins that afflicted young people in the late 1950s.

The hawk's handler was a sturdy, dark-haired man clad in thick tan pants and a green, plaid hunting shirt.  His voice was soft, but it carried surprisingly well in the open air, and he had a kind of confidence that I eventually learned to associate with people who spend a lot of their lives out of doors.  He wore a fringed, heavy gauntlet that extended over his sleeve and well up his forearm, protecting him from his bird's talons.  The hawk's legs were secured by six-inch leather straps called jesses that he held in his gloved hand.

The bird was a beautiful female goshawk (female hawks and falcons are up to a third larger than their male counterparts, because they're in charge of securing food for their young).  She had gray, white and brown markings, was approximately two feet tall, and her wings measured more than a yard when they were fully extended.

The hawk sat demurely on her trainer's fist and preened herself like a ballerina preparing to go on stage, her hooked beak protruding from a leather hood that completely covered her head and eyes.  The hood had a white plume at the top, like a knight's helmet, and it bobbed up and down as she smoothed her feathers, preparing her toilette.  She wore a small bell on each of her legs so that her handler could find her more easily in broken country, and their music carried clearly across the bright sunlight.

Before putting the bird through her paces, her trainer gave us a short lecture on falconry in general, and goshawks in particular.  He told us that darkness has a calming effect on birds of prey, and that by keeping their eyes covered with a hood until the last second, falconers prevent their birds from trying to chase game that's undesirable, or too far away.  Unlike true falcons, which normally find their prey while flying in tight circles over open country at altitudes of up to 2,000 feet, the goshawk is a woodland hunter.  It's so good at what it does, in fact, that it was known as "the cook pot hawk" during the Middle Ages.  The trainer went on to describe how goshawks stalk rabbits, squirrels and other small game from the branches of trees, taking off from a dead stop and quickly building up tremendous speed as they close in on whatever it is that they're chasing.   Then he asked everyone to step back, creating a kind of alley that led into the widest part of the clearing.

His assistant walked 40 or 50 yards down range and tossed a lure onto the grass.  In falconry, a lure is a weighted piece of leather with straps on it that are used to attach chunks of meat that the bird finds particularly tasty.  It's connected to a cord that's approximately 20 feet long, so the falconer can swing the lure in the air or drag it over the ground to entice his bird back home after she's been freed to hunt.  As the falconer's assistant pulled the lure through the grass, tugging it with a slight stop-and-go movement to simulate an animal, the trainer used his free hand to remove the goshawk's hood.

She immediately saw the target and squatted slightly on her handler's fist, bunching her shoulders and then partially spreading her wings in a sharp, inverted vee.  Her abrupt movement couldn't have taken more than a second, but time seemed to have slowed for me, and I would have sworn that she was grinning in delight as she continued to track the lure, her head bobbing rhythmically from side to side.  Then she lurched into the air, her trainer's arm recoiling slightly toward his chest as she pushed off with her strong legs.  The goshawk righted herself and bolted forward with astonishing grace, her long wings flapping only two or three times before she drew them close to her body and hurled herself toward her target.  She didn't hold anything back when she hit, flipping herself upward slightly at the very last instant, extending her feet to grab the lure in her talons, and then rolling with it over the turf.  By the time the handler arrived to reclaim her, she had covered her imaginary prey with outstretched wings ("mantling," the falconer called it, to hide her meal from the eyes of other predators) and was tearing at the meat with her beak.

What can I say?  I fell in love.

I'd read about falcons and hawks, and seen them from a distance in the wild, and up close in an occasional movie or at the zoo.  But this was it, the thing itself, a kind of beauty and excitement that I had never experienced before, and that has stayed with me ever since.  And then there was the falconer, who had somehow created a work-a-day yet mysterious relationship with that incredible, wild being that he slowly took up again to his fist.  How self-assured he seemed, kneeling there in the grass, and how I envied him as he slipped the hood back over the goshawk's head and gave her another morsel of meat.

But as excited as I was, fear also played a big role in the fascination I experienced that day, standing in the sun among the pine trees.  I was moving from childhood into adolescence, and had already gained a good understanding of how painful that process was likely to be.  I was awkward; I was fat; I was horrified by the humiliation I regularly felt, but never really understood.  Even today, forty years later, I remember how carefully I composed every sentence I spoke at school during that entire year, forming each phrase in my mind before uttering it aloud, examining it, afraid that it would sound wrong, or open me to ridicule in some unforeseeable way.  I had begun to have trouble sleeping, lying awake almost every night, listening to the clock that hung in our dining room chime the hours, becoming more and more desperate in the intervening stillness, finally losing consciousness sometime between 2 and 3 a.m.

The universe that the falconer and his goshawk occupied seemed to be utterly different than the one I lived in, and therefore infinitely better.  I wanted to join them there.

Amazingly, within two months, I got my chance.

I told my parents I was interested in training a hawk, and I was surprised that they didn't raise any objections.  But actually securing a bird seemed to present almost insuperable problems.  My books recommended setting elaborate traps using pigeons or other live bait to catch a hawk (the most desirable bird in this situation was a young or "passage" hawk that had not yet completed its first migration), or wearing telephone lineman's spikes to climb a tall tree and take a chick from its nest just before it learned to fly.  Neither of those things seemed likely to occur, and I was fairly sure that I wouldn't be able to buy a hawk, either.  In the event, however, getting a bird proved to be an easy and painless process-for me, if not for her.  That fall, while they were duck hunting, my father and older brother discovered a hawk that someone had shot.  Since she couldn't fly, they chased her through the bushes and succeeded in catching her, wrapping her in a thick blanket, and bringing her home in the trunk of my Dad's car.  Although this rather direct approach wasn't covered in any of the literature, and was far from ideal, I had my bird.  More importantly, she wasn't badly injured, and recovered quickly.

She was a red tailed hawk, and was almost as large as the goshawk we'd seen at the science museum.  Red tails are the kind of bird you can spot circling over cornfields, 200 to 400 feet above the ground, their blunt wings hardly moving as they balance themselves on the updrafts, looking for small game.  When we took her out of my Dad's car, she glared at us as if she were Cotton Mather, and had just stumbled into an orgy.  She was probably slightly stunned, however, because she didn't snap her beak, or display her talons to threaten us.  My Dad carried her like a baby in her blanket, putting her in a roofed, chain-link dog run he had built several years previously under a pear tree in our back yard, adjacent to our garage.

My two brothers and parents took a good look at her, and then went back in the house, but I stayed with her for quite a while, wanting to see what she'd do.  She ruffled her feathers, and occasionally extended her wounded wing.  But there was no blood visible, and she didn't appear to be particularly upset, or unhappy.  Every now and again she raised one yellow claw and formed it into a kind of fist, tucking it into her feathers and balancing herself on the other foot (a habit she retained as long as I knew her).  As for me, I couldn't get enough of her.  I stood watching, my fingers linked through the galvanized metal wire of the dog run, the evening getting colder as the sun set.  I was careful not to stare directly at her for too long, because that's how hawks gaze at animals they intend to attack, and it makes them nervous to be on the receiving end of such a look.  Finally, the light failed completely and my mother told me to come inside for the night. 

Over the next week, I constructed a perch for my bird, covering the round piece of wood at the top of the T with inverted carpet to make it more comfortable, as my books recommended.  I also cut a pair of jesses for her legs out of a scrap of chamois I bought at the hardware store.  But I had no idea where to find a leather gauntlet, so I wore thick work gloves and a jacket that had leather sleeves when I handled her.

Feeding her was a problem.  Because of their all-meat diet, birds of prey build up a lot of grease in their digestive systems.  In the wild, the fur and feathers that they eat roll around in their stomachs, sopping up the excess oils.  Eventually these materials are formed into a fairly noxious ball, which the birds periodically regurgitate (called "casting").  I had no trouble finding appropriate meat at the grocery store (liver, of any kind, was a big favorite), but fur and feathers were in short supply.  My books said I could rely on man-made fibers for a while, mixing a bit of cloth in with my bird's food, but eventually I'd have to come up with the real thing.  And so began my perpetual search for road kill.  My mother tolerated this eccentricity in her son, but just barely, and she drew the line at storing my finds in her refrigerator.  Thus, I couldn't plan ahead for a rainy day, and was always on the prowl for squashed squirrels or rabbits, the fresher the better. 

Food is a big part of falconry, and not only because it keeps the bird alive.  It also forms the bridge that's eventually built between the handler and his hawk or falcon.  The goal of the sport is not to tame the animal, but to keep it as wild and strong as possible, while teaching it to tolerate the presence of human beings.  Perhaps that's why I never felt the urge to name my bird.  Somehow, it would have humanized her, or made her into a pet, implying a more conventional, subordinate relationship. 

No . . . I wanted to keep her as wild as I could, and food was the key to the entire process.  My books said that there are two ways to go about getting a bird accustomed to the presence of its trainer (called "manning your hawk"), and they're both built around food.  The first entails a titanic battle of wills between the human being and the animal-it's the avian equivalent of bronco busting, really.  The handler stays with his bird for as long as it takes (and it can take up to 48 hours), not sleeping, continually trying to get her to sit docilely and take food from his hand.  For her part, the bird flaps her wings and bolts from the trainer's fist, screeching, occasionally lunging at him with her talons, and generally expressing her displeasure with all the energy she can muster.  Eventually, if she wears out before he does, she will consent to take a morsel of meat from her trainer.

Knowing that my parents wouldn't let me stay up past midnight anyway, I opted for a less strenuous and more incremental approach.  But it was one that was perfectly fine for my bird, who lacked the skittery temperament of a true falcon, or the single-minded bellicosity of a goshawk.  Her imposing appearance notwithstanding, she had a character that fell somewhere between that of a watchdog, and a rather aggressive rooster. 

When I started trying to feed my hawk, I allowed her to stay on her perch.  I would not permit her to have any food unless she took it directly from my hand, but even so, she didn't want to have anything to do with me at first.  She flapped her wings a bit, did her Cotton Mather routine, and turned her head away from me like a three-year-old trying to avoid a dose of medicine.  To overcome her resistance, I took a small piece of fresh liver, and rubbed it underneath her beak.  This irritated her, and after considerable provocation she finally snapped at me, getting a taste of the meat in the process and discovering that it was edible.  I kept that up until she had consumed a fair amount, and then quit until the next day.  After a week or so, she learned to associate me with food, and we were ready to move on to step two.

That involved standing within one foot of her perch, positioning my left arm in front of my chest, crooked at the elbow as if it were the branch of a tree, and holding a piece of liver behind it in my right hand.  Eventually she learned to hop on my arm for food, and I gradually lengthened the distance so that she had to fly to me from several feet away.  Occasionally I'd attach a leash to her jesses and take her out from her dog run so we could play games.  I'd toss a morsel several feet above her head, and she'd flap her wings, do a kind of Immelman turn, grab the piece of meat in one talon, and be munching on it by the time she touched down. 

It's important that I don't make this process sound too orderly, though.  I was a kid, after all, and both my bird and I were prone to major lapses in our training regimen.  On some days I was in a hurry, so I'd simply feed her from my hand, not making her work for her dinner, and be on my way as quickly as possible.  And on others, I just wanted to be with her, not worrying about her training, watching her move, amazed that she tolerated me, conscious that I was doing something unusual.  And sometimes I liked to show her off, and would invite one of my few friends over to help feed her.  I'd take advantage of such occasions to spout a bit of falconry lore, using strange-sounding words and pointing out her sharp talons. 

So all in all, my hawk absorbed a good deal of my time and attention.  But I was still unhappy at school and saw no reason to believe things would ever get any better.  In fact, as the months passed, I suspected they were about to get a lot worse.  The faster kids had started to pair off in couples, boys and girls overcoming an antipathy that the rest of us thought would last forever.  I didn't fully appreciate the enormity of that change until our school held a mixer dance in the spring.  Somehow, I found myself in the gymnasium helping to decorate for the big event, blowing up balloons and attaching them to the wall with masking tape.  Most of the boys wore t-shirts, and they soon began sticking the tape onto each other's armpits, and then pulling it off with a quick jerk, tearing out as much body hair as possible.  The girls who were helping pretended to be grossed out by this display of adolescent machismo, but I could tell that they weren't.  And, since my armpits were as hairless as a toad's belly, I suddenly felt vulnerable and embarrassed.  So I kept my hands in the pockets of my blue jeans, hoping everyone of both sexes would assume that I was defending my hirsute netherparts from attack by the other boys, rather than simply hiding my shame.  And then I left as quickly as possible.  Later, at the dance itself, I writhed in jealousy and, strangely, pre-pubescent desire, watching the bodies of my classmates jerking rhythmically to the music of the Shondells or-even worse-standing almost motionless together in the subdued light as the Righteous Brothers bellowed Ebb Tide.  It had become apparent that my world was being divided into sheep and goats, and I had no doubt about which side of the fault line I'd find myself on once the sorting was complete.

My hawk gave me a much-needed sense of identity and confidence I wouldn't have had otherwise.  But I can't imagine that being known as the only boy in my school who regularly searched the roads for dead squirrels conferred any particular social cachet. 

By the following fall, I was ready to take her hunting, at least in theory.  But I couldn't really believe I had trained her properly, and was afraid that I'd lose her.  Also, actually preparing a bird to hunt entails a complex process of balancing her desire for food with her need for maximum physical stamina.  If the hawk is too well fed, she won't be hungry enough to chase anything, and may simply wander off to where you can't find her.  If she's been underfed, her appetite will be sharp and her desire to hunt will be keen, but her ability to catch game will be reduced.  So the chances are pretty good that she'll miss what she's chasing, and--once
again--wander off.

My books told me that experienced falconers dealt with this apparent lose/lose situation by carefully monitoring their bird's weight, noting it down to the ounce on a daily basis over an extended period before they took to the field.  And even then, they often faced the prospect of a multi-day search when their hawk or falcon failed to return to the lure from an unsuccessful attempt to capture game.   All in all, it seemed like a daunting prospect, and one that I wasn't sure I wanted to take on.

And by that time, too, I had begun to make my peace with the trials of adolescence.  I remember one Friday night when my parents dropped me off at a pizza parlor to spend the evening with some of my classmates.  Pizza parlors were new things in those days, as was pizza itself.  This particular restaurant was built around a sing-along motif, with diners crowded around long-wooden tables, wolfing down slice after slice of what then seemed to be an exotic food, and shouting out such favorites as "By the Old Mill Stream" along with a small ragtime band.  For whatever reason, I decided to collect various water and soft drink glasses from around the table, and then began hitting them with my fork in rhythm.to the straw-hated musicians.  Suddenly, I noticed that everyone else at my table was pointing at me, and laughing-but in a good way.  Even adults at nearby tables were watching me and clapping along, and when the manager came over to my table and sternly told me to quit horsing around, THAT felt good too.

That night, for one of the first times, I felt the 1959 equivalent of "Hey, I can do this!" and life didn't seem quite so grim.

So, although I still had fantasies of my bird swooping down on a rabbit and dispatching it with her mighty claws, between my fear of losing her and increasing confidence in my ability to survive adolescence, I never took her out after game.  I guess I didn't need to.  Then, in the early spring, I released her.  My father and I transported her to the country and put her back where she belonged, I hoped none the worse for wear.  She simply flew away as we watched, and I wasn't particularly sad.  My equanimity surprised me at the time, just as it does today. 

But now, with the passage of time, I think I understand what happened a little bit better.  As I learned the hard lessons of those years, I somehow lost the sense of wonder that transfixed me when I watched that magnificent goshawk strike the lure so beautifully.  Maybe that kind of feeling wasn't compatible with the thick skin and wiseass cynicism I had to develop in order to survive being a teenager.  Or perhaps my imagination was simply redirected toward sex, a more mundane mystery that had suddenly taken on overriding importance. 

I don't know which it was, nor does it make any difference now.  But I do know this: I wish I had kept my hawk.  Or, perhaps more accurately, I wish I had kept whatever it was that led me to want her so desperately in the first place.  It's probably not fair for the man I am today to be critical of the boy I was then, but I've come to view that episode of my life as a missed opportunity.

Despite my shortcomings, my hawk certainly managed to give me a lot: a larder that's well stocked with useless information about a sport that's 500 years out of date, and an understanding of wildness that would have been hard to come by in any other way.  And most importantly, she was my safe haven--a place where I didn't have to see myself as my classmates saw me, but could look through her eyes, and imagine that I was part of some exotic and vaguely heroic adventure.

Even at the time, though, I knew that she had more to give than I was capable of receiving.  However, I had come to her for my own reasons, and when those predictable needs were met, I guess I just lost interest.  My imagination, and my courage, too, failed me.
 
 

Early this fall, as I sat on our sun porch struggling with the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, I heard a tremendous, raucous noise, like an old-time shivaree.  It was a flock of at least 20 angry crows.  From the sound, it seemed that they were moving from spot to spot in our neighborhood, raising Hail, Columbia! along the way, as only crows can.  I thought, "It must be a hawk, or an owl," and went outside to see.

Following the din, I walked toward our neighbors' front yard.  There I found four or five crows circling like sweat bees around a large cottonwood, their compadres rooting them on from the sidelines, cawing loudly.  And in a moment, sure enough, a large hawk-it looked like it might have been a red tail-took off from the tree and headed in a leisurely way toward the school across the street, its silhouette stark against the blue sky.  It appeared to ignore its tormentors.

Before I knew it, I was running-an overweight 53-year-old who hasn't moved at more than a brisk walk in at least a decade, looking mighty ridiculous, I'm sure, but running nonetheless, trying to keep up, trying to watch the hawk for as long as I could as it headed toward the far horizon.

It was quite a sight.