The Kid has a soft spot on the back of his neck, a downy spot, a place to press a cheek on and dream away. He pulled the covers around his head and covered it up. As far as I could tell he went right to sleep, but after a few minutes of staring at a wounded back I said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, you’re really being unreasonable.” Since he didn’t answer, I got up, went into the living room, lit a Marlboro, poured a drink and took out Joan’s journal, thinking that would put me to sleep.
It was the record of a biologist’s life and her love—birds. Each section was labeled and neatly organized, a scientific treatise, but a romance, too. There was a Personal section and I wondered briefly what could be in there. Joan had never had a lover as far as I knew, few friends and not much of a family either. I skipped it and went to Raptor. By a warm lamp and a cold tequila, I read:
Raptors are the fiercest of birds. They are predators, but most birds are, strictly speaking, even those that eat insects and worms. What distinguishes raptors is that they use their powerful talons to seize or stun their prey and their hooked beaks to tear that prey into bite-sized pieces. Some falcons’ talons are so strong they can snap the head off a wooden duck decoy. Raptors have excellent hearing and their eyesight is the best in the animal kingdom.
Hawks are diurnal raptors, most owls are nocturnal. Falcons are members of the hawk family. They hunt during the daytime and their preferred prey are other birds which they like to catch in flight. The female hawk is dominant, the largest and strongest of the pair, which is known as reverse physical dimorphism. As the female peregrine falcon is one third larger than the male, she is called (technically) a falcon, and he is called a tiercel.
The largest and, I think, the most beautiful falcon is the Arctic gyrfalcon, which is native to the polar region, although known occasionally to migrate south into the northern U.S. Once one wintered in the Customs Tower in Boston. Gyrfalcons have a grey morph and a white morph, but even in the white phase they are not pure white—like a snowy owl they have dark streaks on their heads and backs. They will eat mammals, including hare, weasel and mink, but they like ducks and ptarmigan best. It may be ptarmigan shortages that bring them south.
That was the prose. And then there was the poetry. Joan quoted from one of her favorite bird books, The Peregrine Falcon by Robert Murphy:
Even in [the falcon’s] quietness, sitting relaxed and with his breast feathers loose, he gave an impression of spirit, compactness, strong bone, and hard-muscled power: a rapier quiet in the scabbard.
He was the hunter that men had caught and trained to catch ducks and other birds for them long before gunpowder was used or thought of: for that and for his great style and spectacular powers of flight, which as groundlings bound to the earth they could watch with a lift of the heart.
It is beautiful to see a living creature … that is the master of the element in which it moves; beautiful to see the lightning swift co-ordination, the apparent wild reckless abandon that is not abandon but perfect control, and think of the spirit that moves it. …it is a spirit of ice and fire, steely hard … and marvelously equipped to play with storms and great winds and do the killing that is its function and by which it lives.
And from The Treatise on Falconry of Albert us Magnus:
Girofalcon or gyrfalcon means ‘whirling falcon’, for it is her nature to fiercely pursue her quarry, such as cranes and swans, with a whirling and spinning motion. … Other falcons do not fly readily with this species, and even the eagle hesitates to attack her. She likes to be fed delicate meat, so freshly killed that the warmth and natural movements are still present; most of all, she likes the heart and the meat around the heart.
Joan was enraptured with that embodiment of the American West, a cool and efficient killer. Only in her case, instead of a dark gunslinger, it was a white female, one who liked the meat around the heart. Who would have thought it? The falcon was a creature of myth and legend, no ordinary bird. Well, at least I wasn’t pissing the Kid off and going into the back of beyond in search of a sparrow.
I got back into my side of the bed. The Kid was gone when I woke up in the morning. He’d left a yellow stick-on note on the door. “Send me a postcard,” it said.
Enjoy more of Judith Van Gieson’s mysteries as ebooks:
North of the Border: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#1)
Raptor: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#2)
The Other Side of Death: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#3)
The Wolf Path: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#4)
Lies that Bind: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#5)
Parrot Blues: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#6)
Hotshots: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#7)
Ditch Rider: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#8)
The Stolen Blue: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#1)
Vanishing Point: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#2)
Confidence Woman: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#3)
Land of Burning Heat: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#4)
The Shadow of Venus: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#5)
North of the Border Page 18
