Briefly a Hawk

Photograph by Sam McPhee.

I live with my family in the mountains of western Montana, near the small railroad town of Alberton. A week ago I found a dead hawk on my front porch. Flight feathers and bristle had been torn from the body, and scatters of down were fluttering in place or tumbling away, light as ash. But there was no blood anywhere, not even on the carcass. My five-year-old daughter, June, was there with me. We were on our way out to the car, on our way to school. The morning sunlight was rich and cold. Then I saw a tiny down feather dabbed to the pane of one of our front windows. A point of impact.

How sad, June said.

Yes. It’s rare to see a hawk up close, I told her.

We looked at the bird for a moment, as if to pay it our respects.

When I returned home an hour later, the hawk was still there on the porch. No scavenger had come for it. I called a taxidermist in Frenchtown. He was driving when he answered my call, and his truck was full of wind. He shouted his hello. I asked him if he did birds, and he said, Yeah, laughing to himself, I do birds. But when I told him the bird was a hawk, he said, Let me stop you right there. I can’t touch that bird. You can’t touch it, either.

I told him that it flew into my window. The hawk will just go to waste, I said.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, I would love to do it for you, and his voice was different now, almost mournful. But I can’t touch a hawk.

I had known, of course, that hawks were federally protected, and I suppose I could have inferred, had my mind not been left breathless in the presence of that hawk, that the state of Montana would necessarily have to protect its perished birds if it wanted to protect its living ones. What’s to be done, then, with a protected bird in this condition? The condition of accidental death. I called Fish and Wildlife, but its menu options were a maze, a loop, and I hung up. My dad, a painter, would want to see this hawk. That was my instinct. Send the bird along to someone trained in the appropriate act of salvage. If not to a biologist, a carcass goes to a taxidermist, and if not to a taxidermist, then a photograph goes to a painter. My dad once pinned a departed woodpecker by its wings to the wall of his studio and did a series of pencil sketches and then a few watercolor studies. A beautiful graphite rendering of that woodpecker hangs in my brother’s house.

All afternoon I wondered what to do with the hawk. When June came home from school, she and her sister Heidi played with their old, ratty Barbies out on our porch. They watched me with no special interest as I lifted the carcass up with a shovel and carried it across our wide concrete porch, out from the shadow of our house, and set it down gently in the sunlight not far from where they were playing. Wearing nitrile gloves, I conducted a primitive examination, pulling the wings out to their full span. This hawk did not especially resemble itself, not anymore. Bereaved of the air, the bird was so unlike a hawk, very small, clenched. The feathery lids of its tiny eyes had fallen delicately closed. The beak was also surprisingly small. Only the slender tip of a beak was visible.

The melancholy I felt while I held this hawk in my hands had more to do with an undeserved proximity than with the hawk’s death. I often feel a minor sadness when I see a wild animal up close. To see a hawk in the sky or on the post of a fence is to regard it as you would a celebrity; celebrity is, if nothing else, a finely tuned distance. Whereas to hold a hawk in your hands is to cross a threshold, beyond which the hawk betrays its famous appearance. The hawk’s body was not as light as I had expected it to be. Its body was dense yet springy. It was a cage of quills. From a great height this hawk had spotted a low, shimmering portal of sky. In the final moments of its life, its reflection had welled up in that windowpane. Its last glimpse of the world would have been a glimpse of itself. It crashed into its own appearance.

I felt very distant from this compact alien in my hands. I laid the hawk gently down on the concrete. It resembled June’s drawing of a small, stumpy owl. It was a feathered cylinder with feet punctured into its lower end. I took a few photographs of the hawk, but none of them captured its appearance. The only photograph I liked was of its profile, of its head curled into the plumage of its chest.

I moved the hawk so that June could ride her bike. I carried it in the bowl of our shovel over to the grass by the propane tank. The hawk lay there, and night fell. I had thought a coyote would come for it in the dark, but the hawk was still there in the morning.

I sent two close-ups of the hawk to my dad. One of them was a close-up of the plumage and the other was the close-up I liked of the hawk’s profile. When I pressed Send, the photographs flew—but one moment before they did, I saw the bird as it was. I recognized the bird.

It was not a hawk.

It was clearly a female ruffed grouse.

How could I justify this error, knowing as I did, and knowing thoroughly well, the appearance of a hawk?

Foolish eyes. Black bears often wander out from the woods in the early spring, and even though I expect them to appear down by our barn, rarely do I see a bear and think, at the instant of seeing it, That is a bear. For one moment, it is a thing before it is a bear. It is a thing with black or blond fur. My perception reverts to that of infancy. A shape of great obscurity has appeared in the center of an otherwise-sensible landscape—grass, trees, sky, all of it is appropriately labeled. Then the thing lifts its head, and my eyes attune themselves, and the truth envelops me. That is a bear.                     

In the case of this non-hawk, my foolishness lasted an exceptional length of time. I had looked at my own photographs closely and also at published photographs of confirmed rough-legged hawks and light-phase red-tailed hawks, and still I didn’t see it for what it was.

It was a spell, a madness. It was as if my brother Joe had come to visit me, and, a few hours into his stay, I had looked at him and realized that he was in fact my brother Patrick. My mind cleared, and my eyes opened. I could suddenly see the petiteness of the beak, a beak that nibbles at leaves and catkins, and I could see the little bowling pin head, and I could remember, even, the feet, which were not yellow and did not have talons. They were feet like a chicken’s.

So a hawk was spared last week. It was spared by a labeling error.

***

Now that spring has arrived and the weather has turned warm, the saxophonist has come back to Petty Creek. I saw him a few days after the grouse died. He parks his car under the overpass at my exit. He is tall and bald and he plays into the cavern of the overpass, leaning against the passenger’s-side door of his small car as if that door were the shard of an alley wall. He is a familiar, unfamiliar landmark for me. He is familiar because he is often there, and he is unfamiliar because he is a saxophonist in the middle of nowhere, playing for nobody. The nearest fragment of civilization, Missoula, is twenty-five miles to the west. On either side of his overpass are miles and miles of wilderness. But the scene is partly recognizable. A lonely saxophonist blows his horn underneath a bridge. But the river is not the Seine. The Clark Fork runs its wide and shallow course to the left of him, and flyfishermen cast their lines, and out beyond the river cougars glut themselves on does.

How many times must I have driven past him without seeing him as he was? Does anyone else see him there? He is not hiding from anyone or anything, but he is hidden. In what sense is he hidden? Cars pass overhead, and none of the drivers or passengers know he is there. I suspect many people drive right by him without recognizing what it is he’s doing—he’s too strange to see. We see a man leaning against a car. A flyfisherman, perhaps. Or he must have a flat. Or he must be having a smoke. Or we don’t notice him at all.

I am always thrilled to see him there. I descend the exit ramp on my way home from June’s school, and when I arrive at the stop sign, I look left, and if he is there, the day is made. I roll down the windows on his side of my car, though not necessarily all the way down, because I don’t want him to know I am listening. I drive as slowly as I can without calling his attention to my slowness.

When I saw him the other day, I announced his presence to June and Heidi. He’s here!

Who’s here? June said.

The saxophonist.

What’s the saxophonist? she said.

Saxophonist? Heidi said.

He’s here all the time, I said. Look, that’s him.

As we drifted slowly past him, I surveilled a few seconds of his playing through the sonic keyhole of the passenger’s-side window. I can never tell what he’s playing, but his playing is big and fast, like Coltrane’s. He’s accompanied by a rhythm track blaring out from a small speaker set on the roof of his car.

When I see him, I suppress the instinct to stop my car and ask him who he is. I almost broke our mutual anonymity once. I spun my car around—but I drove past him without stopping.

***

Wild animals, both predators and prey, are most familiar to me when the distances from which I see them are themselves familiar; the distance is a part of the animal. Hawks of one species or another appear hawklike when I see them from a distance of between ten and one thousand feet; at ten-plus feet away, they are reliably hawks, which is to say: the mediating distance, being familiar in itself, no longer ensures a creature its proper resonance. A familiar span of air mediates a hawk in somewhat the same way as a cliché mediates an experience. Familiarity has emptied of its elemental power a phrase as beautiful and vivid as “My heart is breaking.” From ten-plus feet away, a hawk is a kind of cliché. That is a hawk is a thought unworthy of a hawk. Better to think, for one moment, That is a grouse, and then to see the bird come out of the grouse, as if out of a chrysalis. The hawk pumps its wings, and the dust on the ground flies first. Then the hawk ascends the air.

Hawks are justly famous for their very un-grouse-like qualities—their mythic beauty, their cunning, their precision, their brutality. A hawk flies and hunts and kills with total impunity. The field is its solipsistic dream. The mice are there in the field as if by the hawk’s decree. The hawk dreams the mice’s termite turns. It permits me to slow my car and roll down my window. It is, to my eyes, if not also to the eyes of a mouse, flagrantly continuous with its chosen fence post.

Before my encounter with the grouse, I would have said that I would prefer, on any given day, to see a raptor. But my mistake has sparked in me a love for this modest stranger, and I have developed a respect for the grouse that rivals my respect for a hawk. To be fascinated by a grouse is to be fascinated by hiddenness. A bird in the sky is necessarily an unhidden bird; the sky is open, unabashed, arrogant, whereas the ground lies hidden beneath cheatgrass and rotten logs, tiny thickets of saplings, sleeping deer. In the spring, I hear a male ruffed grouse. A pent-up male cups his wings and beats a drum of air somewhere in the wilderness just behind our home. I know approximately where he is. He lives and drums in a bright, grassy thicket of second-growth Douglas fir and ponderosa. He mounts a log or a crumbling stump, and he drums. He sounds like a motorcyclist hitting the road. But his drumming is less like a sound than a feeling. He is a rush of adrenaline, felt in my ears. He addresses himself only to my ears.

There is one place on the mountain, near the summit, where, on two or three occasions, I have accidentally startled into flight what I assume to be the same female grouse. She is a feathery land mine, a practical joke. She inherits her ownhiddenness when I walk past her. She loses her cool and blows a hole in the brush, and my heart thrashes in its own identical panic.

***

A classification is both a shelf and a lens, but it is a lens first; the lens creates the shelf. Creatures as laughably different as a blue whale and a shrew are nevertheless on the same shelf only because their classification instructs us to see meaning in similarities such as having warm blood and giving live birth. A classification is beautiful for its capacity to gather together unlike creatures.

A taxonomy of local hiddenness would include the ruffed grouse, the morel, the gray wolf, and the saxophonist.

Without his saxophone, he wouldn’t be hidden, he would be just another guy standing on the side of the road at the edge of wilderness. To stop and say hello, or to stand somewhere nearby and listen to him play, would risk his hiddenness. He would acknowledge me. He would say hello. And what should I say then?

I would want to ask him, Why do you play here?

He would look at me for a moment with slight disappointment in his eyes. Then he would say, I like the sound, which I could have guessed. Or he would say, I’m on my way home from work, which I could have guessed. Or, My brother died in a car wreck on this overpass, which I could have guessed.

Why are you here? is a question for which there is no satisfying answer. He is not hiding, but he is hidden.

For now, I don’t want to break this spell that he doesn’t know he has cast.

***

Only once have I encountered a grouse that didn’t take flight or dart away. Two springs ago, at Fish Creek, I stumbled into a shady honey hole of morels, and while I snapped those mushrooms free of the thicket’s loamy floor, a grouse watched me. She was watching me when I saw her; she had been aware of me long before I became aware of her. She surprised me; the ground had eyes. She remained hidden inside her stillness. My eyes distinguished her from the ground; my eyes settled into her. She was a grouse disguised as a grouse; only her eyes were alert to me. She regarded me with ferocity and terror. I had never been looked at like this before. A hawk couldn’t have matched her stare. A hawk is chastened by nothing and no one. The intensity of a hawk is worthy of respect, but such intensity is proportionate to my expectations. The grouse in the thicket was smaller than a chicken, but her perfect stillness and her sublime terror sharpened and enlarged her ferocity. I was inside her hiddenness. She was in possession of the thicket. She had wrapped it around herself.

Yes, it’s rare to see a hawk up close, I had told my daughter.

We looked at the bird for a moment, as if to pay it our respects.

She was briefly a hawk; she was lying dead in the bowl of my shovel when she became, once again, a grouse. She lay there in the shovel for three days. Maggots came, and she was animate; she was gently simmering. Then she collapsed. Then she was gone.

She was briefly a grouse.