Hostages to Fortune (15 page)

For forty-eight hours this one ignored the bloody half of a fresh-killed pigeon that she was offered. She would have fed if left to herself but she must be made dependent for her food upon her owner (master she would never have) and associate it with his gloved hand. There and there only would she eat from now on. Evidently she would sooner starve to death.

The indomitable glare she fixed upon all humankind, the cold contemptuous blink with which she dismissed it! In accepting her hood it was not as though she were submitting to restraint but rather as though she were obliging you to remove your offensive self from her sight. She would not abide being looked at herself; your very gaze seemed to sully her, and in her rage she would bate—hurl herself off the wrist and hang by her jesses upside down, furiously beating her wings and screaming. Stock still, the boy waited out these tantrums and set her back in place on the glove. When she was stroked with a feather to soothe her ruffled feelings she accepted the attentions with the thanklessness of an empress for a slave.

Between them it was a contest of wills, yet should he succeed in breaking hers the most he could hope for from her was an admission of dependency. She was a heartless thing, incapable of affection or fealty. A pet she would never be. Was it selflessness or was it slavishness, this devotion to a creature that would never requite you with more than bare toleration? Her unapproachable hauteur, her fierce independence, her contempt for all humankind including himself was just what the boy admired in her, though with that sneer of hers and that blink of her basilisk eyes she seemed to say, “The sight of you wearies me.”

On the evening of the third day of her hunger strike, here in this dimly lit room, she was offered the half of yet another freshly killed pigeon. An hour passed, although, arrested in that timeless tableau as boy and bird sat motionless, it seemed to stand still. Both expressionless, they might have been a statue in an Egyptian temple, he representing a priest of the cult of the hawk, his head averted in deference to the god that permitted no human to gaze upon it, the bird the cult's remote and inscrutable idol.

It was only after an hour had passed that the hawk's head began to incline. Slowly, stiffly, as though in violation of her will, by degrees it bent down. There was visible an involuntary working of her throat, the pangs of hunger which not even the proudest and most indomitable will could deny.

Her table manners were a surprise. Far from being the ravenous harpy he had expected, she was downright dainty. She mantled, that is, spread her wings to conceal her eating. She plucked at the pigeon, tore off small bits, was satisfied with a morsel of the breast. Or maybe this was not daintiness but loyalty to herself, a way of saying, “I may be in your debt but it's not for much, so don't expect any thanks.”

Now Anthony went in for falconry as he did for everything, with unstinting energy, and in this sport there was the added incentive of its having a long history and an extensive literature. The tradition and the lore of falconry were a full-time study, sufficient to occupy a person for a lifetime. The demands of the bird for constant exercise, for regular hunting lest she forget her training, tied Anthony to her. She even had to be weighed regularly to determine the state of her health and to ration her diet. When he returned to school she went with him. One of the school's employees kept her in a coop at his house.

Your troubles were not over once you were licensed and had your hawk and she was manned. In areas suitable for flying hawks you seldom encountered the enlightened attitude that tolerated them and favored their protection. That was found among birdlovers, but they were no friends of falconers; they opposed trapping and robbing nests to capture birds. Farmers and hunters alike hated birds of prey, the one seeing in them a menace to his poultry, the other a rapacious destroyer of the game he himself sought, and both looked upon the person who favored them as peculiar, not to say perverted, one who had betrayed his race by allying himself with one of its blood enemies. They routinely flouted the law and shot hawks and sincerely believed they were doing both nature and man a service. Most who did so would have been surprised, even mystified, but still unmoved to learn that the one he had just killed embodied countless hours of training by someone who doted upon it.

These obstacles and attitudes Anthony seemed not only not to mind, he seemed positively to thrive on them. They seemed to strengthen the bond between the bird, protected by law but outlawed by custom, and him. He soared above the contemptible common prejudice as the hawk soared in her solitary flight. He worried only that he risked her life each time he flew her. Ought his father to have worried over his identification with this predatory pariah of a bird? Princeton University's admissions officer didn't. Anthony's
Falconer's Journal
had been instrumental in gaining him admission.

Anthony found in the hawk a creature like himself in this: neither could endure failure. All hawks, not just his, were the same in their self-demands: nothing short of perfection in their every performance. Should Jezebel miss her mark two times running in a day she had to be hooded and taken home, and she was a disgruntled and bedraggled looking thing then. No pride in her pose, no fire in her eye. A most dejected and droopy fowl she was, more like a wet hen than a hawk. To have flown her for a third time on such a day would have been to risk having her fly away and not come back for shame. The implication was that she would go off and hide herself and die in disgrace. Not disgrace in men's eyes—disgrace in her own eyes. So it was with the boy; for the world's he cared nothing, it was his own disapproval he could not endure.

Jezebel's failures, never many, grew still more infrequent the longer Anthony flew her. Nature had shaped her with a singleness of purpose like that of a knife and all she needed was sharpening. She communicated to him, first by a downward stiffening of her wings, then by a hunching of her shoulders, when she was “in yarak”—that is, when the urge to kill was upon her. A pure bloodlust this was, for she never ate her kill; she was rewarded for it with a portion of a pigeon or the heart of a chicken. Sometimes, when he was home from school, Anthony used his father's old English setter to find birds for her. When her kill was made out of sight but within hearing they could follow it by the sound of her bells. While she hovered in flight they tinkled in the breeze but when she was hurtling toward her mark they rang like an alarm and when she struck, talons extended, they crashed like a cymbal. Then she tumbled earthward with the grouse or the duck—often as big as she, or bigger—in her grasp.

Images in the pristine colors of Persian miniatures, books of hours, medieval tapestries—lords and ladies of the court, hooded and tasseled falcons on their gauntleted wrists, lean greyhounds on leashes, and a recumbent unicorn in jewellike flower gardens amid trees laden with imperishable fruit—a modern-day American boy in blue jeans on a windy hill about to launch the hawk on his wrist could conjure up all that, such was the lore of that princely pursuit brought back from Byzantium by the crusaders, and since then so fallen into neglect as to be an anachronism recalling the days of Roland and the Knights of the Round Table.

Jezebel's glove was stained and stiffened now with the blood of many a pigeon and pullet. That left arm of Anthony's belonged to the bird as a mother's belongs to her baby. And when they were separated, he fixedly tracking her as she glided and hovered overhead, it was as though they were in communication on a wavelength all their own. The thermals she rode in her aerial acrobatics he seemed to ride with her and when the flutter of her wings as she hung on air signaled to him that she had sighted prey he tensed visibly. Then down she dropped the more closely to spy her quarry, gathered herself together, compacted her wings against her body, and aimed herself earthward like a bomb.

They would find her by following the tinkle of her bell. Find her perched upon her kill, clutching it in her claws, imperious as an eagle on a Roman standard. He did not wonder at her, for she was only doing what she was born to do, but he could not help wondering a bit at a son of his who had entered into such an odd alliance. Until Anthony changed his mind and decided to go to college after all they were inseparable.

It was far too late to apply for admission to college that year and it was madness to apply to only one, any one, especially the one he chose, but his prep school record and his interview and his paper on falconry opened the doors of Princeton to him.

He tidied up his affairs at home. He sold his flytying business to one of his employees. There would be neither time nor a place at Princeton for the hawk. He would not give her to another falconer. She would have adopted a new owner shamelessly. He applied for and got permission from the state conservation agency to return her to the wild. She would quickly learn to hunt for herself again, to live on her prey.

He wanted to release her near the spot where she had been trapped. They drove together with her into the mountains. With them went Anthony's newest interest, Jezebel's replacement, Alice Clayton.

Anthony removed the hawk's hood and she blinked her languid, indifferent blink, like the rolling of the eyes of a malevolent doll. Then for the first time since her capture her bells and her jesses were removed. She did not bolt for freedom but sat on on the gauntlet kneading it with her talons, and he wondered whether this unwonted show of unforced attachment would cause the boy to reconsider his resolve. Not for a moment. He raised his arm high and the bird took flight.

Anthony watched the hawk climb and his father watched him, remembering the ancient, almost universal superstition of the human soul being a bird that soars heavenward when released from the body by death. Anthony was letting go a part of himself, perhaps of a self. The bird had been practically an appendage to him. But that left arm of his was his now. He could take on his new life with both hands, with both fists if need be. He was a boy no more. The release of the bird marked the end of his boyhood. It was he who was free. He was off to college and a career and how could his father doubt that this next stage in his son's life would be anything but interesting and rewarding, maturing?
The falcon cannot hear the falconer,
he recited to himself as they turned to go to the car, the bird a diminishing speck in the vast, unclouded sky.

Now the verse completed itself:
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

He ended his night's vigil when, at half past four, he switched off the barroom lights and felt his way along the wall, through the door and to the stairway newel post. He climbed the stairs and crept down the hall. Behind the bedroom doors the same untroubled snores droned on. He had come to feel that he belonged to another, nocturnal species, not to his own.

He dressed in his newly bought pants and shirt and socks and, carrying his shoes, descended the stairs. He stepped out on the porch. All was still. The creatures of the night had ceased their prowls and those of the day had not yet begun theirs. Above the ground a low-lying luminosity, like the crack of light at the bottom of a curtain, gave presentiment of day. A task awaited him there in the tackle shed, and with no one to observe, now was the time to get it done.

In the tackle shed he found a profound change, here in this bastion of backwardness where change was so stubbornly resisted. On the door of the locker which for four generations had borne the name
Thayer
there was a new name. This could only mean that Pris had let her membership lapse, had even taken the step of canceling it, for unless otherwise instructed, Eddie would have kept it active pending her return, as he had done with his. Often a widow kept it up, and not just in trust for an underage son but for herself, for this was no stag club. Wives and children were welcome and among them were some of the club's most ardent anglers. It was here that he had taught both Cathy and Anthony to fish, she when they were courting, he beginning when he was just ten years old. Several widows and widowers had found themselves new husbands and wives among their fellow club members. Pris had been a keen fisherman, but now she had decided to drop out, not revisit this scene of so much lost happiness. Ought he not to take warning from her, turn back now? He supposed he would never see Pris again. Having all they had in common, it would be too painful for them both.

Of the gear now to be removed from the Curtis family locker there was not much that had been Anthony's. The little he had accumulated in his life attested not just to the shortness of it: he had always traveled light and had had little to leave behind him. It seemed now as though he had wanted few mementoes of himself. He had been a hard child to give presents to, not because he had everything but because he wanted nothing. He liked to make do. If he had been vain of anything it was of doing a job with whatever tools were at hand; indeed, there had been something of the showoff in his doing better with less. When he had exhausted an interest he rid himself of the reminders of it. A pair of blue jeans had been his wardrobe. His room at home, like his dormitory room, when it had had to be cleared out, was as bare as a cell. Here now was his one fishing rod, a cheap thing of fiberglass, with which, nonetheless, he could outcast men using the best bamboo ones, his much-patched boots, and his old vest containing, to judge by its weight, the minimal tackle. Even to someone not put off by their previous ownership these things would be worth little or nothing. To Anthony they had been basic equipment, of no sentimental value. In handling them now why could his father not remember and take comfort in that?

There was a locker in the tackle shed marked “Lost and Found.” In it were put not just things found but things outgrown, replaced, perhaps—this struck him now for the first time—things that had outlasted their owners, there for anybody to take who had a use for them. There he discarded Anthony's few pieces of tackle.