1
1983
Bowman sat on the floor of the hayloft and kicked his bootheels on the boards to knock off the snow while his father walked downstairs for the eagle.
He wore a green wool watch cap pulled down over his ears, wool pants, a plaid wool jacket. Over the jacket, his father had strapped a baseball catcher’s chest pad to Bowman’s back and pinned a stiff, poorly tanned Alaskan wolf pelt to the pad. Two half-frozen chicken necks dangled on a leather strap tied to the back of the wolf’s head.
Bowman shut his eyes. Wolf-scent from the thick coarse fur of the pelt enveloped him, somehow familiar, triggering what felt like long-ago memories, or the shreds of a dream slipping away in the morning. His saliva flowed at the raw meat of the chicken necks and he swallowed to keep from drooling on the barn floor. His sense of smell was too sensitive, which he thought was strange, but he didn’t dwell on it. Instead he leaned over to the hay bales stacked behind him and inhaled the sweet scent of summer afternoons, a mix of brome, grama, wild rye, and bluestem that grew in the high, lush valley his family called Panther Gap. In his mind he left the cold barn and lay on his stomach in the valley, in the breeze and insect buzz, hot under the long sun, watching bison move through tall grass, unhurried as old gods.
Slow footsteps on the stairs. Alecto appeared first, standing two feet tall on an upraised forearm, her head covered with a leather hood Bowman’s father had sewn himself. Then his father’s thick black hair and graying beard, shaded eyes, a frown of concentration that softened when he saw Bowman waiting.
Bowman rolled to a knee. He and Summer had pulled a lure behind them on a long rope, walking, running, on horseback, teasing the eagle from the sky with a stiff musty fox skin jerked along the ground. But this was going to be different. He knew he should probably be afraid.
The high gable windows showed a blank white sky. Still snowing, the first tracking snow of the season, and when it stopped, he and Summer would walk down into the valley and read the new tracks there. Deer and elk and moose and bison, of course. The black bears were mostly denned up by now, but there would be bobcat, marten, river otter tracks. Maybe they could find the male lion who lived in the valley. A young female had appeared during the fall and Summer was hoping for kittens next year.
Others had arrived as well, animals who weren’t supposed to be here, who had come from far away.
Last spring, a pair of wolves had dug a den way up in the old timber at the north end of the valley. In August he’d found a set of long-clawed bear prints in the mud at the head of the lake, a pilgrim from the relict grizzly population up in the San Juans. He’d seen lynx, and at least one fisher cat, and he’d glimpsed a wolverine at dawn in mid-September, disappearing over the high ridge of the Red Creek Range opposite the house.
And there was one other animal, or maybe he was something more, who had appeared in Bowman’s dreams, one so powerful and rare Bowman had never even allowed himself to say his name, a massive spotted cat making his way north from the Sierra Madre Occidental, returning home to Panther Gap along pathways forgotten for five hundred years, leaving a trail of carcasses behind him, a trail Bowman would retrace someday himself, following the bones into Mexico.
He hadn’t told Summer yet. He wondered where she was now, why she wasn’t here to watch.
“You should be moving when I pull off the hood.”
Bowman started at his father’s voice. It took him a moment to parse the words’ meaning. He looked up at the eagle, deep black in the indirect light. It seemed to Bowman that his father had nearly disappeared, had become inanimate, insignificant beside Alecto.
“Will she know it’s me?”
“No. She’ll think you’re an animal. Prey.”
Bowman waited. He knew what his father meant by the word, but he was struck by the homophone. There was no church in their lives, no formal religion, but he and his sister had climbed out onto the roof at night and prayed to the full moon. They hid in the willows at the foot of the lake and prayed to the herds of bison and elk feeding in the meadows. And they snuck down through their grandfather’s tunnels to the canyon at the edge of the desert and prayed to the ghosts of the Old Ones who roamed the secret cliff dwellings and spoke to Bowman while he slept. They didn’t tell anyone they did this, and when they prayed they always asked for things that they knew were going to happen anyway: the sun to come up, the snow to fall and to melt in the spring, their father to kill elk and a bison for their meat, their mother to rest on the east ridge where the sun hit first in the mornings, under the broken stones Bowman had helped to pile on her before Summer was old enough to remember.
“Now,” his father said.
He moved fast, crawling on his hands and feet, hunched over, trying to move like a wolf would. He thought wolf-thoughts and loped across the barn floor. He moved in a straight line and didn’t turn. A wolf that turned to fight would make the eagle flare and break off the chase. The wolf was only vulnerable when he was running away.
He felt himself change, a little. It puzzled him.
When the eagle hit, it felt like his father had whacked him with a baseball bat instead. His breath went out and he collapsed facedown, his arms protecting his head and face.
He was supposed to hold still, pretend the first impact had knocked him out, not buck and jerk like a wolf trying to get away. That would be too dangerous, would bring on more killing from the eagle.
Still, she footed him, her first and second talons piercing the pad and pulling and then driving down again, through his skin, between his ribs, and into his chest, teaching Bowman a new kind of pain, an opening up, his guts pricked and held. A boundary so perfect and inviolate that he had never known it was there, broken now, dissolving, as if the eagle had reached inside him and was holding his heart, ungently, intimately. Later he would read that this sort of experience was called a unitive trance, and it was usually brought on by hallucinogenic drugs, extreme religious fervor, or near-death experiences. It didn’t often happen to eleven-year-old boys.
His father was speaking. A hollow voice, miles distant. “Are you okay?”
He nodded, not wanting to say anything out loud, to break the wolf illusion.
“Now hold still, let her feed for a moment.”
She felt heavier than her fourteen pounds as she shifted, adjusting her grip and picking at the chicken necks. His right side felt punched where the one foot still held him, the other on the wolf’s head while she fed. That’s the way she was supposed to do it: one foot on the body, driving the two primary talons into vital organs and compressing the lungs, the other on the head to control the wolf’s defensive bite.
He had been a wolf for a moment, and now, with the eagle holding him, as he started to bleed internally from two puncture wounds, he was the wolf, and he was the eagle as well. He knew them both. He floated up and impossibly away from his body. He’d read about people claiming to have done this, but had always thought it sounded ridiculous, something they would invent to make themselves seem more interesting. Yet there he was, lying on the barn floor, his point of view unquestionably suspended in the air above, watching as his father approached.
Alecto was mantling, her wings spread protectively over him, shielding her prey.
His father spoke to the eagle in a small voice, in a language Bowman no longer understood, carrying a folded blanket he would use to cover and hide his son as soon as he coaxed the eagle away.
* * *
Leo Girard felt an unaccountable foreboding. The short flight had been perfect but Alecto had gone high-strung now. She hissed and glared at him over her shoulder, holding her immense wings out over Bowman. There were no wolves to hunt within a thousand miles, but Alecto was large and fierce enough to take one, and Leo thought he might try her on coyotes later in the winter, when the snow was deeper.
“Easy, big girl.”
Leo’s great flaw as a falconer was his desire to please his eagle. He knew this, and he fought it, but the little concessions he made had led to a relationship with the bird that was less than ideal.
He would walk out to check on Alecto at night, his boots crunching in the snow, and when he opened the heavy plank door her head was already turned in expectation, eyes shining with reflected moonlight, eyes larger and heavier than Leo’s own. He would stand in front of the perch, the eagle’s dark form silent, fluffed into a caricature against the cold, and he would feel her looking into him until the things he’d done and seen, the great love he’d lost, his nagging, desperate worry for his children’s fraught future, the lives he’d taken, the soul sickness of his already too-long life, it all shrank to insignificance. On still winter nights he stared into those glinting black orbs, thinking there should be some kind of sound emanating from them, a low thrumming hiss like a river in flood. Alecto’s eyes were silent in the same way a meteor arcing across the sky was silent, impossibly silent, as if the watcher must have suddenly gone deaf.
“Bowman.”
“Sir?”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes.” The boy’s voice was weak, muffled, speaking into his arm. “Did I do it right?”
“You looked like a wolf. Even to me.” It was more than that, a perfect performance, and it had spooked Leo. The boy had changed into a wolf before his eyes.
Alecto lifted her right foot, the first and second talons shining wet with blood.
“She footed you.” Leo moved in closer, reached out with his gloved arm toward the bird. She hissed at him again, the hackles on the back of her neck raised. It was still too soon. Something about this ersatz kill had agitated her. “You’re hurt.”
“I’m fine. It’s kind of hard to breathe.”
Leo hesitated. It was risky to try to take the bird off her kill before she was ready.
“Come up, Alecto.” He placed a strip of raw chicken on his glove and stepped around in front. His son’s face was hidden. “That’s Bowman you have there. Let me see what you’ve done to him.”
The chest pad on Bowman’s back looked inadequate now—what had he been thinking?—but already he was imagining something more protective, a vest of stiff heavy leather. It had gone so well. He hadn’t expected Alecto to take to such a large quarry so quickly.
She held his eyes with hers, her beak open, panting.
“She’s not letting me in. We may have to wait a few minutes for her to settle down.”
Bowman lay still, the eagle tenting her wings to shadow him, her feathers compressed tightly against her body. She stood like a statue of some crazed angel, her eyes glaring an unmistakable warning.
“You okay for a little longer?”
The boy didn’t reply.
“Bowman!”
He heard Summer’s frightened “Daddy?” from behind him as he lunged to kneel beside his son’s shoulder. The eagle’s blooded foot struck at his face like a snake but he was ready, taking the blow with his gloved fist, the thumb talon big around as a pencil going through the leather and into the meat of his palm. Before she could strike again he swept her feet together with his other hand. Her left wing cut a gash in his cheek as he pulled her toward him, folding her against his chest. She weighed no more than a fat housecat, but her power was astonishing, preternatural. Leo Girard had fought men to the death but he had never experienced anything like Alecto’s hissing, primal fury, and he knew she wouldn’t forgive him for this. He used his weight to subdue her, lying atop her while slipping the hood over her head.
Her struggle ceased as if he’d thrown a switch, and he set her on a pine beam, wrapped her jesses loosely around a peg, and turned to lift his son and carry him to the house. Summer stood wide-eyed at the top of the steps, and he whispered to her, asking if she would please run down and open the outside door.
Copyright © 2023 by James A. McLaughlin
