Blood on the Curve of its Beak
"...Hawk, I whispered, hawk,
and stared straight at him,
into his hard eyes.
Hawk, may heart sang, hawk,
a word of death and life
in balance, a word of death
and hunger and fierce pain
and beauty and devouring...
Hawk, I whispered, hawk."
(a portion of the poem Red-Tailed Hawk, by Patricia Monaghan)
It was quite an evening, and luck was with me. The kind of evening that does not come around that often. It was hot, but not quite as hot as it had been a few hours earlier. With only about three rides in the past three weeks, I wasn't expecting to ride well, but I did anyway. And then there was the hawk, i took forty-five photos of that hawk (admittedly not all worth anything) - it flew up from the ground, out of the dry grass, just past the army yard. The sun was glaring so i couldn't see it well, but i suspected it had caught something (hawks are not usually on the ground unless they've caught something), so i decided to follow a hunch and veered off my route in pursuit. The chase wasn't a long one, and soon enough i spotted hawk up on the lowest brace of the nearest tower of power, and it was indeed gorging itself on something tasty. Forty-five photos followed. A curious raven flew in, rolled some bones deep in its throat, but decided hawk wasn't going to share and flew off again. Hawk wasn't too concerned about either raven, nor myself, and kept pulling and ripping at its dinner. Blood on the curve of its beak.
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