summer_jackel

The spring rains come, warm and piercing. Squalling tantrums that flatten but cannot contain plum blossoms and daffodils, that gray the sky without darkening it, that bring up the thick young grass in wet, green tufts. The cycle’s birth phase is messy this year, an unpredictability of blue patches so shining and pure that they force attention, and the tiny active fists of this rain.

It’s so young yet. There’s a newness, an expectancy to everything in the world, stridently directing me to attend those seeds I planted in the depths of winter and sorrow. Only the earliest flowers have blossomed, but they are there, opening vibrant-colored tenderness hesitantly to a gaze made soft with sorrow, yet frightened and bright with hope.

***

There are geese again. A pair of them in my horse’s pasture, stark black and white with their gray parts blending away into heavy mist. Even with the wind skirling around them, they are utterly still and full of poise.

Further away, a skein of them moves away in a loose vee, the long notes of their conversation muffled by the rain.

***

When I first saw the hawk and osprey circling one another, I assumed that it was a squabble between species which, occupying as they do almost entirely different ecological niches and prey choices, rarely have cause to interact. Raptors are always worth observing, but this seemed odd to me. I watched with interest.

They circled slowly around one another high and then lower in the clear, cold air, a great redtail on the upper end of the size range of her species and so most likely a female, a mature bird in full feather with her coppery tail blazing in the midday sun. The osprey seemed little more than half her size, narrower of wing, his white breast and underwings stark and lovely against their frame of darkest brown. If I had to make an educated guess, I would call him male, or juvenile, healthy.
There were no shrill cries, no talon-jabbing or short, fierce fluttering attacks and I soon understood that this was no altercation. Nor were they simply two birds ignoring one another but sharing airspace. I have seen the sky gloriously full of hunting osprey; even when they fly right past each other, each bird clearly has its own direction, a distinct agenda. What I saw was interactive.

This hawk and this osprey circled carefully around one another’s axis, sometimes face to face only a few feet from one another in their wide field of blue. Even at a distance, their pattern mirrored.

When I returned more than an hour later, the pair had perched beside one another in the topmost limbs of a winter-bared tree. The hawk leaned over; I thought for a moment I saw her preening her companion, who leaned into her touch.

What was this odd friendship? I’ve never heard of such a thing, and most raptors are solitary unless accompanied by mates and young. Whence this undeniable rapport?

If there exists an easy scientific explanation, I would love to know it. Even so, though, I can’t help but sense a breath of mystery beyond. This seemed an act outside the custom and order of these birds’ lives, contrary to at least their more obvious needs of biology and livelihood, reminding me that even here the power of the moment and personality of the individual may toss in a thrill of irregularity. Somewhat unconventional by the standards of my culture, maybe even my species, I found myself touched beyond the interest in a rare thing or the obvious loveliness of any raptor.

Mute and beyond my understanding, here was a quiet intimacy shared by these wild and nameless lives, a decision that had been made, however brief: a beautiful aberration, a few feet between them of shared sky.

***

As the seasons pass, there is learning. It was a dry winter, and in December my young horse and I explored the riverbank. Emboldened by having just learned to cross little streams without fear, he stepped into the low river itself, with his eye on the farther bank. I wouldn’t have asked such a thing so soon in his training, but I was hardly going to discourage such initiative: we crossed.

Or tried. Halfway through and thigh-deep, he felt the current, shied and lost his footing, falling over and thoroughly drenching his rider. No harm was done, and he has crossed without incident (and possibly a hint of equine smugness) a few times since. Learning.

Now in spring, the river is still and quiet and full to its furthest bank, turgid here and there with grey-brown, active floodwater. Most of where we usually ride is submerged. My companion stopped and stared for a moment with ears forward, mildly startled by this unexpected change.

I felt the moment when, satisfied, he returned his attention to me. He made no motion to venture into the wide, still water. Learning.

***

They prefer to emerge at dusk and dawn, but this day the ragged end of a storm is passing over at noon, and the clouds afford them enough dimness for comfort. Three tiny rabbits, earth-colored cottontails, emerge from the blackberry hedge to nibble the bright new grass. So lovely, so perfect and vulnerable, dashing under their cover with aching, fleet immediacy.

And later, the jackrabbit, long-legged and huge of ear and eye, bounding over the vivid yellow mustard blooms. The running hare commands attention. Her kick, which is strong enough to badly injure a hungry coyote, sends her forward in leaps like flight.

They are formidable, these small, light things, swift and sensitive, difficult to catch; and theirs is the beauty necessary to truly appreciate the predators in context. By themselves, they are singular wonder. All together they are a marvel: the hares and rabbits and the glorious warble of a redwing blackbird not yet fully fledged into his summer plumage, the slender-legged gray coyote moving through the vineyard with alert care. The sweet bright green of the grasses, the wild yellowness of mustard between yet-sleeping grapevines. I am not immune to it.

Could you write a love song to a jackrabbit? A paean of joy to the vivid blueness of sky or the liquidity of a blackbird’s voice, the reflection of white clouds in the shallow puddles left everywhere by recent rain? Could an artist half hope to touch a thousandth of it?

***

Another osprey, and an ending. The bird startles me enough to stop my car, eager as always to see something interesting. This is a large one, her long near-black wings flapping oddly. Through my binoculars, I can see tangled orange netting wrapped around both legs; it has caught in the branches of an oak tree and trapped her. For nearly a minute, aching, I watch her struggle, flapping upside-down beneath the limb.

She frees herself, but the garbage is still fast to her. She could never hunt this way, and unless she can get loose of it, I know that she will die. I watch her glide silently, tiredly, over the river and away, hurting for her, hoping that this is not the crisis that ends this particular tenuous life.

We cannot predict sweetness, or splendor, or sorrow, or death. The sudden assault of beauty, those moments that force attention away from ourselves and into sweet mystery are almost, but perhaps not quite, as swift and unpredictable as the final crisis that will end each of us. There exist both beauty and necessity in these endings: the osprey and the fish it eats have together their symmetry and wholeness, their own intimacy. There is a particularly human ugliness to this bird’s entanglement, of course, a deeper and more destructive aberration. This pressure upon a system, the threat of unbalancing the symmetry badly enough to break it: the floodwaters rising up to swallow the world.

If you were to write a love song to a jackrabbit, there would have to be a note of joy for her blood in a coyote’s jaws; but must it fathom this? Must it incorporate this mournful cry of loss, embrace that which threatens more than just a life here and there? Can it include our one species that has tainted everything? I am culpable for the netting on the osprey’s claws; I am part of what created it. Must the cry of joy I feel at the perfection of the moving hare in tall mustard flowers incorporate myself?