Hawk Tale
It’s quiet in the house. The children are asleep. The sun is slanting through the trees, sending golden lines across the frosted labyrinth. It has become a sundial, a sweep of green grass marking the minutes. The birds are singing and my coffee is going cold as I write a poem. A hawk flies into the garden.
From the kitchen window I see it come in low over the neighbouring barn, making tight circles over the creek. Wings spread, legs lowered, it drops out of sight. I wait for it to lift off again with its prey, but there is no movement.
I’m as quiet as can be, opening the door, slipping my feet into my gumboots, crossing the deck down onto the grass. I keep my eyes on the place I saw it fall—there, behind the feijoa trees.
I’m 10 feet away now and holding my breath. Then she’s up. With a strong wing beat that seems to blow my hair back, she’s at eye level, now higher, across the creek, up and away over the barn again. She rides the landscape like a wave, surfing the crest and gone.
Her tail feathers were patterned like code. Each feather a page, tail spread, the entire book of hawk was laid out for me to see, but I couldn’t read it. She was too fast, or I was too slow or I don’t read that language.
What had she been at? Crouched in the frosted grass, I look under the hedge, scanning for the body of a bird, or a rat. It takes me a moment to see the broken chicken eggs behind the hedge. And a few moments more to see the eggshells right under my feet.
A few months ago the chickens went fully free range. They gave up their coop completely, including their laying box. I couldn’t find where they were laying. Here, I guess.
The chickens are back to ranging the garden during the day, sleeping and laying in the coop. But one of the chickens is obviously still enjoying her free range lifestyle. The loss of a few eggs seems a small price to pay for enticing the hawk so deep into the garden.
Maybe this is a fairytale, with a happy and only-slightly-macabre ending—the chicken gets her freedom, the hawk is fed and I get another chance to read her tail.
would you like to read more about the hawk?
I don’t know how it will end. I know it will never end. All is life and death, famine and glut.