Pecked to death by ducks (9 page)

The signal—it always happens this way—took the falconer through a small town. Now when a man is searching for his bird with a receiver of this sort, he must constantly listen to the beeping of the machine and turn in a complete circle, carefully blocking one point of the compass with his body in order to isolate the signal.

Falconers understand such antics at a glance. The rest of us find it bewildering. I mean, here's a man running through your backyard, a little frantic, sweating in the chill, holding a little black box with an antenna on it. Every once in a while he performs a slow-motion ballerina twirl, then goes hysterically galloping off in one direction or another. The man is wearing what seems to be a pair of long Johns, bursting at the seams. Naturally, seeing such an individual whirling through your backyard, you might be inclined to inquire as to the nature of his business.

"The hell's going on here?"

"Sorry," your falconer in lingerie is going to reply, "can't talk now. I've lost my bird."

Now, for the average outsider, this translates out to: "Can't talk now, I've completely lost my mind."

The ancient field sport of falconry has been the subject of some controversy over the past few years. There are a number of people who simply can't stomach blood sport of any variety, and they are people of good heart. It is wise, I think, for falconers to point out that they have had a guiding hand in bringing the majestic peregrine falcon back from near extinction. In 1965 there were fewer than twenty known pairs of peregrines in the wild. DDT was killing them. In 1970 the Peregrine Fund, a nonprofit organization supported by scientists, ecologists, hunters, and especially falconers, began raising peregrines in captivity and releasing the young. A dozen years ago, for instance, there were three known pairs of peregrines in the southern Rocky Mountains. Today there are thirty pairs. It is difficult for those of genuinely good heart to take issue with these statistics.

Similarly, hunting falcons are not taken from the wild: all peregrines, by law, must be captive-bred.

Some observers feel that falconers are invariably successful in their hunts. This is not so. A man with a shotgun is a more effective predator than any peregrine.

Indeed, the point of falconry or hawking is not merely to take game; the important issue is the manner in which game is taken. One bright Amarillo morning, for instance, I was out by a duck

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pond with some falconers and noticed that the man flying the bird had it wait on, which is to say, hover, several hundred yards from the pond. When we flushed the ducks, the falcon stooped, but she was far out of hunting range. The ducks flew off unharmed. Later, I asked the falconer why he had set his bird up for certain failure.

"I want her to learn that she has to take a higher pitch," he said. "If she was over the pond, it would have been a simple slaughter."

And I understood that falconers require a certain perverse elegance in their sport. They are rather like the sexually obsessed in this regard: "Well, if I can't do it with whips and midgets, I'd rather not do it at all."

Most hunters—all but the most doltish fringe—speak about respect for the hunted. A falconer's concern for the quarry is legendary.

One example of my point: There is an individual who is a pillar of moral authority in his community, and who, for that reason, has asked me not to reveal his identity. Let's just say that one fall day, on his annual hawking vacation, he was out flying Harris hawks with several friends. This was in Colorado, and the friends were flying the Harrises from their fists.

Now Harris hawks, I discovered in Amarillo, are rare raptors in that they hunt in groups, using strategy. I imagine the scene was rather like the one I witnessed out in the corn stubble near the Amarillo airport. I recall a rabbit—an animal weighing perhaps seven pounds—being pursued by the Harrises. Once again it occurred to me that if game were the purpose, a shotgun would have served us better here. We scared up a rabbit, and then it was "Ho ho hawk," and the Harrises sprang from four fists as the rabbit bolted toward high cover. Two of the hawks were slow off the mark. One of the pound-and-a-half hawks was coming in high, one low. The rabbit—there were several ferruginous hawks cruising the field, and my guess is that the local bunnies were used to this sort of thing—stopped short so that the high hawk overflew him. The second Harris came in only inches off the

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ground, but the rabbit leapt a full four feet into the air. Then it disappeared in a series of sharp angles and lost itself in the corn stubble. There was, on the part of the falconers, some small, grudging applause for the rabbit.

The scene was something similar in Colorado that day: four men walking through a field, hawks on the fists. A rabbit broke, the hawks flew. The rabbit bolted toward the gravel road. Between the road and the field, however, there was an irrigation ditch. The day was cold and turning colder. A thin skim of ice had formed over the water in the ditch.

The rabbit had no time for caution, and it attempted to run across the ice. Which broke. Now we have four men standing around with hawks on their wrists looking down into a ditch with some consternation. The rabbit was drowning. It attempted to crawl up on a ledge of ice, which immediately gave way so that the rabbit fell back into the water. When it surfaced the third time, ice was forming on its head. The men were abashed.

Now it is true that only moments before these men had earnestly desired the complete annihilation of the rabbit. But this— this drowning, struggling, pathetic scenario—wasn't nearly what they had in mind.

Someone, it was decided, would have to save the rabbit. The gentleman in question—a moral pillar of his community, remember—took the task upon himself. First he removed his boots and socks. He was going to get wet, and it was no use being miserable all day. Then it occurred to him that he didn't actually know how deep the water in the irrigation ditch was. It could be two or three feet deep. A man could spend the rest of the day wearing wet pants. No, best to take them off. But now his shirt and his parka hung down past his waist, and for all he knew, the water could be chest-deep.

The rabbit was weakening.

No time to waste. Get the clothes off and save the rabbit. Hurry.

Imagine the scene. Four guys standing around with vicious-looking hawks on their fists and one naked man shivering on the subfreezing, wind-whipped plain.

This was the tableau that greeted the elderly couple as they drove down the lonely gravel road that paralleled the ditch. There was a slowing of the car: Our falconers had an enduring impression of two pairs of eyes, and felt much of what a driver feels when a deer is frozen in the headlights.

"Geez almighty, Madge, it's some of them devil worshipers Geraldo was talking about."

A squeal of tires, a spray of gravel, and loneliness on the road.

The postscript to the story is that the rabbit was saved. It trembled in the men's hands, badly chilled. If they released it, this rabbit was going to die of hypothermia. The hunting trip was cut short, the hawks were hooded, and the rabbit was driven back to the motel. The most efficient and least traumatic way to dry the animal and warm it up at the same time involved a blow drier. The rabbit was released in large field where—if the coyotes haven't gotten it, if the wild hawks or foxes have somehow missed it—it is still alive, fat and sassy.

Nonetheless, I have a persistent vision of the maids in that motel gossiping.

"Don't know who they are, but they come here every year. Capture rabbits and style their hair. I think they're mad haredres-sers."

Finally, the man who swam naked for the rabbit was foolish enough to tell his wife about it. Now, every time he comes home from a hawking expedition with some matter of grave or amusing import to relay—"Honey, guess what happened to me today" —she replies in the world-weary tone of one who has experienced much in life and is not often surprised.

"You didn't get naked again, did you?"

A week in the company of avid falconers has considerably broadened my horizons. "Falconry," I can now confidently proclaim, "is that flourishing contemporary field sport in which frenzied, monomaniacal men (and some frenzied monomaniacal women) soil their neighbor's living rooms with bird droppings and run around naked in the snow."

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There's an old Roger Miller song that concerns itself with a series of intuitively inarguable philosophical negatives, one of which is that "you can't roller-skate in a buffalo herd." I yield to no one in my admiration for the man who sang "Dang Me," but it is my experience that, given the proper circumstance, an extremely stupid or suicidal person could indeed roller-skate in a buffalo herd.

The song was running through my head one day last summer when, for reasons that seemed compelling at the time, I found myself on foot in the midst of the largest buffalo herd to roam America since the 1880s. Some twenty-five hundred buffalo range over the 2.5 million acres of Yellowstone National Park, and I was strolling through an aggregation of animals known as the Mary Mountain herd. They were stretched out across the extent of the Hayden Valley, bulls, cows, calves all together in this, the end of the rutting season.

My neighbor, Tom Murphy, and I had been on a day hike through the park, and the buffalo blocked our path to the road and our car. We might have avoided them: scaled the mountain to our left and dropped into the next valley, but that drainage was closed to hikers. Several grizzly bears, the Park Service said,

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were bickering over a buffalo carcass there. To the right there was only a low rolling ridgeline. The sun was low in the west, and the late August grasses looked softly saffron, aureate. A line of buffalo stretched out over the ridge, and there was no way to know how many there might be on the other side of the hill.

The choice seemed to be grizzlies to the left, a midnight stumble through a herd of unseen buffalo to the right, or a tense straight-ahead sunset stroll through the buffalo we could see. Tom and I set off across the treeless expanse of Hayden Valley, directly into the herd.

"Must be a couple of hundred of them," I said.

Tom, who grew up on a cattle ranch in South Dakota, began stabbing at the herd with the first two fingers of his right hand. "Three hundred sixty-five," he said presently, "not counting that line against that far hill."

To say that buffalo can be pesky is understating the case. Statistically, a Yellowstone hiker stands a greater chance of being injured by a buffalo than of even seeing a grizzly bear. Being stupid ups those bad bison odds considerably. Being very stupid around bison can get you killed.

The bison graze peacefully, stolidly, and they seldom take notice of humans. Indeed, if a bison looks at you, you're already too close. Some people interpret the bison's indifference as stupidity and meekness. A man with the good sense to be afraid of a domestic bull will try to touch a buffalo, to say he's done so. Some people have actually tried to feed bison. Walk right up to the largest animal on the North American continent—bulls can weigh in excess of one ton—and jam a handful of grass in its face. Other people have thrown rocks at bison, just to see what they might do. The enraged one-ton animal might demonstrate its ability to outrun a horse over a quarter of a mile.

One park ranger I talked to thought too many people have a Disneyland mentality about the park. They see an animal up close, are appropriately thrilled, and reason that, since these beasts live in an area administered by the United States government, they must be bound by the same laws of courtesy that

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apply to petting zoos. In point of fact, over the last four years, at least twenty-seven people have been injured by buffalo in Yellowstone Park.

Most of the injuries are Instamatic in nature. They are the result of someone edging just a bit closer for "a really good picture." And then there are folk horror stories that attain the status of truth, regardless of the facts involved. There's one about a French tourist who wanted a picture of himself with a bison, but the animal in question was lying down. A very unsatisfying picture: Frenchman with dozing bison. He walked over, kicked the bull until it stood up, then he turned toward his friends, and smiled. The bull turned, hooked, gored.

I've checked this story out, and the incident report only mentions the tourist getting close to the bison and turning his back so friends could take his picture. The severely injured man was eventually transferred to the Utah Medical Center, where it took him two months to die. Two months.

The other story involves a father who tried to put his three-year-old daughter on a bison's back, again for a picture. "I've heard that story," a park biologist told me. "I'm not sure I believe it. I think the animal would hook you if you got that close."

And that may have been what happened. The incident report says that a little girl was injured when her father tried to take a picture of her and a large bull. Often these reports are sketchy because otherwise-loving fathers don't care to admit that they wanted to give Grandma in New Jersey just the cutest gol-darn picture of Missy riding a buffalo.

Some incidents don't count in the park's tally: In 1987, for instance, three people were injured fleeing from charging bison. There were twisted ankles, sprains, and face-first falls in that count. These people were injured simply running away, and therefore don't count in the bison-human interaction tally.

In the year 1800 there were over 40 million bison in America. One hundred years later that number had dwindled to a few hundred individuals. Five hundred forty-two in 1889, to be exact. Hunters were not sportsmen. They were executioners. A man

with a good buffalo rifle could watch the herd for a time, shoot the dominant animal, and pick off a hundred others as they milled about in confusion. All this in a single afternoon. General Philip Sheridan, among other authorities, described the slaughter as a clever way "to settle the vexed Indian question." Buffalo hunters were "destroying the Indian's commissary."