Refiner's Fire (38 page)

“I find it difficult to speak about this,” she said. “It's the one thing in the world I know something about, and so much gets in the way. But as the eagles move I'll tell you about them.” And then she proceeded, interrupted by her notations in the Ornithology Department's shared codes and jargon.

“Three quarters of the time they do nothing. They need rest for the kind of life they live, and are not of the working class. So they sit on their perches and contemplate the horizon, like philosopher kings. They spend a lot of time food-getting and, related to that, in soaring and acrobatics—the connection being obvious yet difficult to describe fully. We do not know how closely hunting and soaring are dovetailed (perhaps the wrong word), nor do we fathom the subtleties of the crossover. They are relatively asocial, an ephemeral presence over the landscape. Because of this, they do not suffer destructive sweeping epidemics, and their populations are fairly stable over extended periods. They have several nests, sometimes more than a dozen, and go from one to another according to their pleasure, prey availability, weather, and changes in territoriality. Often they'll green the nests, so that when we band the birds we work in a bed of fresh pine branches. Their vision is the keenest of all creatures', with visual acuity perhaps eight times that of man. Rochon-Duvigneaud reports a million cones per square millimeter of eye in
Buteo buteo.
Eagles can spot their prey (never very large) at two miles. I've seen that, and I hope to show it to you. Now look up there, you see, you see that speck? He's probably close to fourteen thousand feet. They fly so beautifully that it can take your breath away. He might be food-getting, migrating, playing, giving a territorial display. Whatever it is, its gorgeous.

“The complexity of fixed-wing flight (and there are volumes of equations which hardly begin to explain the forces engaged) pales before the infinitely variable contortions of wings, adjustments in emarginated and primary elasticated feathers, the spreading tails, legs, beaks, muscular tension and trunk attitude, feet, and talons.
Aquila
has been clocked in stoops of two hundred seventy-five miles per hour, and an eagle can brake smoothly and suddenly just before it hits the ground.

“The daily food intake of
canadensis
is about seven percent of its body weight, far more efficient than dogs, but less so than lions, which average two point five percent. The lions' social organization allows them this. The eagle, though, is fairly efficient for a loner. You know, they arrive at the sound of gunfire, having learned to associate it with flushed prey. But not up here. They're too wild. I can fire away for an hour and the darlings don't blink. On the edges of the Asian deserts, in places like Kirghiz and Samarkand, some people depend on
Aquila
for their livelihood. The eagles are sent after foxes and wolves, for the pelts. In medieval times, only a king was allowed to hunt with an eagle. They are the perfect hunter, and they have little trouble in dashing in to grip an unwitting bird or mammal, piercing to the heart. What Whitman—”

“You mean
Walt
Whitman.”

“I mean, what Walt Whitman called ‘the dalliance of eagles' is really a sexual display in which the male and female tumble through the sky after the female has turned on her back and presented her talons to the male. Sometimes, though rarely, this is combat. In 1948, a pair of golden eagles were found in Scotland, quite dead, locked in one another's talons.”

An eagle flew by at their level and dropped a stick, which fell through the air until he dived after it and caught it soundly. Nancy was delighted, and quickly began to snap photographs. “This is just what I want,” she said as the eagle repeated the trick again and again until finally he was lost in the distance. Her face was pressed against the telescope. Marshall was entranced by her smooth dark skin and the convex form of a blue eye as it peered into the black tube.

“Sometimes they'll swoop down on some poor bird and frighten it to death, just out of habit, or in practice, or in play—we don't know. Sometimes they kill and don't eat. You see, the need to kill is intensified in certain stages of the breeding cycle. Males, the provisioners, develop the habit of killing far more than they themselves need, for the nest-bound females and young. I'm sure there's a link with play. I shouldn't put it that way. Perhaps there is a link. I'm observing young males who haven't yet been required to provide for families, to see if they indulge in such highly aggressive diversions.
As
you can imagine, this question has many complex implications. My greatest fear is that if I can fashion a decent dissertation on the subject, some idiotic behaviorist will use it to arrive at a tart psychological explanation which other behaviorists will claim mirrors the soul of man. They are fools, you know, behaviorists. They don't understand—not at all—religion, nature, art, or birds. As far as I'm concerned, they're as convincing and attractive as bats.”

“Yes,” said Marshall, “muffins of the lowest caliber.”

“Indeed, and I fear even more that a sociologist will get ahold of it. Then my ideas will cretinize in the news magazines. I'd have to go to some place where they don't have
Time
or
Newsweek
.”

“Doesn't exist,” said Marshall.

In the days they watched eagles glide, and at night they lay facing a raft of stars. Sometimes they turned on the SLS for the silent band concert. The green streetcar always rolled up in the darkness and the women looked happily at the concert. But as Marshall and Nancy became better observers, they realized that the expressions of those women were very sad as well, as if they were longing for the unyielding past. One night, they had been observing life in Santa Fe, when the streetcar came around the bend and did not stop. The women inside were tearful. Nancy began to cry, and Marshall held her, his shoulders spotted with hot tears. He didn't know exactly what was happening, but she said, “I have a confession to make. I'm not from Kentucky. We didn't have a ranch or a breeding farm. I never rode horses until I came to Pinnacle, and then Denis had to teach me.” She looked sad and burdened, as if she had done him a great disservice in creating the myth of a Kentucky girlhood.

“We grew up in Chicago, near the elevated line. It was a Polish neighborhood. I even know some Polish. Daddy worked at Swift. The most I remember about nature is looking at the orange sky beyond green trestles. I thought that it was a fire from a purer place. I thought that if I could fly, I could get there. That's how I came to love birds. In summer, we used to sit outside the door, in the heat, and watch the streetcars go by. They were green, just like the one in Santa Fe. Is it wrong to cry when I think of how little I knew, how much I loved, how much simple things meant? I remember that little girl, in clothes that were always too heavy and never fit. I was so hopeful. I didn't really know who I was or where I was. And yet, those times seem to be the center of the world, the root of everything. Am I wrong? Am I wrong to love the little girl that I see in a sweet, tortuous, slow-moving vision of the past,” she got her breath, “in Chicago, in the summer, far away from eagles or anything like them? We were very poor. Am I wrong?”

“No,” said Marshall. “No. You're not wrong at all, not at all.” He held her so tightly that she had trouble breathing, but she loved it, and pulled him to her even harder. The little girl who was, who would never be again, came in front of their eyes. And there they were, way on top of a high rock chimney, breathing heavily because a vision of Chicago had leaped out of time and taken hold of their hearts as suddenly as if an eagle had fallen from above and gripped them in its talons.

I
N THE
last nights they waited for the wave of Chicago to come rumbling in as if a commuter train with tracks on air left the city each day and raced across the plains to Nancy Baker, whose eyes clouded as she was subsumed in a mist of the past. Sometimes it was pleasant. Once, they found themselves on a wood porch overlooking a hot street. It was so quiet that they heard the faucets in a neighbor's house, and the grinding of streetcar wheels many blocks away. A potted palm sat in the corner, its fronds pressed up against white rails. Where was that palm? And where was the heat, and the glances? Where had they gone? It was painful to discover that she would not see these things again, more painful when she saw them in their true colors billowing out of the air, and still more painful when somehow other people's memories and sadnesses were spliced in. Why did these things return so surely and strongly?

Marshall said that it was because the stars were so bright. “You see, we're lying here and all time is passing through us, echoes of light from the past and the future as well. The whole thing,” he said, moving his hand to indicate the sky, “is a vast complex of webs and lances. The lances are like needles, and they thread the past after them. Wherever you are, you are completely hemmed in with events that have happened and events that will happen. It's like being submerged in water. You can't see it, but you're pressured from all sides. Air, too, is like that—you feel it only if there is a breeze. We are trapped in this molten crystal, and sometimes the surge of waves allows us to sense a chain of events. Sometimes, you can even lean into it and not fall. It is communicated and revealed by light. You need not see it, but you have to be in it. I'll prove it. If you want the waves of Chicago to cease their pounding, come sit in the storage room and we can discuss practical matters divorced from memories. And you'll see that, away from the light, the past recedes.”

In the rock chamber they felt as if they had gone behind a waterfall after passing right through it. Nancy threw her hair back and stared into the darkness, knowing that a cascade of light and time beat against the rock as busily as a heavy rain. It came from all angles and struck rhythmically, arhythmically, with surprise, insistence, and humor. They could have been in a cave of Spain, in cool white rock, while all around the lightshower chattered like clucking animals, castanets, plucked strings. In quiet places where the stars shone or the sea rose, the lightshower was always strong. She looked at the black wall, where a line of booted cavalry in white galloped over a ragged hillside while, beyond, a plain covered with red flowers appeared telescopic and grainy. The cavalry rushed along in searing colors. “I thought we were to speak of practical matters,” she said, as dust flew from behind the horses and sabres and metal equipment danced about and jangled.

“Just a second,” Marshall replied. “It will undoubtedly fade. Must have been drawn in after us. They're Mexican, late nineteenth century, wouldn't you say?” She strained after the fading image.

“It's hard to tell, but they are South American. They have those flattish hats, and they're dark in color.” When the image left, they discovered that they were exhausted. They went to the top level and threw themselves down on the mats. Their supplies had run out two days before, and they had been working on spirit, devotion, and lust. But they dared not descend the great ladder in too much of a trance, and had decided to leave the next morning. Marshall was pulled east, though he could not explain the attraction, for Nancy May Baker was certainly enough to keep him at Pinnacle forever. Within him was a pressing desire to confront his past, the way Nancy May Baker had begun to do. The period of observation was over.

It was not easy to leave, but certain images arose to claim fealty, images mysterious and powerful, which he knew that he could no longer ignore. And one only moved to the West, and could not grow up there, whereas the East was real. The East was substantial, the West only a dream.

But then there was Nancy—dark, quiet (though often quite voluble), and so beautiful in and out of her sex that she entranced. Her interest in the objective world brightened her beyond belief. She and her kind, scientists who followed a pure cord of sense, were destined to discover new dimensions, an order apart from and superior to the decadent mechanistic notions of the avant-garde. It would be, perhaps, a new faith, an iridescence in the bell of the universe. In pursuit of the absolute, in attention to things such as the flight of eagles, and in travel of great distances, new laws would become manifest. Legions of scientists worked throughout the world in enviable integrity and wholeness, charting the processes by which, someday, earth and its sucking gravity, a constraint (and balance) for the mind as well, would be escaped.

In her study of raptors and eagles she had soared beyond fashion and trend to learn the inbent lessons of a million years within the cabinet of perfect nature. Others who had seen the strange and penetrating lights had left record in music and painting. It had been their way and the only means. And then the wave of exploration had transferred to the back of the mundane, and, by pure logic (they thought), astrophysicists broke upon the time sphere of musicians. It was a strange alliance—sunburnt young men and women in Africa and elsewhere giddy in the noonday heat, their seniors in laboratories of the West, and all the minors doing their part so that by the small steps of technological advance, a pure science was directed on its way as straight as a lance. Nancy did not know her role, but Marshall realized that were he to travel with her he would feel the enviable momentum of a priesthood in ascendancy.

She was not only lovely, but tall, and the direction of her life was very important, touching as it did upon the outermost reach. The day that he left they hiked ten miles to a rail line and waited by the tracks for several hours, talking nervously. A freight rounded the bend; she stepped back because of the noise and vibration; Marshall started to run, and then jumped on. Nancy May Baker and the ethereal world of the Far West, traced above by warlike eagles, receded in the distance as he was carried to the solidity of the East.