Skyward

Satisfied, his father turned and pushed into the federally protected land. “Well, come on, then,” he said over his shoulder. “Don’t lag behind.”

The woods were still dark in the dank hush of early morning. The crush of Brady’s boots in the layers of frosted, composting leaves sounded violent in the quiet forest. There were lots of loblolly pines, growing thin and so close together it would be easy to get lost if one didn’t know the territory. Brady always preferred the longleaf pine and the way its long needles stirred in the breeze. There was something regal about them, the way they stood ten stories tall, six feet around and straight-backed—the kings of the pine forest. He liked them even if his father hated them, calling them nothing better than wood weeds on account of the fact that the fire-resistant bark was no good for firewood. He’d heard tell of a time when longleafs used to dominate the woods, back before the buzzsaws did their work. Brady would like to have seen that.

As he walked around the clustered trunks, he noticed how the light of the rising sun dappled through the leaves, making the melting frost sparkle like diamonds. In the thick branches over his head, he could hear fox squirrels chattering and, farther off, a red-cockaded woodpecker hammering into the sapwood.

“Quit draggin’ your feet back there! If you didn’t stay up all night with that rowdy bunch of no-counts you call friends you wouldn’t be so damned worthless in the mornin’. Took a bomb to get you outta that bed this morning. I told you we was goin’ huntin’ this mornin’.”

Brady spit out the sour taste of his breakfast of cold biscuits and jerky, then picked up his pace behind the bulky, wide-shouldered man in the camouflage jacket. At least it would be the last thing he’d hear from the old man for a while, he thought. From here on in, he’d be telling him what to do in hissed whispers and jabs with his index finger so as not to spook the game.

Roy Simmons never asked his son where he might think was a good place to hunt or even what game he’d like to go after. Brady felt little more than a lackey behind the skilled huntsman who knew better than most where to find the first buck of the season, or a fertile oyster bed, or where to flush out birds. That’s what they were after this morning. Some pheasant, or maybe quail…something special to put on the Christmas dinner table tomorrow.

Most of the food on their table came from what his daddy hunted or fished. It was pretty much a hand-to-mouth existence for the family of seven. His mama did all she could with whatever his father brought home, but he never seemed satisfied. And lately, with the neighboring land just made into a national preserve, places to hunt were hard to come by. More and more folks were after what little game was left. Roy Simmons had to hunt longer and smarter to bring less to the table, even as his young were growing bigger and eating more.

He preferred hunting alone, but for the past few days since school was out for the holiday he’d dragged Brady, the eldest son, along on his early-morning hunting trips. They’d come up empty-handed each time. It being the holiday, the stakes were higher. Every day Brady saw his father’s desperation turn to anger. As he followed the pounding footfall of his father, Brady hoped he wouldn’t take that anger out on him.

Brady and his father walked without luck for more than an hour into the Marion National Forest, miles from the small spread of ramshackle house and barn that his family called home. The scrap of land was deeded to his great-grandfather back when this place on earth was considered nowhere. Now the sprawl from Charleston was spreading its tentacles their way, causing environmentalists to scoop up whatever they could as protected land. Their scrubby bit of earth was a small speck of private land bordered by thousands of acres of national forest, what his daddy smugly called “the thorn in the ass of the feds.”

“You think maybe we should head back?” he asked, foot weary.

“We’re not going back without we get somethin’ for dinner.”

Brady silently groaned. His eyelids were drooping and his toes were cold in his boots as he silently kept up. He hated being forced to get up early in the morning. He hated being stuck in these godforsaken woods, hungry and tired, when all he wanted to do was go back to his warm bed, even if he did have to share the room with his brother and the dog. And though he’d never admit it to his father, he hated hunting. It was boring and pointless, like most things in his life.

At last they came to where the flat woodlands opened up to a wide expanse of open marshland. His father stopped here, his shotgun hanging from his arm, to survey the landscape with an eagle eye.

A brisk wind was blowing in from the ocean, stinging Brady’s cheeks with crisp freshness and waking him to the beauty of the eastern sky. He lowered his rifle in quiet awe. The dawn had already declared itself. Pink streaks softly shadowed a pearly blue sky, but an approaching armada of low-lying gray clouds and fog stretched threatening fingers across the horizon.

“Look! There!” His father jabbed his side and pointed.

“Where?”

“There. Over that stretch of marsh. At nine o’clock.”

Brady turned his head to see an enormous black bird soaring on a great expanse of wing. The beauty of the sight was awesome.

“Go on, son. Take the shot!”

Frozen with shock that his father was actually offering him the rare opportunity to take the shot, Brady fumbled as he raised the barrel, losing precious seconds.

“Hurry up! You’ll lose it.”

I ain’t gonna lose it, he thought to himself, aware that actually speaking the words could cause him to lose his train on the bird. He could hear the blood roar in his ears, and excitement thrummed in his veins as he brought his eye to the scope.

“It’s bankin’,” his father said. “Comin’ right for you.”

“I can’t see it!”

“It went back into the fog. Don’t matter. Wait for him. Be cocked and ready.”

Brady eased off the safety, put his right forefinger on the trigger and placed his site squarely on the spot he figured the bird would emerge. He tried to calm himself, to take slow breaths and make certain he got the shot. His father wouldn’t give him a second chance.

Okay, where are you? One…two…three…Suddenly, out from the fog, the bird emerged—right where Brady figured it would. Oh, yeah, it was a big bird. A real big bird. He told himself to take it slow and careful as he trailed the soaring bird and focused. His finger applied pressure. He held his breath.

Brady released his breath with the curse, lowering his rifle. “I can’t shoot. It’s an eagle.”

“A what? Goddamn…That’s all that’s left in these goddamn government woods.” Roy shook his head and mumbled a curse. “They won’t let us hunt nowhere or shoot nothin’ no more. Look up there! It’s comin’ straight for us. Bold as can be, knowin’ we can’t shoot. Probably gonna steal some decent farmer’s chickens. Well, hell. Go on, son. Take it.”

“What? I can’t. It’s against the law.”

“What’s the law got to do with my god-given right to hunt like my father and my father before him? I’m tellin’ you, that bird is the enemy, you hear me?”

“That bird ain’t done nothing.”

“I’m not playin’ with you, boy.” He looked his son in the eyes with steely rage and said in a low, threatening voice, “You’re either with me on this or against me.”

Brady hesitated.

His father muttered with disgust that he was as weak as a woman, bringing his own shotgun to his shoulder.

Brady felt his chest constrict and brought his eye back to the scope of his rifle and his finger to the trigger. Life with his father had always been an endless, agonizing series of tests.

Was he with his father, or against him? In that moment, one that seemed to linger in the air without regard for time or judgment, Brady knew that, whatever action he took, his life was going to change forever.

The old man smiled from ear to ear in elation at the magnificent sight of seven feet of wingspan riding a thermal. The Good Lord sure knew what he was doing when he made the eagle, he thought to himself. Powerful wings, a razor-sharp beak and talons as long and sharp as tiger claws. And the way she flew…It was like she knew she was queen of the skies. There weren’t no creature more beautiful in the whole world, he thought.

He whistled again and reached into the pouch hanging from his side to pull out a wide-mouth bass he’d brought just for this bird. He knew she was busy with her nest, knew she was hungry.

“Well, come on and get yourself some bittle,” he told the bird as he raised the fish high into the air. He whistled again, loud and clear, wiggled the outstretched fish and began walking through the field. She saw it. He could tell by the way she was circling.

Suddenly, the unmistakable thundering of gunshot shattered the morning’s peace. The old man stumbled. His arms jerked outstretched, dropping the fish to the field. He watched with helpless horror as the eagle’s great wings fluttered against the bruise-colored sky. His breath choked in his throat as the bird seemed to hang in the air. Then the wings crumpled and the eagle dropped like a stone to the earth.

His cry of anguish mingled with the shrieking wind that streaked across the wetlands, whisking away the old man’s hat to reveal a head of snowy white hair. Spurred forward, he took off at a stiff-legged gait across the frosted fields straight for the fallen bird.

Buteos: The Soaring Hawks.Buteos are medium-to-large hawks with broad wings and a short tail. Although slow flyers, they excel in soaring and hunt on the wing. They are a diverse group with a wide range of habitats and prey. Buteos include red-tailed hawks, red-shouldered hawks, broad-winged hawks, Swainson’s hawks, rough-legged hawks and ferruginous hawks.

2

Harris stood in the brisk wind watching the sky until the tiny speck of brown that was the hawk disappeared from view. Scanning the horizon, there wasn’t another hawk in sight; only a broad-winged vulture coasted over the treetops.

He could remember his grandfather telling him of the days when he could walk a mile through a country field like this one and see every kind of hawk: sharp-shinned, Cooper’s, red-tailed and red-shouldered, kestrel and harrier—though his grandfather called those small but quick birds “marsh hawks.” Harris was no older than five when his grandfather began walking the fields with him. His grandfather would pause, point to the sky and ask, “What’s that?” Harris would shout out an answer with boyish confidence and never feel rebuked when his grandfather, more often than not, gently corrected him. Those walks were some of the most memorable in his life and fired a lifelong devotion to birds of prey. His grandfather had loved raptors, hawks especially, and taught him that identifying a hawk in the air was not as much a skill as it was an art. Color of plumage wasn’t a key, as it was in smaller birds. He was a shrewd and patient teacher, instructing Harris to take his time to read the subtle signs—the cant of a wing, the speed of the flap—and to trust his intuitive sense of how a bird appeared in flight before making his call. By the time his grandfather passed away Harris was only twelve years of age, but he could unerringly spot and name a raptor from a distance.

Harris was born in the early 1960s, a decade that recognized the devastation DDT brought to the environment. Since his boyhood he’d worked to help rebuild the birds of prey population from near extinction. They still had a long way to go before the skies would be as filled with raptors as his grandfather remembered, but they were on the right track. Each time he released a bird back to the wild he felt his entire being stir with hope.

“Harris!”

He reluctantly turned from the sky to see a young, black, teenage girl neatly dressed in jeans and fleece trotting toward him from the edge of the open meadow. He waved an arm in silent acknowledgment, then cast a final glance toward the sky. The hawk was long gone. Beyond the circle of meadow, the fog was closing in.

“Mr. Henderson?” the girl called again, breathless from her run. “I’m supposed to tell you that Sherry needs you back at the clinic right away. Someone’s brought in a bird what’s been shot.”