Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(31)

Local police are describing the attack as “personal”—“a kind of execution.” Not likely a random or opportunistic attack for the victim’s wallet was not missing, his expensive new-model vehicle had not been stolen.

There are no suspects so far. There seem to have been no witnesses on the country road.

The murder of the brother-in-law has followed soon after the assault of six local boys by what two survivors of the assault described as “a big bird like an eagle” that flew at them “out of the sky with a stabbing beak”—injuries to the boys’ heads, faces, eyes, torsos that closely resemble the injuries of the brother-in-law.

Four boys killed in the savage attack, two boys surviving in “critical condition.” They’d been attacked in a marshy area near Lake Aubergine where there are no eagles, no large hawks, no predator-birds of any species capable of attacking human beings, or with any history of attacking human beings.

Yet the survivors insist they’d been attacked by a big bird out of the sky with a stabbing beak.

Like the brother-in-law, each of the boys was blinded in the attack.

Their eyes badly wounded, past repair. Stabbed many times.

Trembling, the widow hangs up the phone.

She has heard about the boys—the deaths, the terrible injuries. She has not wanted to think that something so awful could take place so close to her own home and when police officers have come to ask her if she’d seen or heard anything, if she knew any of the boys or their families she’d said only that they were not neighbors of hers and her husband’s, they lived miles away and she knew nothing of them.

I’m afraid that I have seen nothing, and I have heard nothing. It’s very quiet here at the lake.

More astonishing to her is the news of her brother-in-law—dying so soon after her husband James.

How devastated their family is! She is no longer the most recent widow among the relatives.

The phone will continue to ring but the widow will not hear it for she has stepped outside the house. Her lungs crave fresh air, it has become difficult to breathe inside the house.

Outside, the lawn has become overgrown. She has terminated the contract with the lawn service for she prefers tall grasses, thistles, wild flowers of all kinds—these are beautiful to her, thrilling.

A shadow gliding in the grasses at her feet.

She looks up, shading her eyes. She is prepared to see the great blue heron in its solitary flight but sees to her surprise that there are two herons flying side by side, their great slate-gray wings outstretched as they soar, the wing tips virtually touching.

From below she can see the faint tinge of azure in the gray feathers. Such beautiful birds, flying in tandem! She has never seen such a sight, she is sure.

Transfixed the widow watches the herons fly together across the lake and out of sight.


That cry! Hoarse, not-human, fading almost at once. But in an instant she has been awakened.

Cries of nocturnal birds on the lake. Loons, owls, geese. In the marshy woods, screech owls. Herons.

Sleepily she moves into her husband’s arms. She is very content in his arms, she doesn’t want to wake fully, nor does she want her husband to wake. Consciousness is too painful a razor’s edge drawn against an eye—never are you prepared for what you might see.





The Season of the Raptors

RICHARD BOWES





1


One recent summer, Greenwich Village fell in love with carnivorous fledglings. Beloved birds of prey in the heart of New York seemed ironic. I pointed it out to friends as a suitable metaphor for a town with a sentimental side and a savage side.

Then on a morning early in June, a red-tailed hawk alighted on a ledge outside the back windows of my apartment, and things started to get personal. Behind my building is a forgotten New York: a tangle of alleys, second-story patios, and tough survivor trees. All was silence out back and I was sure the pigeons, the sparrows, the pair of mourning doves who nested there had either fled or were as still as stones.

The hawk looked over the side of the ledge. Sparrows were too small to interest him and I didn’t care if he made off with a pigeon. But I worried that he might find the doves. Their forlorn cooing was like something out of another time and place. And I would miss that sound in the mornings.

I knew the visiting red-tail was male because of the color of his plumage. And I believed that he was the mate of the hawk, which famously nested over on Washington Square.

There wasn’t a camera handy. As I studied him, he studied me: first with his right eye, then with both eyes. He moved his head to get a few more views of my face—like a photographer looking for the perfect shot. He swiveled his head 180 degrees; gave me one last look and took off. The visit evoked memories I’d managed to forget.

He and his mate raised their young on the very ample windowsill of the president of New York University. The president himself had more than a touch of the raptor about him and he welcomed the red-tails like they were relatives. A camera called “The Hawk Cam” was set up on the window ledge twelve stories above the trees and fountain of Washington Square Park.

Any time you wanted to know what the hawk kids were up to you could watch them. Often you saw nothing but still forms, downy or feathered. Other times you might see the mother, with her fierce beak and murderous eyes, shove bits of fresh rat down her children’s gullets.