From: William Halstead
Subject: RR: Story(mostly true)
Date: Thursday, April 24, 1997 3:28 PM
From: William Halstead
Subject: RR: Story(mostly true)
Date: Thursday, April 24, 1997 3:28 PM
One of my favorite birds was a tiercel peales/prairie from Dave Jamieson’s project. An imprint of course, he was raised and lived in my bedroom for four years when not in the field. "Willie" named himself by demonstrating occasional stubbornness on par with my own, this always produced one of those Mona Lisa smiles from my girlfriend which could turn into a story in its own right. Willie and I had great fun chasing pigeons, incidentals, and occasional game-farm partridge and tried hard not to take ourselves too seriously. He outlasted two girlfriends and became family as the genetic relatives found too compromising the frustration of not understanding what we did, or why it isn’t always possible to explain the reasons for doing it. This bird had a true passion for flight and did not believe that any of his behavior should be cut in stone. Peregrine genes gave him a love of height and vertical spiral stoops. If he missed, the prairie genes kicked in and he tail-chased until he succeeded. Once he followed one of my homers over 5 miles before bringing it down. My functional relationship with telemetry techniques was refreshed every season. Willie had one serious fault, he seethed with testosterone. In his second season he began bringing down red-tails. The first was a bird of appx. 1200gms (weighed by myself before release) Willie flew that day at 564 gms. This distressed me, there had been no overt provocation and I had no desire to take raptors as game, or to lose one to this sort of interspecific pee-pee shaking. I tried raising his weight to reduce food stress and this appeared to work, he also began soaring during flights for 30-40 minutes and would then settle down to business again. It was about this time that I received THE phone call; my mother" the artiste"of Cherokee extraction from whom, by mutual agreement, I had drifted. It was the big C,with inoperable mets and she wanted to share her suffering (yes I actually managed to feel that way). We no longer knew how to talk, or fight, or love for that matter, but we needed to. I agreed to meet with her again.
We spent Thanksgiving of the next Fall together (sort of), quietly being awkward and cooking together. There were monotone discussions of my dad, the fighter pilot whose death she never understood. We sat alot, more quiet. There was no discussion of us, or of the birds, or of the future. We were both very relieved when she left. Willie and I resumed our life.
Inexplicably he began taking red-tails again, now he was killing them. To my horror two were killed in less than a week and I struggled with the prospect of putting him up. I began to recognize a pattern. He would be at pitch and both of these birds were slope-soaring along the hill where I stood. When they came within about 200 yards of where I stood he would begin kekking and stooping past them, then make a posterior assault from below. The first bird drew blood by footing him superficially in the head and I hoped that would put an end to it, but the second didn’t even react. The evening after the second red-tail’s death I felt an intense urge to call my mother. I told her of the situation and her assessment was succinct, "He’s protecting you." .
Utter nonsense, I did keep my tongue though. Then for some reason known only to her she asked if she could see him fly. Now in the 20 years that I had flown birds she had never before expressed an interest, and I stopped asking her to be interested when I was about fifteen.
"Aren’t you too sick to be out in the field?"
"Utter nonsense!"
Perhaps hyperbole can be inherited.
"Well, I suppose so."
She drove overnight some 500 miles and I was shocked more by how much weight she had lost in 15 days. At this point I was ready to commit her for care and we argued for awhile. I lost.
"I have to do this, I have to see your bird fly."
I extracted a promise that she would fly back to Atlanta for care that night and made the arrangements. On the way to the field she began talking about my father again, but her face was animated and there was a warmth in her words that I had never felt before. Two sentences stuck in my mind.
"Your father always protected me."
"I loved him too much".
Willie took an ok pitch that day, not out of sight but high enough that he made three good stoops at the homer and then, atypically, returned to his pitch. I was of course out of pigeons having left home in a hurry and not thinking very clearly.
"I’m glad he didn’t kill it."
Well at that point I wasn’t very glad at all. I swung the lure for a few minutes and he ignored it. So we stood on this hilltop in central North Carolina as the sun began to set, the valley West of us began to fill with rouge reflection from the clouds , there was no noise except the falcon’s bells on the upswing of each circle. My pulse began to pound in my head as I was quite certain Willie would be out for the night. This reddish light gained such intensity that I believe I could have tasted it if I had tried.
"Let me try."
It didn’t seem to matter anymore so I handed her the lure.
Willie closed up in that teardrop shape and began a 3/4 mile under the wind stoop that gave me chills, branded by that sun into my memory is the last moment as he rocked and slipped to control the bottom end and land on the lure at her feet.
My mother was crying and well I may have been too.
"For the first time, I feel the voice of my ancestors:Now I know why you do this thing"
There have been some strange things happen in this field but the next I’ve never understood. As we looked up an F-4 was passing through the valley at about our eye-level and close enough that we could see the pilot looking at us from behind his visor, he wing waved and about this time the doppler reached us. I could not hear what my mom was saying as she waved back. The strangest part was that I swear there wasn’t a single marking on this aircraft.
Three days later Willie tried to protect me from another red-tail and was killed. My mother never left the hospital and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that he was dead. We managed to really love each other over the next few weeks and she literally died in my arms, we were smiling. In southeastern Idaho Willie has been given a mountaintop platform burial, I cut off his cuffs, bells, and band then wrapped a lock of my mothers hair in his feet. My mom has a fan of his tailfeathers in her hand. Keep the sacred path.
