Old Madera Hawk

Bri Castagnozzi

Someone stole the young goshawk on a blue-white morning in October, before Sarah Kim had stretched the sleep from her aching back. The bird’s leash had been untied and was left coiled like a snake on the sand floor of the hawk mews. A bead of early light slipped through the crack of the door; it was open when she’d come to it and immediately she had felt a cold ball settle in her stomach. 

It had only been the hawk’s first night away from the comforting warmth and protection of Sarah’s living room. It had keened in protest as she placed it in the mews and tied it to the perch. The nictitating membrane slid across its peach pit eyes and it flung the cold from its face—a new sensation, cold. Sarah had walked back to her house with no other thoughts besides those of a tired graying woman setting down a tenacious child.

Among the rime and mud, it was impossible to distinguish the paths of her daily work from that taken by the perpetrator. Everything was holes and crisp edges and dormant grass. Yet Sarah’s eyes cut through the dim light and found a succession of hawk-foot gouges in the mud beside the mew, feverishly forcing their way to the woods. There were two downy breast feathers on the ground, twinkling like stars. 

She cursed and leaned her hands against her thighs, chewing an angry knot in her cheek. The young hawk had been partially stolen; whoever had tried did so with clumsy hands and now the hawk was lost in a woods to which it did not belong. 

The Adirondack ridge afforded little suspects to her list; her neighbors were few, her townsfolk loved to hear of her hawking stories—the hares yanked from the lips of their dens, the grassy knolls upturned for spitting mice. Squirrels chased up and down the pale sycamores until her old hawk’s talons met their bellies. Grouse wrestled from hot angry briar; these she shared with the townsfolk. 

Rosey Hornbitt was not a name that often crossed Sarah’s mind. She was a fickle woman, supposedly young but looking quite old, loving her own praise and quick to bear teeth at the slightest instigation. She would have been a fine and average person were it not for the blighted personality, and to be fine and average among the populace of Lake George was to be remarkable a bit further south or east or west of the shore. 

It had been made apparent on few occasions that Rosey Hornbitt took serious issue with Sarah’s hunting hawks. It was something about the taming of wild hawks that infuriated her, as though she felt it disrupted the natural order of things. Hawks were wild, free, fearless. Rabbits were cunning, prey, fearful. Rosey felt entitled to placing every creature in its designated box, and any effort to stray from her boxes she took as a personal affront.

Though Sarah offered to show her what it was truly like to hunt alongside a bird of prey, Rosey was already adamant in her decision to hate it. That was why Sarah found herself plodding to the dormant farmstead of poor Mason Hornbitt, the old man who’d fathered Rosey and in thirty years found neither man nor woman to whom he could hitch her. 

It was not so easy to hoist herself over Mason’s fence as it had been twenty years ago, when Old Madera had just been called Madera. Mason was a longtime friend. His fields had always bore rabbits for Sarah to hunt, and out of his ancient felt hat he’d pulled a good number of rabbits himself—war rabbits and rambler rabbits, rabbits from the Great Depression that he could never let go. Everyone carried with themselves a number of rabbits that dwelled in the mind, digging holes and multiplying until they were let out. That’s what Sarah imagined anyway, when silly old Mason put on their favorite tea and told her stories of when Rosey had been a nice little girl. 

She came to the farmer’s house, long and flat in the style of a ranch. She saw him look out the window at her. He dipped inside and the old wooden door he’d salvaged from a church whistled as it opened.

“Sarah,” he breathed. His wool felt hat sat atop his straw hair. “Sarah. Chrissake.”

He offered to make tea, the kind they both liked, which was cheap and tasted fine with fake sugar and never steeped too bitter. But she had no time for tea. She explained how her precious young hawk had been let out, how its leash had been untied and left by its perch, and how Rosey had been the only one to ever disdain a love for hawks. Most grievously, Sarah told the old farmer that the hawk was only just learning to fly and would likely die in the coming nights exposed to the squalls of Adirondack October. It was imprinted on humans and could never learn to hunt without Sarah’s help.

Mason went to fetch Rosey. She emerged from the grand oak door, dressed in plastic fur. She looked at Sarah’s wool coat and jeans stained red with terra cotta. Then she looked at Sarah, and greeted her robotically.

“Rosey, someone let my young hawk loose this morning. He’s imprinted on me; I’m his mom. Have you heard any birds crying today?”

Rosey swallowed, something moving like a frog behind the loose folds of her throat. 

“I’ve got no clue,” she said. “Hope you find out, though—it could be in real danger, seeing as how you had to get it so young.”

Her voice held its usual passive-aggressiveness. In the building wind, Rosey’s cheeks were beginning to turn pink. She retracted her long neck into her scarf like a turtle and gave Sarah the ghost of a sympathetic smile. Sarah could almost imagine the younger, kinder Rosey of Mason’s tales. 

“You’ve got a nice grandson, Sarah. I was talking to him at church last Sunday. He really loves animals. He said every dove deserves to fly free.”

“I’m sure he said that, Rosey, Well, if you hear anything, my door’s open. Tell your dad I said take care.”

She thought of her grandson, Reid, waiting at her home. He was a beautiful child with big brown eyes, thick black hair, and legs pocked from summer nights spent camping in black fly country. He loved animals and people. He was one quarter Korean—at nine years old, it was something he was old enough to be proud of but too young to fully understand. 

“Ri,” she called as she entered her house. He poked his head from behind the kitchen counter, anxious to ask if she’d found the little goshawk.

“No, honey,” Sarah said, “but I’m not done looking.”

He sobered and was silent. He would not look at her, which clove her heart in two. The imprint goshawk was to be their personal project. Reid was still thinking of a name for it. Sarah was still looking for a glove that fit him. 

Suddenly he asked if she would take out Old Madera and fly her at the edge of the woods. Sarah sighed—she could not refuse him, for she had seen the lonely scar of Mason’s eyes cut there by his grandchildren, from whom he did not even receive cards last Christmas. She could not bear the thought of diminishing visits, of Reid growing up apart from her. She resolved to never refuse him: a grandmother’s curse.

Sarah led Reid to the hawk mews. She unlocked the door-fence of the weathering area, where the hawk sits in the rain and snow and sun. Once inside, Reid locked it behind them. Sarah opened the second door. In the middle of the shed-like room, Old Madera was perched on an arching metal rod. 

Old Madera was a red-tailed hawk: dark-eyed, dapple-breasted, with thick yellow legs and a ferruginous tail. She was well-manned and quick to trade off a kill. She did not keen for food like the goshawk. She was as wild as she’d been twenty years ago; she was not an imprint, but rather had been caught—taken, Rosey would say. Stolen from the wild.

Old Madera knew Reid and was unbothered by him, yet she often paid him an extra stare as though he confused her. 

Sarah stooped to clip the hawk’s leash to the leather glove latticed with crisscrossed cuts. It was an old glove, cracking at the points where guts and fat had congealed last winter, when Old Madera killed a cottontail. Leather never quite recovers from the gore. It is not supple and does not bounce back, and Sarah wished she had taken better care of the glove. 

They went outside and she came to an idea. Her own eyes and ears were beginning to act their age but the hawk was sharp as ever, not so agile as she once had been but still elegant, fierce. Sarah took her grandson’s hand and put the hawk in a tree, hoping her fine eyes could spot the dark-capped gos in the snow, or that she would hear it crying for food. 

“Ri, listen: it takes a bird to find a bird,” Sarah said.

Old Madera was hopping between branches, eyeing Sarah as she’d always done on their hunts. A hunt is transformative; on a single day Sarah could become the dog who flushes game, then quickly she is the path blazer who runs and runs and finally she becomes a heavy boot that silences a rabbit. But they were not hunting, and of course Old Madera did not know this. If she found the gos and went to hunt it, Sarah would have to protect both birds. 

“We have to find him,” Reid said. He sniffed. His hand was sweaty. “Did you find out who let him go?”

“I…had a feeling Ms. Rosey may have had something to do with it. But I spoke with her, and she seemed honest.”

“She’s not an evil person, Nana. Just weird.”

Sarah made a soft noise. They walked on to the atonal ring of Old Madera’s hawk bells.

To the north of the Adirondack ridge a storm was swelling, puffed and hanging low like the belly of a hen. Old Madera keened softly at the top of a gray birch. 

Sarah called her down and held her leather jesses tightly, not wanting to let her go and lose her to the coming wind. With her free hand she guided Reid back down the path they had come, and only when the trees grew short and thin and cut themselves at the clearing, the boy spoke. 

“I did it. I let the hawk go. It was an accident—I just wanted to hold him. Please don’t be mad.”

Sarah led him inside, and though it hurt, she was gentle with her grandson. She left him to mull his thoughts over a bowl of hot soup. 

The wind was beginning to pick up and take with it the smallest branches off the birches and conifers; they clanged against the metal roof of the hawk mew outside, but their noise was soon lost to the icy patter of snow. Sarah felt something in her stir and went out to check the mew, to double-check and be certain that everything had been locked. Old Madera was free-lofted and allowed to roam her mew untethered; it had never been an issue, for she was loyal to her comfort. But as Sarah entered the mew a tempest wind forced open the double doors and Old Madera, seized by a sudden imperative to scream the way red-tails do, pitched through the air and into the bleeding night. She was gone before Sarah called after her, and she returned to her home, silent about what had happened. 

She imagined what her ancestors were thinking, in heaven or perhaps still in Korea flying hawk-spirits after the ghosts of pheasants and hares. For her to have lost two hawks in one day—were they shaking their heads? Did they pity her, who had been lost to Korea since the Forgotten War? When she closed her eyes she could see their proud figures, their northern goshawks like chalices in their fists, the red shich'i mi on the hawks’ backs. For the first time, she prayed to them.

When Sarah awoke early next morning she set out to find Old Madera. The trees and shrubs were fragile and wicked as witches’ hair—white and wind-whipped, arching to the south, suspending the foothills in glassy fractals. Sarah put her ear to the wind and listened for Old Madera’s bells. Nothing but the reedy whistle of pine needles was carried in the wind. 

She stuck to the path, eyeing the painfully white snow for sign of hawks. In a short while she passed the empty site of her first kill with Old Madera—a rabbit caught in briar twenty years ago—and then she was upon the stone wall, where she’d shot a grouse and upset Reid.

There was a sound then, which she recognized immediately as the call of a distressed animal, high and droning and breathless. She followed it to the basin of several large conifers, impervious to storms, and among the great roots gray and looped like thrown clay, Madera was lying still, her wing tips poking out from beneath the snow. An old friend had gone to rest. 

Sarah knelt and let herself weep beside the body. Old Madera’s wings were out to their sides stretched as far as they would go. Her body had formed a hollow between the earth and the falling snow. Seeing her hawk lying there struck Sarah’s heart with a sudden fear of the void toward which all creatures slouched. The past twenty years seemed to her like a dream. 

In the hollow beneath Old Madera, the young northern goshawk was alive and keening for attention. 

The goshawk beat its wings and cried upon recognizing Sarah. She took it up on her glove and felt its keel—sharp and lacking the padding of muscle on either side, but behind it the heart beat true. 

It needed food, water and warmth. She would be busy for the next few days tending to its needs, slowly building its muscle with short flights and jump-ups. The mew would be locked during that time—a home to the beautiful memory of Old Madera. She needed to dig a deep hole in the valley holler where surely the hawk’s spirit would fly on forever. And Reid—had he come up with a name yet?

The warm breeze that came from the mountains took the ice off the snow; what was left was downy-white cotton, like a dream.

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