Tiger Country

Only a Mountain-2

Caught between relief, disgust at the unwanted kill, and an almost s****l embarrassment at being caught in the death, Nick was never sure if he answered. He raised one finger in acknowledgement and stepped forward. The raven lay on its back, its black wings spasmed into a stiff upward curve four feet across. The gyr stood solidly on its breast, one fluffy black feather grasped firmly in her bill. She looked up at him, shook away the feather, said “kack,” clearly and with consonants, and stepped to his glove, her stout little hands shifting and gripping. He murmured meaningless endearments, fished around in his hawking bag for a hunk of pigeon, and handed it to her. Only then did he turn to the intruder.

“Thank you for not walking in.”

“I know better than that. I’ve read the book and seen the movie.”

“The movie?”

“Whatever.” An impatient wave. “That’s a gyrfalcon, right?” He pronounced it as two words. “Gyre-falcon.”

“Right.”

“In that case I have to buy you a drink.” The face was long and pale and narrow under a dusty black cowboy hat. A rooster tail of straight black hairs fell over the collar of an ancient brown canvas jacket as the driver withdrew into the wagon’s tinted-glass gloom. In a moment it returned over an outstretched hand, holding a shot glass full of golden liquid. “Unless you have some kind of principle against it.”

“Not at all, no.” Suddenly it seemed the best of all possible resolutions. Holding the heavy bird high with his left hand, he reached out with his right and tossed back the shot. The smell and taste of the tequila burned through his awkwardness. “How the hell does anybody out here know what a gyrfalcon is?”

“Don’t be a Yankee asshole. Get that bird fed up and I’ll tell you all about it.” He paused and extended his hand adding, “Johnny Aragon.”

Their friendship was based on mutual admiration, mutual cultural incomprehension, and mutual immediate excess, and consisted of wide separated marathons of drinking, eating, talking, and chasing animals. They shared a fondness for tequila and brown liquor, not to mention the outspoken conviction they were smarter than everybody else except for a few tough articulate women who enjoyed the same, especially Juan’s difficult sister Cecilia.

The Aragons were local kids, born ten miles south of the pavement in Leon County. They were the product of an unlikely liaison between a land-grant scion from northern New Mexico’s insulated society and a Welsh-Jewish heiress from California. It had been a Romeo-and Juliet affair, and their residence in far-southwestern Leon County was considered by more conventional ranchers to be a kind of exile. Ostracism never bothered the elder Aragons. With her familial connections and his savvy they had made a modest fortune in oil and real estate, with which they had built a private empire in the mountains. They died together in the crash of their Cessna, probably drunk, when Juan was seventeen. Drink was a family trait, its excessive indulgence as inevitable an Aragon character as hawk noses, blue eyes, good manners, and horsemanship.

Aragon once described Cecilia, to Nick’s secret dismay, as a “bug zapper—you know, one of those blue-light boxes that buzzes and burns up everything it touches.” She was a vegetarian and style-queen, an even narrower and more elegant version of her brother, with premature silvery black hair and New York clothes and the kind of deliberately frenetic wit that Nick found almost heartbreaking.

They ran through a year as passionate and furious and thoughtless as children. They slept in the woods, drove all day to rodeos, talked and drank all night in motels, and never got hangovers. They saddled up and rode to the top of ten-thousand-foot Escondida peak in April, wallowing through belly-deep snowdrifts to celebrate what Juan called Aldo Leopold Day with tequila and champagne. The Aragons showed Nick his first lion that afternoon, hurrying nervously through the melting drifts, shaking drops off a forepaw, looking over his shoulder, leaving tracks the size of coffee-can lids.

And, of course, they chased things. Cecy would cast a number-22 dry fly, an artificial dust-mote almost invisible from ten feet away, on the nose of a rising trout that she would then release. She led Nick to the tiny headwater streams where the nearly extinct Gila golden trout still spawned, protected by walls of willow, beaver dams, and the indifference of industrial sportspersons. Juan scorned such effete sport. He taught Nick to fish for catfish in the tamarisk bayous along the Rio Grande. They’d go at night, with lanterns and cigars and plenty of mosquito repellent. The surroundings were eerie, the sounds extraterrestrial, the bait scary.

Juan scorned the stinking lumps of chicken guts, “buzzard bait” that worked for channel cats. He was after bigger game: carnivorous “flatheads” that weighed from twenty pounds up past one hundred, monsters that resembled whiskered tadpoles the size of dogs, above all, hunters that only ate things that moved. To attract them, Juan favored neotenic tiger salamanders for bait: axolotls. They were a foot long, cold and mottled and vibrating, with staring eyes and bushy gills and hands like tiny humans. Nick thought they looked like embryos, didn’t even like catching them in cattle tanks, never mind sticking hooks in them. Juan laughed, and cast them into the black water, where they swam in tethered circles. Cecy would watch and shake her head, but she too would stay all night.

Later in the bird season Juan and Cecy took him to a vast flatland ranch in the prairies south of Portales, where the only things that broke the oceanic horizon were windmills. The owner was an eccentric red-headed millionaire from the Midwest who now devoted his time to bird-banding, ballistics research, raising emus, and hunting Cape buffalo. They entered through a mile-long dirt drive with the emus racing beside the fence like reanimated dinosaurs. Jim’s ranch house was full of nineteenth-century English weaponry, dogs—field-trial pointers, Russian wolfhounds, Jack Russell terriers, heelers—and what seemed to be a complete collection of original Audubon lithographs by Havell.

He managed the place for cattle and deer, but above all for Prairie chickens, which he preferred to call “Pinnated grouse.” These were rare and local, legendary in bird-hunting history, high-flying flock birds with headdresses that danced like Plains Indians in the spring. Like them, they had followed the buffalo; like them, they were broken and scattered.

But not on Emu Ranch. They walked into the gray afternoon skies with the falcon bent like a bow against the wind five hundred feet above their heads. They were an incongruous hunting party. Nick looked appropriate with his moth-eaten gray fedora in an antique Stetson pattern, and a game vest over his denim coat. Jim resembled a farmer, with bib overalls and lace-up boots, his unshaven chin and bare head. By contrast, the Aragons were their usual elegant nearly-twin selves: black jeans, black packer boots, meant for riding more than walking, silver-belly hats, silver at their wrists and buckles. Juan also wore his ancient brown canvas barn coat and somehow seemed more in place for that. After a few hundred yards Jim sent his little black-and-white female pointer out to race back and forth in the precise arcs of a windshield wiper. As she bounded across their bows, arcing and disappearing in the shin-oak like a spotted porpoise, Nick felt exultant, all his cares flowing out and behind him downwind, to be replaced by clean prairie air.

Just as he tugged his hat more firmly onto his head the pointer slammed to a point as abruptly as if she had run head-on into an invisible wall. They trotted up to the dog, a sudden statue, only a vibrating tail to show she was alive. She rolled her eyes back to watch her human companions. Juan whooped, sprinted past the dog, and sailed his hat forward into the wind with a cowboy YEEE-HAH! Nick had been expecting a covey flush, a burst of four or five birds . Instead, an acre of dark grouse bigger than pigeons erupted from the stubble, first ten, then fifty, more and more, finally stragglers in twos and threes. Distracted by the thunder of the wings and the plaintive calls, Nick momentarily lost sight of the falcon. He caught her as she slashed across a grouse with a burst of feathers. It staggered, recovered, and headed for the horizon with the falcon in hot pursuit. In a moment they had vanished over the hillocks on the fence-line.

“What do we do now?” asked Jim.

“Follow that bird!” whooped Juan. They raced to the truck. Nick turned on the radio receiver, then paused.

“How far do those things fly?”

Jim squeezed his chin. “They can fly forever. But they usually head for trees or structure. There’s an abandoned homestead just past the section line… right over that little ridge.”

The sun was below the horizon and the colors were draining fast as they bumped along the rectangular grid of section roads. Jim turned on the headlights as Nick, holding the receiver’s earphones with both hands, tried to balance and interpret the beep at the same time: “louder… even louder… WAIT!”

They stopped where two straight dirt tracks intersected at right angles. Nick hopped out, waved the hand antenna up, down, left, and right. “North!”

“That’s where the homestead is.” Jim, smiling. Nick climbed in. In a moment the truck’s headlights illuminated a ghost building, gray and shivering, with black holes like eyes in a skull, a tattered elm shading the walk. The beeper was so loud it hurt Nick’s ears. He stepped from the truck to see the silver hawk glowing incandescent in the beams, bent in a curve over a gray- barred bird with splayed black head plumes. She reached down for a mouthful of feathers as he watched, shook her head irritably in the wind to clear her beak, bent again. She continued to ignore him as he picked her up with her quarry, pulled the grouse through his glove, and hid it behind his back. She was calm, almost in a trance, after the flight’s storm. After a moment she seemed to come to. She rearranged her feet, stood erect, polished her bill on the glove, and shook down her feathers. Nick looked back and his friends burst into applause. Cecy, the vegetarian, was clapping too, face solemn, eyes as black and enigmatic as the falcon’s.

That night, when Jim took two more grouse from his freezer, Cecy reached in for another. “There’s still meat I’ll eat. I want Cara’s though,” she added, looking at Nick who nodded his assent, as solemn as she.

Later Nick was to assign that evening any number of meanings, ones that shifted and would not come into the same focus twice. That night it only seemed to be more fun than he had ever had… the friends, the food, the electricity, the aftermath of action, even the fact that Cecilia had chosen the bird. He was high before he ever touched his wine. The wines were magical old Bordeaux from Jim’s amazing cellar. The table was lit by candles that illuminated his companions’ faces below, so they seemed to glow softly in the dark.. The conversation bounced like a ball tossed higher and higher. One moment they would be laughing madly at the sound of a word—“javelina” nearly reduced them to hysterics, as though they were stoned teenagers; the next moment they would sit and shiver as Juan told of a beloved horse he had shot when he thought it would never regain its feet, who had returned to stand blood-drenched in the moonlight in front of his door after he had had to drink himself to sleep, forcing him to, as he put it, “kill him again.” Juan described his ninja-style dispatch of a persistent poacher: he had ambushed and beaten him while wearing a black hood over his head, then dumped him hogtied at his favorite bar after pissing all over him.