This was the moment Harris Henderson relished. He squinted and let his gaze slowly traverse the wide, open meadow encircled by tall, leggy pines. The grasses were crisp and the ground was hard with the early morning frost. In only one day’s time, winter had blustered into the Lowcountry, plummeting temperatures from balmy to freezing. He took a long, deep breath, feeling the moist chill go straight to his lungs. The morning air carried the scent of burning wood—cedar, he thought—so strong he could almost taste it.
Turning his head, he gazed upon the sleek red-tailed hawk held firm against his chest by his thick leather gloves. Maggie Mims, a robust woman with hair almost the same color red as the hawk’s tail, looked up at him with eyes sparkling with excitement.
She gave a curt nod.
Harris moved his gloved hands so that his left wrapped around the hawk’s wings and the right maintained a firm hold of the hawk’s feet. Instantly, the hawk’s dark gaze sharpened, her mouth opened and she jerked her wings hard for freedom.
“So, you’re eager to be off,” he said in a low voice.
He waited patiently for the bird to calm itself, all the while looking on with admiration. She was a beautiful specimen, creamy breasted with a dark bellyband and the brick-red tail feathers that gave the species its name. Red-taileds were superb hunters, “the black warriors” J.J. Audubon had called them. It was hard to believe, looking at her sleek, healthy form, that she’d been brought into the clinic with gunshot wounds a mere two months earlier. “Well, it won’t be long now.”
The bird cocked its head at the sound of his voice, glaring, ferocious—the right attitude for survival. Every instinct in its body was on alert for flight. Harris could feel the bird’s anticipation in his own veins.
In this brief moment before flight, Harris sought to merge spirits with the bird. He’d read stories of shamans who practiced this ancient art, myths of Indians whose spirits soared with eagles, tales that he’d heard spoken of only in passing or in jest. Though he’d tell this to no one, deep down he’d always believed that at the core of legends and myths lay a kernel of truth. There were individuals who communicated at some visceral level with birds. He knew it. Witnessed it.
And it was his private pain that he was not one of them. Although highly skilled, he didn’t possess the rare instinct—the gift—of connection. The art of truly flying the birds.
The closest he came to it was at liftoff. The seconds when the bird’s wings stretched out and he heard the whup-whup of their flapping and felt the quick fluttering of air against his cheek as the bird flew fearlessly into the wind. At that stolen moment in time he caught an exhilarating glimpse of what it might be like to fly, to feel the lift, then the air glide over him like water.
“Ready?” asked Maggie.
Sensing freedom at hand, the red-tailed tightened its talons on his arm. The brisk wind gusted, riffling the feathers on its head. She didn’t flinch. Her eyes were focused. A faint stream of breath clouded the air like steam as her chest rose and fell. The moment had come.
“Okay, my beauty,” he said softly to the hawk. “Let’s send you home.”
With a lift of his arm, he let his hands go. Instantly the talons released their grip. Wings fluttered, stirring the air. Harris released a sigh as the hawk took flight.
Up, up, the red-tailed climbed. Harris tracked the bird, assessing her strength and looking for any tipping, which would indicate the broken wing hadn’t completely healed. The margin for survival was very slim in the wild. A raptor had to be one hundred percent to successfully hunt. There was nothing tentative about this bird’s flying, however, and Harris felt a bone-deep satisfaction that their work at the rehabilitation center had been successful.
This bird, number 1985, was successfully released to the wild.
“We’re not s’posed to hunt in there.”
Brady Simmons pointed the business end of his .22 caliber rifle toward the No Hunting sign posted on the gnarled bark of a bare-leafed live oak. “It says right here, see?” he said, careful to make it more question than statement.
His father rubbed his bristled jaw and drawled, “I don’t see no sign.”
“Billy Trumplin’s dad says we could get in big trouble if we hunt in there. ‘Specially birds. It ain’t even the season.”
Roy Simmons slowly turned his head, narrowing his eyes as he focused on his eldest son. His voice was low but lethal. “You tellin’ me what to do now, boy?”
Brady took a step back. “N-no, sir.”
The spark in his father’s eyes banked as he acknowledged the respect. “Our family’s been huntin’ this here land longer than anyone can remember. There ain’t nothing wrong with takin’ a little of what’s there for the takin’.” He hoisted his rifle. “Besides, we ain’t here for sport. We’re here to put food on the table. And I’ll be dog damned if some tree hugger’s gonna up and tell me I can’t.”
Brady gave a curt nod and kept an eye on his father’s balled fists. The stench of stale whiskey on his father’s breath kept the boy mute with fear and contempt.
His father reached out to rip the sign from the tree bark and throw it on the ground.
Brady’s face was a portrait of teenage apathy as he watched his father ground the muddy heel of his boot on the federal sign. What a jerk, he thought. He was sick of hearing his father grouse about land that had been “stolen” from the people. How could someone steal what wasn’t theirs in the first place? Besides, what did he care about the land and who owned it? All he wanted was to get as far away from this hellhole as he could.
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
