he three men on the neighbor's front lawn stood with their feet slightly
apart and their straight backs to the house. They all held sticks in their
left hands, which looked like rough square broom handles, but not as long.
I didn't look at them much after I saw the hawks flying overhead. The men
seemed not to notice me as I joined them and we stood shading our eyes with
our hands or forearms to get a better view. Red-tailed hawks, five of them,
were diving down in front of us. They were falling head first in an even
horizontal line, amazing wings spread in a full stretch, zinging after their
own glowing orange beaks with their bellies facing us and their tail
feathers spread like peacocks. The impossibly bright red feathers left
brilliant trails in the October blue afternoon sky. As they neared ground,
they looked up and without flapping, powerfully shot straight up, never
losing momentum.I kept watching, trying to figure out too many things at once about what was happening. I began to forget what I was trying to understand, and just became hypnotized by the birds. They were fluid, unreal to my rational mind, but most certainly very powerfully alive.
As they neared the ground yet again, a stick in the grass caught my eye. I picked it up and held it like the men were, in my left hand with the sides extending to my left and right. It wasn't heavy. The birds kept up the show; the only variation I saw was when one opened its mouth and devoured a dragonfly just before it made the loop near the ground.
I felt tenseness coming from the men, and when I looked over I noticed that a teenaged boy was also holding a stick. The birds were at their highest point, and they stopped and hovered there like hummingbirds without flapping. Although they faced away from us, I knew they were watching. The three original men held up their sticks above their heads and the boy and I did the same. The birds plunged down, and as they neared ground, they looped and flew toward us instead of back up. They flapped gracefully upon their approach, and landed on the right side of our sticks, one bird to each human.
I looked past the bird to the men for some clue about what to do.
"Let it stand on your arm. It won't hurt you," one of them said.
So I held out my right hand and the bird walked off the stick and onto my wrist. The man was right; it didn't hurt. I let the stick fall to the grass. I felt a pulsing in the bird's feet, like a heartbeat, but one that came from the bird's whole body, not just its breast. We looked at each other, and I felt ashamed by my normalcy.
I lowered my head for a moment, and rubbed my eye, which had begun to itch. My hand came away sticky.
"Something's wrong with my eye," I said to no one in particular.
"That's because you have a crow," came a voice from the lawn.
When I looked again at my wrist there was a crow there. It was unusual like
the hawks. It was light brown and had brown eyes, but it was definitely a crow.
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