When I wasn't able to ski last week, deterred by road conditions, I decided to hike the East ART trail instead. The trail was snow-covered, but it was lovely to walk in and out of the snowfall and to watch the dark clouds come and go. At one point I stopped on the trail to admire the Bishop Road draw, forested, narrow, and loden-green deep below me, while the gray cloak of clouds, hovering low over the mountains, spread the subtle undulations of subdued light into the afternoon.
A small red-tail hawk was flying in slow gyres over the valley, the red tail gleaming as he banked and straightened. He gyred upward, then sailed towards me on a swing of the wind. Closer now, he circled upward again and then again in slow motion, disappearing in the mist, reappearing, and disappearing again, like a mystical reading in a seer's magic sphere.
Oh, the grace of his flight in the gray silence of the afternoon!
I was thinking I had never seen a hawk dive—had never witnessed Hopkins's "Oh air, pride, plume here buckle!"—when suddenly I heard a whoosh, as startling as a train whistle, and felt the air stir across my side as a crow dove to a landing near me. Pausing only a moment, he rose up and attacked the hawk.
The hawk turned, struck back, and the crow flew back over the valley where I had first seen the hawk, the hawk following in pursuit, the smaller bird after the bigger one. Was it, "You can't get away with that, you bully!"? Was he seeking revenge? Do animals seek revenge? Can adolescent birds also be immature and quarrelsome? Do they, too, carry grudges? Why did the crow attack the hawk in the first place? Was this an old fight between them? Or am I misreading the whole episode, which was actually a game between hawk and crow, the way wolf pups bite and tumble in play?
As they flew over the valley, the hawk gaining on the crow, the crow suddenly took the offensive, turned mid-air, and attacked the hawk, who flew off in one direction, the crow in another, the whole thing as silent and slow as a dream.
Dd the hawk depart a sullen loser: "I'll get back at you another day"? Or did he give a cheerful, "See you next week for another game"?
Oh, what do we know, what can we know, about the motives and psychology of hawks and crows?
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