Raptor (7 page)

Once, while ambling about, I encountered a full-grown wolf, and another time a fox. But I did not have to flee from either, for on each occasion the beast was feebly staggering, and a farmer came hastening with a mattock to bludgeon the animal to death and skin it for its pelt. Ordinarily, those predators entered the Ring of Balsam only by night, and prowled only the end of it farthest from any human habitation. But the local folk put out bits of raw meat into which they had put a quantity of powdered bugloss herb, and that was what made the wolves and foxes blind and addled, to totter helplessly about in broad daylight.

The peasant who slew the wolf told me, while he was skinning it, “If ever you come upon a
lynx
fuddled by bugloss, boy, do not kill it. The lynx looks like a large cat, but it is really the offspring of a mating between a wolf and a fox, and therefore it is magical. Nurse it to health, give it sweet wine to drink, then catch its urine in tiny bottles. Bury those bottles for fifteen days and you will find that they contain bright red lynx-stones. Gems as beautiful and as valuable as carbuncles.”

I never got to try that, for I never came upon a lynx. But I did have another encounter with a predator—and this one not fuddled—when I climbed a tree one afternoon. Like any boy, I liked to climb trees, and some of them, such as beeches and maples, having many limbs set near the ground, are easy to get into. Others, such as the stone pine, are like pillars, with their branches only high up, but I had devised a way of scaling those, too. I would undo the waist rope from my smock, knot a loop into either end, stick my feet in the loops and put them astraddle the tree trunk while I embraced it with my arms. The taut rope’s friction against the bark enabled me to kick my way upward almost as easily as if I had been climbing ladder rungs.

Well, that was what I was doing that afternoon: climbing a stone pine tree, because I knew there was a bird nest up there, a nest of the bird called the wryneck. I had often marveled at the queer snakelike way in which the wrynecks waggle their heads, but I had never seen a chick of that bird, and I was curious to know what
it
looked like. However, a large glutton had also decided to investigate that nest, and had incautiously come out of its burrow before nightfall, and had got up the tree before me. We came face to face, away above the ground, and the animal snarled and bared its teeth at me. I had never heard of a glutton’s attacking a human, but in our situation this one might forget its scruples. So I immediately abandoned my project and slid back down the tree trunk.

I stood on the ground, and the glutton and I glowered at one another. I wanted to kill the thing—for one reason, it had a fine brown fur side-banded with yellow-white; for another, it was probably the thief that had so often stolen moles from my noose-traps before I could get to them. But I had no kind of weapon with me, and the animal would make its escape the minute I went to fetch one. Then I had an idea. I took off my smock and high hose and stuffed them with the dead brush lying under the tree. I propped that limp simulacrum of myself against the trunk, sneaked out of the glutton’s sight and then ran as fast as I could, stark naked, to the abbey. Numerous monks and peasants working afield goggled as I flashed past them, and Brother Vitalis was sweeping the dorter when I lunged in there. He gave a cry of scandalized astonishment, dropped his broom and went running himself—probably to tell the abbot that little Thorn had eaten of bugloss and gone demented.

I got from under my pallet the leather sling I had made myself, and yanked on my other smock, and raced back the way I had come. Sure enough, the glutton was still up the tree and still glaring down at the mock me. I had to try four or five times—I was no David with my sling—but a stone finally hit the animal, and hard enough to topple it from its branch. It came flailing down, and thumped on the ground, and I already had a thick piece of tree limb handy to brain it with. The glutton weighed almost as much as I did, but I managed to drag it to the abbey, where Brother Polycarp helped me skin it, and Brother Ignatius, our sempster, helped me sew the fur into a cowl for my winter blanket-surcoat.

There was one wild creature that no one disliked or feared or wanted for its skin or tried to kill. It was a small brown eagle that nested not in trees but on high ledges of our cliffsides. The Ring of Balsam had other raptorial birds—hawks and vultures—but those were despised, the hawks because they habitually raided the poultry flocks, the vultures merely because they were so ugly and such foul feeders. The little eagle was treasured, because its chief prey was reptiles, including the one snake in all this continent that has a poisonous bite: the slender, greeny-black adder.

Either the eagle was adroit enough to avoid the adder’s fangs or it was impervious to the venom, for I frequently saw the bird and the serpent in a thrashing, flapping struggle, and it was always the eagle that emerged victorious. The largest adder is not very big or heavy, but I have also seen one of those eagles fight and vanquish a ladder snake that was as long as I was tall and must have weighed six times as much as the bird. Since the slain serpent was far too heavy to be carried entire, the eagle then proceeded with its beak and talons to tear the cadaver into manageable pieces and fly those one by one to its high nest. From then on, out of admiration, I called the eagle the juika-bloth, meaning in the Old Language “I fight for blood.” And the valley folk, who had never called it anything but aquila, the Latin word for “eagle,” liked my new name and adopted it and used it ever after.

That was not to be my only association with the bird. During my very last year at St. Damian’s, the juika-bloth solved for me the mystery of that deep and polished groove in that rock beside one of the cascade pools. At twilight one day, I chanced to bathe in that particular pool, and then lay floating lazily on the surface. The water being no longer agitated, and I making no noise, a juika-bloth came fluttering down from the cliff above the cavern, and made straight for that rock. It put its hooked beak into the rock’s groove and busily worked the beak back and forth, sideways, up and down—
sharpening
it, as a warrior might whet his sword. I was surprised and thrilled to see that, and somewhat awed, too. How many, many generations of those eagles must have done the same, and over how many, many centuries, to have worn that notch so deep in solid rock! I stayed quiet and watched the juika-bloth until it was satisfied that its weapon was formidably ready for its next opponent, and then it flew up and away again.

What I did, on the following day, I would now regard as unforgivable. But I was then still only a child, and unthinking that a bird might value its freedom from mastery as much as a child does. I went again to the cascades, a little earlier in the afternoon, carrying my winter surcoat and a stout, lidded basket. At the rock, I smeared into the groove some birdlime made from the inner bark of a holly, which must be the stickiest substance there is. But that would hold a strong juika-bloth no longer than a moment. So next I carefully laid out at the foot of the rock a loop of rawhide—I had made a larger version of the noose-trap I used in mole burrows—and disguised that with scattered leaves. Then, taking with me the far end of the long rawhide, I crept deep under a nearby shrub, lay quiet and waited.

At twilight again, an eagle came. Whether it was the same one I could not tell, but it did the same thing: put its beak into that groove. Then it made an angry noise and began back-flapping its wings—much as I moved my arms when swimming on my back—while it pushed with its widespread talons against the imprisoning rock. But I suddenly stood erect, and in the same instant pulled the rawhide loop up and around the bird’s hinder body, just above its tail, and yanked the noose tight. Then I leapt, flinging my sheepskin over the eagle. The next few minutes are only a blur in my memory, and they must have been a blur in reality, for the juika-bloth was only tethered, not bound. It had its wings, beak and talons free to fight with—which it did—much tattering my coat and tearing some bloody bits out of my desperately grappling arms. Tufts of wool and down wafted all about us. But at last I had the bird fast inside the coat and, holding the bundle tight with both arms, I scrambled to where I had left the basket, dumped the eagle into it and latched down the lid.

I kept that bird—and kept it secret, because, in that time and place, a person would have been considered lunatic to maintain a creature that did not in some way earn its keep. I housed my eagle in a large unused coop in the pigeon loft, where no one ever went but me, and I fed it on frogs and lizards and mice and such things that I could catch or trap.

Back then, I had never even heard of “falconry,” so I certainly knew nothing about that sport and art, unless I had inherited from my Goth forebears some instinct for it. And well I may have done, because, all by myself, I succeeded in taming and training my eagle. I began by clipping enough of the bird’s wing feathers to prevent its flying any better than a chicken does, and whenever I first took it afield, I had it on a tether. With trial and error—and maybe instinct—I learned that the eagle could be kept quietly sitting on my shoulder if its eyes were covered, so I made a little leather hood for it. I caught and killed a harmless garden snake, and used that for a lure. By doling out rewards of morsels of meat, I taught my eagle to pounce upon that lure when I shouted, “Sláit!” meaning “Kill!”—I had to keep on catching snakes to use for that, as one after another got mangled—and also taught the bird to return to me when I called, “Juika-bloth!”

The bird and I had got that far by the time its wing feathers grew again. So one day, in an empty field, I threw my snake lure as far from me as I could. Then, with a small prayer, I slipped the eagle’s tether and let it fly free, and immediately cried, “Sláit!” The bird could have flown straight back to its life in the wild, but it did not. It evidently had decided to look on me as its companion and protector and provider. The eagle obediently swooped down upon the dead snake and gleefully tore at it and tossed it about, until I called, “Juika-bloth!” at which it flew back to perch on my shoulder.

That admirable eagle continued to stay with me, and to serve me in ways of which I will tell later. I will only mention here that it and I had something in common. During all the time we were companions, the eagle of course had no opportunity to mate with another, so I never knew whether my juika-bloth was male or female.

During the time at St. Damian’s when I was smugly congratulating myself on having got educated far beyond my years, there were of course many, many things that I had yet to learn—even about the Christian religion, though I had been all my life immersed in it.

Of two things in particular I was then as ignorant as any unquestioning peasant. One was that Christianity was not so catholically universal as the Catholic Church would have liked its believers to believe. The other was that Christianity was not the solid, indivisible, unyielding edifice that all its priests pronounced it to be. None of my instructors ever divulged those truths to me, if they ever acknowledged such unpalatable facts in their own minds. However, since I never did conquer the curiosity that my tutors so much deplored, I continued to wonder about things and to scrutinize them, instead of merely accepting them, as I was expected to do.

Of all the things and occurrences pertaining to our religion that gave me cause for wondering or doubt, I remember most vividly one wintertime Sunday’s mass.

Dom Clement, besides being abbot of our monastery, was parish priest to our whole valley, and our abbey’s chapel served as the sole church of the valley’s inhabitants. It was merely a large room, plank-floored, with no furnishings except the ambo reading-table at the front, and with no decorations whatever. Naturally, the congregation was separated by sex and status to stand in appointed places. Our resident monks, and I, stood to one side of the ambo, together with any visiting clerics and any distinguished lay Christian guests. The local peasant men stood in a body on the right of the room, the peasant women on the left. And off in one corner were segregated any sinners under sentence of penance.

Not until everyone else was in place did Dom Clement enter, wearing over his brown burlap robe the pure-white, priestly linen stola. The congregation saluted him with the “Alleluia!” He returned the salute by chanting the “Holy, holy, holy,” and the people—signing the cross on their foreheads—responded with the “Kyrie eleison.” Then Dom Clement took his place behind the ambo, laid his Bible on its top and announced that his Prophetica lection that Sunday would be the Eighty-third Psalm—“O God, who shall be like to you?”—the psalm that inveighs against the wicked Edomites, Ammonites and Amalekites.

He read it loudly and slowly, in the Old Language, but not from the Bible. He read it from a parchment scroll that had been written out in the Gothic script, and written large, so that the scroll was considerable in length. Also, it had been illuminated by our scriptorium limners with pictures illustrating various things mentioned in the lection. Those pictures were set upside down in the text. That was done so that, as Dom Clement read, and let the free end of the scroll unroll down the front of the ambo, the pictures were right side up in the view of the congregation. Almost all of the local people except the penitents came close to the ambo—politely taking turns, not crowding—to examine the illustrations. Since no peasant owned a Bible, or could read one, and since many of them were too ox-witted even to comprehend a priest’s reading of it aloud, those pictures enabled the peasants to get at least a dim idea of what was being told to them. When Dom Clement had finished reading the psalm, and then began to preach his homily on it, I was more surprised than impressed by his solemnly telling us:

“The tribal name of the Edomites comes from the Latin word ‘edere,’ ‘to devour,’ hence we perceive that they were guilty of the sin of gluttony. The name of the Ammonites comes from the pagan ram-demon Jupiter Ammon, hence they were a tribe of idolaters. The name of the Amalekites comes from the Latin word ‘amare,’ ‘to love passionately,’ hence they were guilty of the sin of lust…”