One Sunday morning, instead of going to the church, I went into the park near it. Just as I was about to climb an oak tree, I saw a friend of mine walk down the path from behind a partisan monument. One dark bronze-alloy partisan was perpetually about to throw a hand grenade at the town; another was shoving his rifle into the air in his right hand, clenching his left fist and shouting a most terrifying metal silence.
The boy who appeared from behind the monument was a Catholic, and I saw him in all the Catholic funeral processions; he would lead the way, dressed in white vestments, too long though not too spacious for him, carrying the yellow varnished cross in front of him, his cheeks pink in the wind or the heat, while the priest, behind him, sang in a monotonous Latin. Luka now carried a basket of plaited branches, and the basket was covered.
“What have you got there?” I asked him.
“If you want to find out, give me five dinars.”
I gave him a bronze five-dinar coin and peeped into the basket.
“Don’t open it much; they might fly away!”
“Wow! What are they? Little ravens?”
“No. Can’t you see? They aren’t black. Hawks. I found them at the Raven’s Rock.”
“You didn’t climb a tree and steal them out of the nest?” I said threateningly.
“Who, me? Just take a look at me!”
“Well, yes, you are too fat to do that. Hmm, and what will you do with them?”
“I don’t know. Feed my dog.”
“Look, why don’t you give them to me!”
“Give? Are you crazy? They are not easy to come by!”
“Well, what do you want for a hawk?”
“It’s a precious bird. You could train it to catch chickens, one a day, which would make three hundred and sixty-five chickens a year, and with that you could buy all kinds of things. . . .”
“I’ll give you my sword.”
“Come on! We outgrew that.”
“All right, I’ll give you all my textbooks.”
“Textbooks are worthless this time of the year.”
“My sweater and my jeans?”
“They would be too tight on me.”
“You could stretch them.”
“No, forget it!”
And he made as if he would walk on.
“Well, how about a strawberry ice cream?”
Now there I got him. His mouth began to water and he swallowed, his eyelids drooping.
“Not one,” he said, “three.”
And so we walked to the sweets shop. I bought him three ice creams and he licked them, lapping like a dog drinking milk. Then he took out one hawk.
I took him gingerly in both of my hands and gripped him, to make sure his talons, which looked like small Turkish sabers turned upside down, could not reach me. I was uneasy about his beak.
“Could you lend me your basket?”
“No, it’s my mother’s.”
“Well, just for ten minutes, so I could run home to leave the hawk there. And I’d like the other hawk too!”
“That would be ten almond ice creams.”
“You’re out of your mind! The second item is usually cheaper if you buy two together.”
“Three ice creams is just enough for me. I don’t want them so bad anymore. Now ten new ones could barely please me as much as three.”
“How about three egg-cream cakes? One white and two yellow ones?”
“Four!” he said.
I searched through my pockets, and in the mess of nails, wires, a Swiss knife, several round pebbles for throwing at traffic signs and my phys ed teacher’s windows, and cigarette butts, I found one torn red piece of paper, with a picture of a muscular factory worker on it.
“I only have enough for one cake. Take it, and let that be a deposit!”
I rushed home with the hawk in my hands, far in front of me. The bird was very warm and its body pulsated with its fast heartbeats; the whole body was one big heart, with sharp edges and eyes atop its valves.
As soon as I got home, I put the bird into a cupboard, stole some money from a prayer book, where my mother kept it because she believed it would be under divine protection there, and ran back to the sweets shop.
Luka was not there anymore. I learned later that he had sold the bird to a policeman’s son, Nik.
Next time I ran into Luka, I said to him: “Look, I already paid security for the hawk, and you gave it to someone else!”
“I don’t remember anything.”
“Luka, you know, so far we’ve traded honestly. I demand that you get that hawk back from Nik.”
“No, he won’t give it back to you. Besides, I want to be on good terms with him and his father, because I still need to steal some things, and if I get caught. . . .”
“All right, here is for the deposit!” I said and gave him a black eye, to which he responded by giving me a wonderful show of the firmament, with stars more than there are sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, flickering and showing me the way to Bethlehem and the cradle of Christian virtues; this guided me to solidifying the blackness of my trade partner’s eye by a blow which got him on the same spot as the previous one. In all fairness to the art of painting, which takes time, I must say that when I was able to behold the colors of this world again, his eye was not yet black but red and purple, the following day it was green and yellow, and on the third day it was blue. Now I knew that you could get green out of blue and yellow, but that you could get blue out of green and yellow was certainly a novelty, and it was not an exception proving the rule, because the surroundings of my eyes followed the same revolutions of colors as his. In the end our colors were dark blue, like the most common sort of plums.
Naturally, I was ashamed of my plum-eye, and for about five days I joined the pirates.
Wearing a piece of greasy leather across my head and over my colorful eye, I went to Nik’s home. I was very uneasy about being there because I had already been interrogated by his father the policeman for stealing Mercedes emblems from tourist cars, and another time for breaking into a cellar of a large residential building and stealing bike bells. Nik told me he would not sell me the hawk, but if I really wanted it, I could get it for a ten-speed bike. I went home kicking stones from the pavement onto the dusty road. Later, I learned that the sibling of my hawk had starved to death.
Having reached home, I went up to the loft, that is to say, my hawk’s new suite. I closed the wooden door, which screeched over the cement floor, and waited till my eyes got used to the darkness. I made out his silhouette on a crossbeam. When I began to approach the silhouette, it jumped and flapped its wings unsteadily to another beam. He nearly fell from it onto the bales of leather beneath. There were still many bales of hide there, out of which my father used to make clogs before his death. The bales covered a large surface beneath a succession of beams, and in the shorter arm of the L-shaped loft there were piles of wood soles, another ingredient for clogs that would never be made. Nearby there were boxes of old newspapers and magazines, some with pictures of Russian spaceships and dogs, or Marilyn Monroe with her parted lips, old clothes that all my siblings and I outgrew, jigsaw puzzles with pieces missing, and a sharp-pointed egg, supposedly a football, that our grandmother had sent us from Cleveland, thinking we’d love it, but we did not know what the hell to do with it, and did not even unzip it — just left it there as some kind of industrial miscreant, and found better soccer balls. Well, all these objects were now the domain of my sharp friend, over which to fly and to bombard with a variety of liquid colors. There he had everything necessary for a good education, and thanks to his good eyesight, he would soon be able to read the papers from his beam.
On his new crossbeam he was now emerging out of the dark, like a picture developed in a lab, sharper and sharper. He turned sideways to me, to assess me better, I guess. I had christened him Yahbo, which sounded to me like a good abbreviation of Jastreb, hawk in Serbo-Croatian. I was pleased to give him a name and regretted he had no companion to name too. A brother would be better for play than a sister, no doubt, but . . . well, in fact I was not sure what Yahbo’s gender was, but was not eager to ruffle in his feathers to find out, fearing that I would have to rely only on my sense of touch, the beaks and talons making my eyes flutter at the thought of coming close to them. Nevertheless, I took it for granted that he was male. In the back of the loft, sunshine streaked in, stronger and stronger, and particles of dust were brilliant, burning like stars in the Milky Way. Through the window facing east (there was also one facing south), you could see the mountains and forests from which Yahbo must have come, from a no doubt very noble lineage stretching down all the way to the Garden of Eden and God’s breath. If He made Adam of soil, He made hawks of leaves, detached leaves that winds carried aloft, and with God’s breath reaching it, the leaf ceased to be a helpless toy of the winds, and instead, the stem evolved into a seeing head, and the outer parts of leaves into wings; and so came into being the great surveyor of the forest, from one of its soft riblets.
I brought him water to drink. But he would not drink. I fed him liver meat, a quarter of a pound daily. I made sure that it was bathed in blood because otherwise he would not get enough liquids.
It was hot in the loft, because the summer was coming and the thin tiles offered no insulation.
Yahbo sat on one crossbeam and stared. White film was covering his eyes, slowly, and withdrawing back somewhere beneath the feathers around his eyes. His beak was half-open. He is dying of thirst and grief, I thought.
Since he would not drink water from a pot, I wondered how to make him drink. I went to the library to find out whether young hawks drank water, or blood only, and I wasn’t able to find out anything. Then I went to the junkyard behind the local hospital, where there were all kinds of needles and syringes and bottles. I found some big injection pumps, and unconcerned whether they had been injected into sufferers of hepatitis, syphilis, TB, tetanus, or diabetes, cancer, cardiac arrest, and so on, I brought them home and filled them with water and aimed into Yahbo’s beak. Just a squirt. But it would not pass down his throat. Some drops trickled down from his beak onto the dusty floor, and they coated themselves in dust, and squirmed and curled on the ground, like miniature hedgehogs on guard. Now I dropped all shyness with Yahbo, grabbed him behind his neck, so he would not move, and squirted into his beak, again and again, until he finally swallowed some. His Adam’s apple went up and down. He opened his beak again. Afterward, he learned to drink from a pot of water, but on hot days he preferred to soak his legs and to get some water on his wings, and shake all his feathers, so water would fly all around the loft. He enjoyed dipping his head in the pot now and then, but I was not sure whether he drank.
Yahbo was growing rapidly. I wanted to teach him many tricks, primarily to sit on my shoulder and to love me. If he loved me, I would be assured that he would stay with me and would not fly away into his forests never to return; and if he did fly away for the weekend, during the week he would stay with me, and I could walk with him on my shoulders, or my forearm wrapped in oxhide. He would attack anyone who displeased me upon my ordering him to, and he would pluck his eyes out with his talons, or tear his ears off, or at least make a hole in the ears which could be used for earrings. I wanted to teach him how to hunt, to bring him all sorts of live animals to slaughter with ever-increasing art, and I wanted to teach him at the same time to be as chummy as my cat was, to let me pet him, tickle him, and comb his feathers with a Russian fur cap.
However, it was already summer, and since there was no school, it was the busiest time in the year. I was outdoors playing Robin Hood with my friends and riding my bike. Quite a few times Yahbo went without anything to eat for two days. Suddenly remembering my neglect, I would run to the butcher’s shop, to the butcher whose face and neck were as red as the international communist flag. He would laugh at me and say: “You better buy more! Look at you, how thin you are! If you want to be big and strong you must eat a pound of this stuff a day!” He always gave me a little more than I paid for.
Anyhow, even the hours that I did have to train Yahbo, I did not know how to put to use. I made a leather strap to put around my forearm; however, Yahbo would not sit on it, and was getting irritated with me for trying to place him there, and a couple of times started with his beak in the direction of my eyes so abruptly that I had to throw him off. I am sure he had no sentimental impulses to kiss my ears or play with locks of my hair right then, but he probably wanted to drink my eye, to teach me a lesson.
I thought of opening the windows to let him fly, believing he might return, because, after all, where would he get bloody meat so easily? But I was not sure he would come back, and moreover, if he attacked chickens somewhere in the town, he might get killed. I imagined taking him out when he was starved and teasing him with some meat on a rope, which I would whirl all around, and he would fly after it, and so would learn to stay around me. But I did not think that the taste of meat was so sweet to him as freedom was.
I was more of a jailer than a friend. I could not talk to him. He would not look at me. His head was always sideways to me — so that I did not know where he was looking. Perhaps he was looking at me, but I could not tell, and that did not do much for communication between us. Nor did he trust me. Sometimes when I came into the loft he would fly from the front beam far back into the darkest recesses of the loft. However, sometimes he flew from the recesses to greet me, and let me approach him, if I moved slowly and softly. Then I caressed him down his soft feathers, with a quickening sensation in my whole body. Petting Yahbo was like petting a sword with sharp double edges, a perfect smooth cold surface over which you glide your palms carefully. Yet he was not cold, but very warm, and surprisingly soft. He seemed pleased then, his eyes grew very shiny, even teary; radiant hazel. His head moved a bit to the left and a bit to the right; he was probably surprised, and did not know what to think, whether I was being affectionate to him. And as if to ask me what it all meant, he opened his beak, but no sounds came out. In the beak I saw his thin red and pointed tongue, almost a snake’s tongue. Overcome with sadness that he could not speak the language of humans (if he believed that humans had a language) he stayed that way, his beak open, and the white film went over his eyes, like blinds down a window.
Sometimes I stayed in the loft for hours, just staring at the majestic bird. He was growing so large that I was not sure he wasn’t an eagle. I was having doubts as to whether I should train him. It did not seem that he would want to be a servant. He was born to be a master, a count of the heavens, and who was I? Son of a clogmaker. How could I subdue this nobility? If he really were a son of a banal human nobleman, I would gladly lynch him and humiliate him daily, make his nose bleed, tie him to a tree, a post of shame, and so on. But to order this genuine nobleman, Yahbo, to serve me, that I could not do.
Maybe I was simply rationalizing to myself, making excuses for my inability to make buddies with Yahbo.
Sometimes Yahbo would fly the whole length of the loft, swing around the curve, smashing straight into the glass window. The glass window was crossed with five laths of wood, which made twelve squares of glass, their surfaces too small to be shattered in such a way. Yahbo would fall to the floor, stand up, fly back to the opposite end of the loft, and in a couple of minutes he’d be flying again, pointing his body straight to pass through the space between the laths. And he would crash down again. He especially kept flying against the window looking east, toward the green mountains whence he came. In the morning I could see him at the window, against the glass, with his beak open and uttering no sound, bewildered, perhaps not understanding what kind of air it was that would not let you out, but through which the wonders of his homeland were all visible to him. He faced east like a Muslim faces toward Mecca, or like a Jew facing Jerusalem, and for him it was a wall of wailing, an invisible wall of wailing. Again and again he flew against the window so mercilessly I was scared he would break his neck. Then his eyes glowed with wrath.
I was tempted to open the window for him, but did not.
Perhaps, I thought, if I could not make friends with him, my cat could. After all, the cat and the hawk looked in some ways similar. She had tiger stripes, her hair was gray, with some red hairs intermingled in the gray, and so were his hairs, his feathers. Her eyes were hazel green, and so were his, though a shade yellower. Moreover, they had interests in common; they were both born hunters. My cat was named Tzzz (the sound zz makes in pizza). The high frequency alerted her, and whenever I wanted to attract her attention, no matter where she was, I had only to make the sound, and she would rush to me, at least in the beginning of our friendship, when I was nice to her, bringing her fish, petting her every day, inviting her to spend nights in my bed, and in winter, to sleep across my neck, to our mutual satisfaction (my neck stayed warmer than if covered with a blanket, and she had a soft thermal pillow which had ears to bite, hair to pull, nose to scratch). But now that Yahbo was there I neglected her. Whenever she caught mice before Yahbo moved in, she would bring me her catch, and proudly put it down at my feet, expecting I would want to play with it and eat it. Seeing I didn’t, she’d flip it over her head back into the field, and let it run, recapture it, and dribble it all around the corridors. The corridor was her Coliseum, and the mouse a Christian, and she a lioness.
Once Tzzz stood beneath a wire for sunning oiled oxhide on which a sparrow twittered; the wire was about six feet above the ground. Tzzz’s moustache twitched. All of a sudden, the cat flew, snatched the bird with her paws, and pierced its neck with her incisors. I snatched from her the bleeding sparrow, who was still hot though already dead, slain since Tzzz knew she could not run to the sky after the bird, the way she could run around the yard after the mouse. Tzzz hissed at me, snorted; with her paw she cut a five-fold mark on the back of my hand, so that it bled. When I stood up, the cat jumped on my leg, and with her teeth tore my trousers, in the manner of a dog. I realized it was cruel of me to take the sparrow away. I had never seen a cat perform a feat of that sort, to jump so high and catch a bird in its element. Yet, this was the time to send gifts to Yahbo, and start making peace and friendship. It was a gift in the manner in which Jacob sent cattle to Esau, to appease Esau for his stolen birthright. First the gift, then the supplications. I threw the bird toward Yahbo, and Yahbo missed it, unprepared for hunting out of the blue. Then he swooped down on the quarry, picked it up, and wildly flew with it around the loft several times. Whereupon he landed on his favorite crossbeam, nailed the sparrow with his talons so that the talons went all the way through the bird into the wood. He stood, dignified, with his head in profile, as if ready to be minted into the tails of the silver dollar, or a German mark, or some other aggressive country’s currency. Blood dropped from the beam onto the floor, and coated itself in dust. Then Yahbo tore the bird, his smaller nephew of the same color and same stripes as his, and devoured it all, feathers, bones, eyes, everything, gulping hastily, his throat and eyes bulging out, and when the sparrow was swallowed, he seemed to regret that the pleasure was so short-lived, and that it was not a bigger bird. Oh, wouldn’t he love to hunt!
Yahbo, having tasted the blood of the peace offering from Tzzz, was in his full splendor, and, I thought, ready to make friends. I caught the cat, who was in a bad mood to be sure, but I thought the mood should improve as soon as she beheld the excellencies of her potential new friend. Upon seeing the newcomer, Yahbo spread his wide wings, and opened his beak; his eyes increased in size, and shot a beam of fire, and his snake tongue popped out. The wings were spread like big arms of welcome. Yet even I was uneasy seeing him thus. Tzzz’s hairs all stood up, like particles of iron on a magnet. The hawk kept his wings outstretched. Tzzz hissed like a choir of vipers. I began to approach the hawk, who stood on the beam uneasily. The cat tore out of my embrace, her back legs cutting into my belly, and rushed out of the loft, as the door was not completely closed.
Knowing that Yahbo needed to taste animals, to see what he should catch, I decided to hunt for him myself. It was not fair to abuse the cat. I borrowed a good BB rifle from a Hungarian boy, Janosh, with whom at the time I was having a brief period of peace. Otherwise, we fought every day; I would hit him on the mouth, so his lips would be cut and bleeding, he threw large chunks of heating coal, striking my legs, I chased him through half the town, and finally catching him, choked him, while he plunged his nails into my back, until his hands grew weak and he seemed to swoon; then fearing for his life, I’d let him loose, he sprang up and ran away and laughed at me, and I ran after him again, caught him, hit him on his nose so that it bled; and Janosh would a day later, as I was relaxing in front of a monument of a naked woman, strike me from behind, holding a large stone in his hand, and would run away while I writhed on the ground. I thought he started our fights, and he that I did, and I thought he was a cowardly sneaky Catholic heathen, and so on. But now during the truce, we were very good friends, and he lent me his rifle gladly. I went into the park to shoot small forms of life, which was a forbidden activity and therefore all the dearer to boys. I killed a sparrow, the sort that Our Heavenly Father feeds and takes care of, and stored it in a hollow of a tree. My stomach was uneasy. Then I saw not far from me a weasel. I stopped breathing, slowly raised the rifle, and leaned it against the cold, smooth bark of a birch. The weasel did not seem to notice me. I aimed for its neck. BB bullets cannot kill such animals unless perfectly placed. I pressed the trigger. Thup! The weasel jumped several times like a wild horse being tamed. I thought it would fall to the ground, but it jumped onto another tree, almost missing a branch. I reloaded the rifle and ran after it. I tripped over a tree trunk, and for a moment could not see where the weasel was. I threw a stone in the direction where I thought it was. Then I saw it, struggling to get onto another tree. I shot, missed, reloaded, shot, missed, reloaded, doing it all too quickly. The weasel seemed to be picking up strength and jumped from tree to tree. I leaned against a tree, and pulled the trigger. The weasel shook. It stood in one place trembling. But would not fall. I must have put about five more bullets into it, and it continued trembling. Then a spasm passed through its body, and it shook no more. But fall from the tree it would not. I found some large stones and began to throw them at the victim. I missed consistently and then resorted to climbing the tree. Unsteadily I reached the weasel. Its yellow fur was covered with blood, its neck torn, eyes almost outside the sockets. I grabbed its bloody body and tore it off the branch and threw it to the ground, shivering. I rushed down the tree, slid down the bark of the trunk, and vomited. The green darkness grew darker, and at the same time more radiant in my eyes, and all I could see in the radiance was the red blood, screaming, like the blood of Abel, straight to God. I threw myself on the ground. I prayed to The Most High, All Powerful and All Just God, saying that I would never again kill any animals, except for mosquitoes, and ants that I was bound to step on in treading the earth; however, that I would never intentionally step on an ant, nor place, in the manner in which a friend of mine did, one ant’s head against the neck of another, to see the reflex motion of ant in panic, biting off the neck of his comrade. And moreover, I would seek vengeance for the innocent bloodshed of animals, wherever I found it. To begin with, I would beat a boy in my street who had bathed a cat in gasoline and set her on fire, and a boy who lived two streets away from me, who had captured the black cat of a ninety-year-old solitary woman, and killed it by putting it into the permanent-press cycle of the washing machine. I was not quite sure that I had enough strength to wreak vengeance upon that Philistine, but I would be willing and in fact would like to grow long hair for that purpose. “Only, Most High God, could you convince the minister, and the deacons of the church, to begin to tolerate long hair, not to threaten to excommunicate me, as they had moved to do so many times, and not to lock me out of the gates of heaven.” And I said I would do all that on the condition that He restore life to the weasel. I waited, opened my eyes, and there was the weasel, as dead as before. So I told God I would not bargain, mere morsel of nothingness that I was; I would stop killing animals for my part at any rate, unconditionally. But would He restore the life for the sake of the weasel, and the weasel’s relatives, not for the relief of my sin, and let the blood of the weasel anyhow, even if He brought it back to life, stain my soul till the day of the Last Judgement, although Christ had shed His blood on the cross to wash away all the blood stains.
In praying I was plucking my hair, which did nothing in the direction of making me a Samson. Then I hit the ground with my fists, quite a few times, until I hit something cool and slimy and when I opened my eyes, I saw I had squashed a snail. The weasel was as dead as before. I stood up, rubbed my slimy and bloody palm against the bark of the tree and against my trousers and, realizing I had not completed my prayer, I said: Amen! Nothing happened, only the wind rustled around, invisible and ubiquitous. And the leaves trembled as it passed. I was not sure God heard it all, and said Amen once again. But nothing changed. With my bare hands I dug into the soft black soil, the taste of vomit in my nostrils and my lungs. Soil stuck beneath my nails. My nails cut through earthworms, but I did not worry about that, because that could not kill them, but only increase their number. I carried the weasel by its tail between my index finger and thumb, and put it into the hole, poured soil over it, and trampled it, making the ground solid.
So I returned home empty-handed. Yahbo, as if he had known I had gone hunting for him, opened his beak, turned his head in many directions quickly, in expectation.
I saw that if I was to let Yahbo go, I should do so without further hesitation. I could make friends neither with him nor for him and I couldn’t hunt for him. It was already mid-August and the more time passed, the more difficult it would be for him to learn how to hunt before the coming of winter.
The following day I took an empty box, made several small holes in it, and put Yahbo into it. I tied around Yahbo’s right foot a thin piece of metal, with my inscribed name and address. Then we set out for the mountains, the way Abraham set out with Isaac, to slaughter him as a burnt offering to God. I did not have any donkeys, so I had to be the donkey myself, carrying the box with Isaac. I hoped that my son would live, that an angel would stop my raised hand with a knife in it. We passed through the park, the woods, past the vineyards in the hills, reached a big forest, passed through a layer of beech trees, and ended up high in an oak forest.
On the way I saw no hawks and wondered how he would do, whether he would find any company, a girlfriend. Actually, I still had no girlfriend, so we were in the same boat. At least I could stare at the girls in miniskirts in the town, and if that was not enough, naked ones in Playboy. But he had nothing like that.
On a small meadow surrounded by trees I opened the box. He jumped out awkwardly, more like a chicken than a hawk. Probably he chickened out when he saw all the sky. And he flapped his wings, and flew in a semicircle to a bumpy evergreen tree, such as I imagined grew in Greece. It looked like a fig tree but was not; at least I never saw figs on it.
Yahbo perched himself on a branch of the tree, the way he used to on a beam, and stared around and at me. Now everything changed. He was free. And I was merely a human with bare hands, and flap as much as I would, I could not take off from the ground. He hesitated, fearing perhaps that there was a glass barrier somewhere, against which he would hit, and then fall, back onto the sandy floor of the hot, dark loft. After several minutes of contemplating his novel circumstances he flapped his wings and sprang from the branch. He flapped up in circles, higher and higher, spiraling into the heavens. High above me he glided on a new wind, keeping his wings still for a long time. Then he made a circle out of which he darted straight for the mountains.
Every day I went to the loft and through the eastern window I stared toward the mountain, like a Muslim toward Mecca, or a Jew toward Jerusalem; and wondered where in the emerald temple he was. When there was a thunderstorm I feared a lightning bolt would strike him because of the metal I had put on his right leg. He would be charcoal on the spot. My cat Tzzz sometimes followed me to the loft, like a dog, and rubbed her back against my legs. Most often I paid no attention to her, but on a couple of occasions, I barely controlled my sudden impulse to kick her off so she would fly straight onto a bale of leather. Her tail used to rise straight upward, in full openness of her nature, only its very tip wiggling merrily; now her tail was sneakily curved, as if she feared I would take her too into the forest, and abandon her.
It is said that friends are one soul in two bodies. Well, a part of that one soul was circling somewhere above the trees over the mountain.
Two weeks later a local forester came by and told me that his dog had found a most peculiar thing in the forest: a dead hawk, with a dead weasel in its talons. The hawk held the back part of the weasel, apparently having missed the front, which he must have aimed for, and the weasel still had its teeth in the hawk’s breast. Both had bled to death. The ring around the hawk’s leg bore my name and address. He had the hawk, if I wanted it.
They were still together, the hawk and the weasel. I separated their bodies and took them to the spot where I had let Yahbo fly free and made a hole beneath the tree to which Yahbo had flown. The tree roots were wiry, and tough to cut through with my Stone Age tool, a sharp stone. Among the roots I placed the thin, limp mess of fur and dark blood, the weasel, for there it belonged.
Then I collected dry branches of trees, made a bundle on the ground, and put the limp chunk of feathers, flesh, beak, talons, and dark blood prostrate over it. The white film covered Yahbo’s eyes. I lighted a match, and put it beneath the pyre, and held it there until my fingers got scorched, but the pyre did not catch fire. The thin branches only darkened, and emitted some short-lived smoke. Several times it went that way until I decided I would need some paper. In my back pocket I carried a small black New Testament with red sides, printed by the London Bible Society. From it I tore most of the Epistles, the Book of Revelation, and the Acts, and put the transparent, smooth paper beneath the branches, setting it on fire. The fire was strong at once, the branches caught it, making crackling noise. The feathers smelled like a tire being burnt. The flames fought through a thick layer of smoke and the smoke rose slowly. Some smoke touched my eyes and stung them so that tears appeared in them as if I had been gazing at a big naked onion. I took out a cigarette and lighted it on the pyre. The circles of my smoke merged into the smoke of Yahbo, and our smoke merged into the sky. The sky turned a shade paler.
“Yahbo The Hawk” originally appeared in The New England Review and is reprinted with permission.
— Ed.
