Out of the Totem Hawk Lexicon

One morning north of Elk, I was walking over an undulance of hills, the wind in my face so that I had to keep blinking, and I grew tired of it and took a rest in the lee of a ridge, a relative vacuum of quiet and warmth where I could open my eyes and my canvas coat and lie back and watch the blowing: clouds in slippage, bluestem in bondage. I dozed off, woke, sat up, and considered whether to eat or hike on.

Suddenly, over the slope, as if tethered to a cord of air drawing quickly upward, came a northern harrier, motionless but for its rising. So still was the bird—wings, tail, head—it might have been a museum specimen. Then, as if atop the wind, it slid down the ridge, tilted a few times, veered, tacked up the hill, its wings hardly shifting. I thought, if I could be that hawk for one hour I’d never again be just a man. It went into a hover near a rock ledge, twisted its tail and ruddered into position for the drop, then fell out of the wind onto what looked like a vole and began tearing open flesh. I made notes on what had just happened and concluded: hwk stlking best dun seatd. After some minutes, the harrier raised its wings but moved them only that once, and, as if again leashing itself to its invisible line, floated up into the wind (a river diver rising to the surface, catching the current) and was gone. Somewhere now the mammal heart flew in the harrier, vole turning into wings and talons, and those giving the rodent its creeping and sequestered and dark life: shapers of each other like a human making a sculpture and it making him a sculptor.

This is a chapter about hawkness and harriers, but I must tell you straight: it’s a cowlick—no matter how much I comb through it, wet it down, try to smooth it into coherence, it pops up, always insisting on standing awry. When I write, I usually try to follow the directions in the images and let details point the way so that my pencil (I always begin drafting with a lead pencil as if I were drawing) is a vehicle across the map of paper, a smudged course down parallel lines, little roads, and the best part of such a journey, the reward for the isolation necessary to it, is the unexpected encounters: travel writing is a tour twice taken, and which one is more real depends on how you value dreamtime. For me, writing is not a search for explanations but a ramble in quest of what informs a place, a hunt for equivalents. (I always envy the painter never having to ask, “Understand?” Were the choice ever offered, I’d want to be a Turner rather than a Twain.)

Now: I am in the room where I write (my pencil absently scribbled “writhe”); wadded and thrown against the wall are nine sheets of paper that were various first paragraphs of this chapter. I haven’t been falling asleep until early in the dark mornings these last few hot July nights, and I’ve become a convict of two alternating emotions, irritation and depression, because I can’t find a way into the topic. I’ve tried all my old devices to trick words out where they can reveal a course: read some Dickens or Shakespeare or Melville’s Encantadas, draw a picture of the subject, play my aboriginal cedar flute, lie on the floor and stretch, go outside and shoot baskets, take a shower, a walk, a nap (these days I lie dreaming I’m solving the riddle of hawkness, only to wake and find myself exactly where I began); above all, try to avoid anger. Still, I’ve ended up with crumpled paragraphs and the old terror creeping in that my quarry has grown too clever to be caught, that it knows what I’m after: itself revealed.

During all of this, I’ve resisted writing down what I am about to say (some things are easier to admit to than others) because it will probably be laughable; but, maybe, it’s a way in:

Six years ago, when I was first beginning to prowl around Chase County, my wife and I visited friends in Canandaigua, New York. Of him I will tell you more later. His wife, partly of Tennessee Cherokee blood, works in vocational rehabilitation; she’s a bright woman whose bubble always seeks its own plumb. Someone had recently given her a Ouija board, which, she said, had taken to calling her Z in its responses. My wife and Z played with the board one summer evening, asking questions, laughing at the answers, until Ouija said my wife would die in a car crash in 2005.

They looked around and told me to ask it something, so I did, although their hands, not mine, followed the black pointer. I avoided destination questions and asked about the new book I wanted to write: was it a good idea? Ouija answered, YO, which I took as yes. What would be the first words? GOIN WEST, BRO. What was the subject? LAND. Ouija gave a couple more answers, both plausible and even surprising in their insight. (I must add that I’d not then talked specifically about my project with anyone.) I asked, will there be strong help in making the book? The pointer lay still, then moved slowly, W-A- (moving erratically) M- (as if hunting a lost alphabet) R-E. We waited for it to finish but it lay still. I asked what WAMRE was, and the pointer sat, sat, then again slid slowly to the letters: W-I-N-D and stopped, then started once more and, herky-jerk, spelled R-I-D-E-R. I admit my flesh was crawling. I asked what a wind rider was, and Ouija quickly spelled out H-A-W-K.

I went outside on the porch to sit in the cool dark and collect myself. I’d recently begun keeping a Chase journal of observations and ideas—a most secret thing—that I hoped would lead me into the prairie book; in it I’d written this: the harrier rides the wind as a fish the current—it treats air like a liquid. I alone had seen the notebook, and neither woman had ever heard me speak of hawks (except in bird-watcher talk), and I’d not spoken about my new notion of hawk medicine—not in a pharmaceutical meaning but in an Indian sense, of power that can infuse a mind or a beast or a bundle of collected sticks and feathers. I was hoping my journal pages would become a medicine bundle.

You may wish to account for all of this with some easy, rational explanation; I’ve tried a few myself, but always I return to a belief that the source of my work is not so much reason as something darker and less comprehended, something arising from dreamtime. For the long journey into the prairie that I was just beginning, that obscure medicine had somehow already taken on the form of hawkness. I’m not quite saying that this figure-hawk is supernatural but rather only suggesting a less conscious mind using an emblem to reach toward a vague awareness and push it to the surface where shallow reason can look it over. (Does this sound like self-deception, hallucination? Very well, let the strict rationalist label it that and pigeonhole the hawk.)

A couple of weeks ago, I was having even more trouble writing another chapter. Then the July heat broke and I opened the windows, a cool northwesterly blew through, ruffling my paper, and I was sitting before the unmarked, lined page, and two hours disappeared in staring and listening to the singing birds; invigorated by the coolness, now I couldn’t blame my trouble on the weather. Among the several different bird voices, I became aware that one came from a red-tailed hawk. I couldn’t see it but for some time heard its high rasping. It was circling close. During the next hour the blank page began to fill, words being called up, lured out, duped into revealing themselves: I, starving, hovered and dropped onto them as if they were plump voles. The next day I had the sketch drafted. I offer this as an illustration of hawk medicine, even if it’s nothing more than a longing conducive to useful delusion.

This week I’ve been hoping for another approach of hawk-radiance, but nothing comes, and I sit blunted. Have I become hooked on a talon-like voice, become its psychic prey?

Then very goddamn well, I say at last, maybe I can write around the goddamn problem: I advise myself to try again and this time speak only in names, in pictures—that’s the primitive method. (Have you ever taken a photograph of an aboriginal person and seen him become angry? People not yet completely seduced by European rationalism often believe something strong but beyond the comprehension of reason attaches itself to images and names.)

I am going only to name and limn hawkness as I have encountered it in the tall prairie, where its form and habits suit themselves so perfectly to the windy and open hills as to make it a familiar of the place. This is a little lexicon, arranged not alphabetically but according to the way I’ve come to see hawk-figure, which in this particular case is the northern harrier, Circus cyaneus. The first dozen entries are recognized names, the other twelve from my dreamtime hawking. (A suggestion: when you finish reading, go outside and find a living thing you do not know the name of and look at it closely and give it one of your own making; then it will become yours to carry into dreamtime because memory depends finally upon what we create for ourselves, and, until we become nomenclators of a place, we can never really enter it.)

So:

CIRCUS CYANEUS: freely translated, “circling blueness,” a Latin misnomer, for neither the males nor females are blue and their distinctive flight pattern is actually one of angles (see Zigzagger); but, understood even more freely, the name suggests an aerial circus of feathery acrobats (see Somersault hawk).

NORTHERN HARRIER: if the country is open, this slender bird may be found nearly anywhere in North America, although it usually isn’t any longer, and the Audubon Society has placed it on its Blue List (an early warning of endangered species); even so, in the Flint Hills it isn’t at all rare.

MARSH HAWK: an old moniker given by easterners because of the former abundance of the bird over grassy wetlands; pesticides and the draining of marshes have almost made the name another misnomer; today, “prairie hawk” would be better but that already belongs to another species.

BOG TROTTER: a description of some poetic resonance, albeit of little accuracy, for such an accomplished aerialist; if you want a trotter, look to the ostrich.

HEN HARRIER: a name used by English settlers; outweighed as she is by a barnyard chicken, an American female cyaneus hunts not so much leghorns as prairie chickens; incidentally, while both of these tallgrass wild birds nest on the ground, cupido takes to the air only when it must and cyaneus comes to earth only when it has to: the grouse a reluctant, sometime bird, the harrier hardly needing legs or feet.

FROG HAWK: if a harrier lives near a marsh it eats many amphibians; if it’s on the prairie it doesn’t; analog: Bostonians residing in Kansas are not commonly called bean eaters.

MOUSE HAWK: in rearing its five to eight nestlings, a harrier pair may catch a thousand mice and voles; but many kinds of hawks prey on mice; analog: to call the French “bread people” would mislead you about Italians or Spaniards; some farmers even call the bird “mouser” as if it were an old barnyard cat.

RABBIT HAWK: since a full-grown rabbit weighs more than a harrier, “bunny hawk” might be more accurate, but then, again, most raptors catch cottontails and hares.

SNAKE HAWK: nearly any bird of prey could be called this; conversely, several species of reptiles that hunt eggs and chicks of the ground-nesting cyaneus could be named “harrier snake.”

MOLE HAWK: it will eat a mole if it can find one above the ground; analog: the woodpecker as “peanut-butter bird.”

BLUE HAWK: for the assumed color of the adult male’s back; a birder who sees a northern harrier as blue has no need of colorized black-and-white movies.

WHITE-RUMPED HAWK: if you accept that birds indeed have rumps, an accurate name but of little elegance (would an Englishman want to be a “bleach-butted Briton”?); the white band, by the way, which the harrier almost flashes in its low and tilting flight, is diagnostic of the species.

Now, suggestions for renaming cyaneus:

SOMERSAULT HAWK: the nuptial flight of the male is a series of nosedives, often from several hundred feet down to within ten feet of the ground; one observer diagrammed it as a UUU seventy times; at the apex of each steeply bent crescent, the harrier will nearly stall before closing its wings, and then, in silence, turn head over tail, plummeting, head over tail again, still falling, only to swing upward at the last moment and barely clear the ground; sometimes also called “tumble hawk.”

SKYDANCER: a mated pair may fly together, arcing marvelously, one of them rolling over to fly upside down and glide along, talons to talons; also called “ecstasy hawk.”

OWL HAWK: with a facial disk of feathers that amplify sound, the nearly neckless harrier can find prey by listening almost as well as an owl; in this way, harriers seem a linking species between hawks and owls.

MORMON HAWK: the male, unlike other North American hawks, is often polygamous; there is evidence that more than two thirds of harrier hatchlings are females, which may account for the polygyny; circumspect travelers in Utah may wish to call it the “Solomon hawk.”

RIDGE RIDER: even though cyaneus is not a particularly big hawk, the female (larger than its mate) may have a four-foot wingspan that will keep it motionlessly aloft in the gentlest of drafts where she can fix her wings to let wind do the work; speaking of the effortless high flight a harrier occasionally engages in after eating, Audubon said, I have thought that it preferred this method of favoring digestion.

CLOUD NESTER: the high ratio of wing surface to body weight of a harrier gives it a flight that observers time and again describe as “buoyant”; although Audubon found its flight elegant, he wrote that it cannot be said to be either swift or strong; but it is well sustained; even if the bird usually prefers flying low to high, it spends half of each day airborne, turning winds into perches as if it could grip the currents, something most useful in a prairie where reconnaissance posts are few; buteos and eagles soar, harriers float; these aerial corks may also be called “wind bobbers.”

HANGMAN’S HAWK: viewed from below in certain lights, the contrast between the dark gray head and its lighter breast feathers gives the male the appearance of wearing a black hood.

BOMBARDIER HAWK: in their nuptial display, a pair will fly together, the female some distance below, and her mate will drop a caught rodent that she, flipping upside down, will catch neatly in her talons; when she begins building a nest on the ground or in a bush (the only North American hawk to do so) the male delivers sticks by flying over and dropping them; once she takes up brooding, he will drop food to her either on the nest or in an aerial exchange: these tactics help conceal the location of the vulnerable nest.

ZIGZAGGER: the harrier takes its prey by flying only a few feet above the grass, quartering an area back and forth, reconnoitering side to side, cutting diagonals as if loving the geometry of angles, holding its wings in a sharply upward dihedral (the reverse of the prairie grouse); upon seeing or hearing movement below, it halts suddenly as if it had hit an indiscernible wall, hovers, the long wings fanning and harrying (hence its common name) a ground beast into terrorized running and full exposure.

VIVE-LA-DIFFÉRENCE HAWK: the northern harrier is the only North American raptor exhibiting pronounced sexual dimorphism and dichromatism: the differences in size and color are so obvious that a booming prairie grouse will continue its performance or even attack a male harrier that approaches, but when a female hawk appears the grouse will freeze or flush wildly; she, one and a half times heavier than her mate, has a plumage dark and streaky like a March meadow, while he is the color of an overcast sky; although throughout most of the year both sexes spend about the same number of hours in the air, their different colorings match the element most important to survival of their kind.

INK DIPPER: moving to and fro repeatedly across the drafts, a male’s long, pointed wings tipped in black look like pens inscribing words on a foolscap of air as if he were amanuensis to the wind; the ancients, trying to read the future in the flight of birds, would surely have held this scrivener of a hawk sacred; sometimes also called “wind writer.”

SPIRITUS HAWK: to wind, the primal life force of the prairie, Circus cyaneus is the embodiment, the hot-blooded beast: token, totem, transmogrification.