Could I present my finger to the little beast, and still retain it? Yes, because the beak is just an eating tool, he said. Killing is done with the long talons. They were already large and lethal-looking on the chick. I felt like a scuba diver petting a baby shark.
It seems like common sense to attack prey from above, but the falconer said the goshawk flies straight at its prey. They have stubby wings for darting through pine forests. They can kill prey, such as jackrabbits or ducks, which outweighs them. One of the birder sites, that the Two Scamps told me about, said that goshawks are so protective of their nests that they will attack humans. Attila the Hun's helmet had a drawing of a goshawk on it.
Ahh, dear... I was in a romantic fog when I left the coffee shop to finish the bicycle ride. There is something aristocratic, medieval, politically incorrect, and irresistible about falconry.
It did bother me the way the falconer volunteered that he never wasted the meat harvested by the birds. Isn't that just an implicit guilt trip? What a bunch of nambie-pambies we've become! To say that it is permissible to hunt and kill only when you need the food is the same as arguing that people should only have sex when they literally intend on procreating.
There were a couple hills to conquer on the way home. Lately I've been riding with other cyclists and have been amazed to see the competitive instinct revive. There is something primal and savage about playing king-of-the-mountain with other cyclists. Just think of the climactic scene, Pickett's charge up Cemetery Ridge, in the movie, "Gettysburg."
Later that afternoon the dogs insisted on a run through their grassy field. Coffee Girl has turned into a rodent-killing machine, just as she was a grasshopper harvesting machine at an earlier age. She uses vertical leaps and bounds to land right on top of her unsuspecting prey. This has become a daily entertainment show on the south side of the RV park.
After observing her it seems strange to me how many times I've heard the old guilt-trip, "Only Man kills for sport." Have any of the people who buy that cliche ever owned a pet cat or dog?
On the way home the Peripatetic Poodle and I almost stepped on a half-grown rattlesnake. Fortunately it was motionless, even though it was 75 F. Once I tried to photograph a rattlesnake alongside a road, and a local yokel in a big pickup truck went out of his way to run it over, right in front of me. I would have understood if the snake had been in his yard, near children or pets.
Oh no, why did I have to have that thought? At the maintenance shed there was an assortment of gardening and digging tools. Tired of worrying about rattlers I resolved to kill that snake. I scrutinized the weapons, like a duelist.
First there was a pitchfork, but that seemed too rusticated. No rider of the purple sage out West wants to be a dirt-farmer or sodbuster. Next was a flat, squarish shovel; too prosaic and utilitarian, like something you would shovel coal with. And the balance was not pleasing to the touch. Most of the choices were the working tools of an agricultural peasant, not the noble weapons of a warrior-knight.
Eventually I settled for the shovel that had the longest handle, and headed back into the field to vanquish the rattlesnake. What a great moment for one of the climactic trumpet themes of Ennio Morricone, always played during the shootouts of spaghetti westerns. But the villain was gone. It had slithered back into the dry crunchy grasslands of the high lonesome desert, from whence it came.
What a fine day of playful reveries this has been, all due to a chance encounter with a coffee shop customer.
