Scott has the kind of fluid physicality that makes everything he does beautiful to watch. He changes the hawk’s jesses, checks there’s food in the pocket of his battered jacket, and we set out. The ground has a deep crust of snow. Everything is poised as if it might shake itself. There are woods here: thousands upon thousands of acres of white pine, of hemlock, spruce and oak. But that is not where we are going. We walk across what looks like a school playground. Yoder leaves Scott’s fist, flies up onto a children’s playframe. We clamber down a slope behind timber-lapped houses. The hawk follows. The air swallows sound, so that speaking into it your voice stops a foot in front of your face in a cloud of white breath. What are we doing here? I think dully. This is a town.
Skittering flakes of dislodged bark fall through thirty feet of air. A family waves from an upstairs window. We wave back. The hawk is laddering up a pine tree behind their backyard fence, hoisting itself skyward with leaps and hawkish flourishes. ‘Squirrel!’ shouts Scott, and I am knee-deep in snow, coughing, my jetlagged ears singing in the hush, attempting to follow what is happening above me. The brightness above is blank behind knots and spars of twigs and needles. The flight is the workings out of two creatures above me. Height, vantage, escape, evasion. The squirrel knows about redtails. They live in these woods. The redtail knows about squirrels, too, has hunted them in the wild before Scott trapped him earlier that fall. A thin branch bends and springs back as the squirrel leaps into the next tree, the hawk after it. We crane our necks up at the war above, playing out like a wildscreen The Enemy Below. The hawk twists, the squirrel makes another leap, is silhouetted black against the sky, legs outstretched, and then a blunt, black form hits it. It is the hawk. I hear the impact, see the awkward, parachuting fall through thirty feet of snowy, splintered air and they land heavily on the ground, and Scott is running in slow motion through deep snow, and when I get there the squirrel is dead, and the hawk is mantling over his prey, wings out, beak open. A thin stream of smoke climbs from his mouth. Blood has already melted a thin line through the snow and the hawk’s feet and feathers are powdered with a crumbly paste of snow and blood that resembles decorative sugar. The hawk looks up and about at his surroundings. A back yard, garages, a low fence. A barbecue heaped deep with snow. An inflatable Santa riding an inflatable Harley Davidson. Icicles hanging from Christmas eaves. Somewhere I can hear a television, and beyond that someone is singing ‘Happy Birthday’. I have never seen anything so fiercely wild and so familiar. How can it be here? How can the wild be here in this back-lot in the middle of a town, in the midst of home and community? These are the things I had flown from.
It was the wildest hunt I had ever seen. Sitting by the window staring out at the sliding river, I begin to wonder if home can be anywhere, just as the wild can be at its fiercest in a run of suburban back-lots, and a hawk might find a lookout perch on a children’s playframe more useful than one on the remotest pine. Maine has given me a family for Christmas and shown me a hawk can be part of it too. It’s shown me that you can reconcile the wild. You can bring it home with you.
It’s our last morning. Erin, Mum and I are walking along Parsons Beach, bracing ourselves against the wind. It is a bitter, salt cold day; we tread on frozen sand. Strings of seaducks fly far offshore, ragged lines over soaked slate baize. The waters under them are full of lobsters; Maine is famous for them; signs for lobster rolls hang everywhere across town. Erin’s dad had been a lobsterman once, and I’d gone out fishing with them years ago. Which is to say, I sat on the deck of their boat and watched as they hauled traps, measured, sorted and banded lobsters, rebaited the traps and set them overboard. They worked for hours while I sat there, unable to help, unable to do anything except watch. They were delighted I’d come out with them, and it was a wonderful day, but I felt guilty all the same: I was an English tourist out of her depth. Walking on the beach I remembered that boat-trip and felt uncomfortable as hell. I’d spent months out with Mabel on the hill. I’d seen the harvest come in, tractors harrowing slopes, stockmen turning sheep out to winter in the fields. And I’d not spoken to anyone. No one at all. I thought of the summer tourists here standing in packs to photograph the lobster boats coming in, or angling their cameras to catch the twisted light and shade on stacks of lobster traps on Cape Porpoise quay. Was I like that? I hadn’t meant to be a tourist with my hawk. It didn’t feel like tourism. But I sure as hell had avoided being part of the working world.