Sunday, March 08, 2009
I live across the street from a fifty acre pasture, with a copse of douglas firs in the middle, and houses clustered at the northwest end. The land is contoured like the Palouse, to the degree that it would nearly be better for sheep, and is divided into a few fields with hotwire fences, cedar and barbed wire along our road.
I was out working today; a week or so ago, I took out two of three wild plum trees along the north fence. They were shading the neighbor’s garden, and the birds didn’t even eat the fruit!
They’ll be replaced by blue elderberries (we only have the red, poison kind in abundance around here), which, if I don’t manage to make jelly and wine out of them, will certainly be favored by waxwings and jays, and even those horrid, thrush-chasing robins. Now, there’s a pile of branches and brush in my yard. In a day or so, I’ll get to renting a chipper and turning the brush into mulch, but all the decent-sized wood I saved out – to deliver to, among others, a friend who put the word out a couple of months ago that he needed firewood – he got a supply, but needs it for next year. I was out there today, having cleaned out the back of the truck, cutting the long branches shorter so I could deliver them down the alley.
While I was standing there, having deposited a load of wood down at the mathematician's trailer, and at the editor's woodshed, and having put bar oil in the saw, an eagle came low over the neighbor’s house, and right past the truck and across the road, barely skimming above the barbed wire, and fifty feet later, a gentle lift above the perpendicular fence, with a twitch of the tail like a marsh hawk, across the pasture just a few feet off the ground.
For about four years, eagles have nested in the firs in the middle of the pasture, having certainly been enticed by the abundant rock doves who visit my birdfeeders. As the eagle skimmed across the road, I looked ahead to see what it might be preying upon, but there were no rabbits, just the cows, and he didn’t have his gear down, anyway. His flight was rather laconic and coasting, indeed, as a marsh hawk.
The cows have worried a section of the field at the crest of the slope into a bare basin two meters in diameter; the eagle was headed for this.
One of the cows along the fence over which the eagle had glided, and just up the hill a bit, saw the eagle moving over the grass, and as the eagle neared the basin, the cow had already begun to move, like a fat cop spilling his coffee and gathering headway.
The eagle landed, backfilling with its huge wings, and by now, the cow was nearly there, like a linebacker charging the quarterback, and two calves were even in pursuit.
The eagle looked up, and here was this cow bearing down on him, and I imagine it will always be fresh in the eagle’s mind, the memory of that treacherous sight, and the massive, glistening, foaming nostrils, and the brisket flapping from side to side, and into the air leaped our brave hero, the eagle, barely having avoided being trampled by a cow.
The calves arrived on the scene as the eagle flew south, and by now, the ten or so other cows were in on it and charging after the eagle as if it were several apples I had thrown, and then –
There was a cow, like there always is, the one far from the herd, nibbling grass that had some odd taste that only it favored, or just being a loner, or needing some quiet time, but you’ve seen them there, the cows, the lone ones away from the others, and this girl got in on the act, too.
She was far away from the eagle, and by the time she intersected the cows, the eagle would be in the forest, but our clever girl made a move in a flash, as if she were in the backfield covering a receiver, and made the move to intersect the eagle’s path, and she did, and the poor eagle, our national symbol, came this close to being mobbed and beset by misery and at the mercy of cows.
I never would have thought you could tell a story that had cows and eagles in it, a friend said later, when I told him the story.
It brought home to me, too, the importance of being outside. That’s where the miracles and ironies are happening, and you have to be out there to catch them in the act.
I'm glad I banded with the squirrels and the crows and their ilk, and join them when I can.
Later, it snowed.