The Hawk, The Eagle, and Hard Winter Seasons
April 4, 2025
The rain keeps falling. I look out my office window and the far hill horizon is obscured in gray—I can see no further than the row of pines beyond the field. The daffodils along the nearer ditch bow their heads as if in mourning. (But really they are happy they are here, that is their secret.) The rain drums on the metal roof, then dribbles and splatters as it goes off the eaves. Everything is grey, but also everything is speaking of new life and coming spring, if you have eyes to see it.
I’m in a reflective mood this morning, thinking about life. Last night was a late night, and that contributes to a vague sense of being out of sorts. I gave a talk in an old barn converted into a coffee house. The coffee house makes quite the impression with its soaring vaulted ceiling, in memory heaped with hay bales. Now an open balcony supported by ancient wooden beams looks down on the ground floor of tables and chairs. I am not sure what impression I made as I shared a broken story about a difficult season. My hope was that I encouraged others. I think I did, at least a few of them.
Afterward as I drove home in the dark, I saw the flaws in my words better than I could make out the road I drove. It wasn’t regret precisely, more a feeling of my limitations. This was the first time for the talk so I tried to be kind to myself. Improvement always takes time.
The coming of April left a hard winter behind. Ensconced away beside a wood stove or under warm blankets, the mind can fail to measure such things—but the animals will tell you, if you listen. They know hardness.
When winter was running out in its last fading days, a redtail hawk began hunting the chickens. This is a chicken nightmare, the reason every one of them has it written into their blood and bones to run for cover at a glimpsed flash in the sky or a passing shadow. Death comes swiftly.
The first chicken was found splayed in the middle of the snowy yard, its head devoured. My initial thought was that it had been a weasel, as they are known to eat chicken heads. But I was puzzled because there were no tracks in the snow. What did we have—a ghost weasel? The next day the answer appeared when the boys saw a hawk buzzing the chicken yard—cutting low, back and forth. There are no tracks when the preadator does not walk.
The hawk would not leave. The bird moved from tree to tree, swooping over the chicken yard. Our rooster stood in the bramble and tried to pretend he was a brave defender, but he looked more like a doleful convict waiting for his inevitable execution. The hens hid.
I went out to make my presence known in the hope that it would drive the hawk away, but he only moved to a slightly more distant lurking point. When I made a count of the hens I realized one was missing. The little Phoenix hen was nowhere to be found. I looked up at the hawk, considering. The preadator was restless, almost agitated, as if it were trying to get to something. I was suspicious the hawk knew something that I didn’t. Running down a list of possibilites in my head, I went back inside to get a flashlight and there in the dark shadows under the chicken coop I found the little bird. Her body was pressed back in the far corner, dead.
It took a little work but I finally eased the body out. A large gashed sliced deep into the back of the neck, a fatal blow. She had fled from the strike in mad terror, scrambling for safety only to die there. Hawks are deadly hunters.
For the next two weeks or so I instructed the boys to keep the chickens locked up. The hawk was hungry, maybe even desperate, and would surely come back. When the weather began to improve with coming spring more sources of food became available and making a hard attempt at a chicken would not be so appealing.
On pinions they rise; wheeling, wheeling, they fly.
Over a month later a bald eagle killed a rabbit in the back yard near the lower garden. In my childhood eagles were almost a thing of legend. Now I can see them wheeling in the sky, most often in the river valley. Eagles prefer hunting the water so the rabbit kill—and especially a kill so very close to the house—was a sign of the eagle’s hard times.
A hard winter makes for hungry predators.
But the birds were not the only things looking to fill their bellies. I was also battling a rat infestation. Winter brings these creatures in also.
After a long war involving many methods (and no mercy), I was finally down to what I thought was the last and smartest rat. In these kind of drawn-out contests I start to imagine all sorts of nefarious and devilish cunning on the part of the rodent1. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had started laying traps for me. Instead, I was almost assaulted.
One dark morning I opened the basement door and was startled to see the final wanted rat down on the stair landing. Instantly, the rat sprinted up the stairs toward me. There are few things as effective at livening your morning and driving away the cobwebs of sleep as a rat sprinting up the stairs toward you.
The battle was on. The direct assault was alarming, but I was more alarmed by the idea that—rather than fling himself on me to extract vengance for his fallen comrades—the rat might attempt a dash past me through the door to wreak some kind of malicious havoc in the first floor. So rather than launch a counter-assualt I made a start toward slamming the door. The rat was faster and played me for a fool, making a sudden left turn off the stairs and into a basement hidey-hole.
Oh.
So I wasn’t being assaulted, but rather witnessing a mad dash for safety.
Winter brings on these rat invasions of the country house. Like a besieging army, they try to find every way into the warmth and stashes of food. I am still sore over how they pillaged my previous year’s dried corn harvest. Once I was convinced the last giant rodent was dead, I sealed off the holes that had been made in the foundation. I hope it will hold.
Today my mind wanders, making leaps. Winters can be hard, and those who must survive feel the sharp pains of hunger. With the talk I had given fresh in my mind, I connected the winter’s recent passing with that past hard season in my own life. It is true, there are other kinds of seasons in life besides those brought by the change in weather.
Our personal lives have seasons, and some of them can be hard like the hardness of a cold and hungry winter. Those seasons grind us down and seem to threaten us with the whisper of death, as no doubt the hawk and the eagle also heard, and the chickens, too.
In my own smallness and frailty I wish hard seasons didn’t exist. Isn’t that a human thing? But we can’t control the seasons—only rise up to live through the hard ones, look for the coming of spring.
Today, the rain slackens. The storm is passing. I have another talk to give. Maybe the second time I will do a little better.
You don’t even have to read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH to go down that path.