A Profile in Courage

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                                      A Profile in Courage

The late sun finds a crack in the clouds to aim into a westbound windshield where the road cranks hard right at a hilltop. Last night at that curve an opossum (hereinafter possum) wandered into the road and today's  glare gives a glimpse of a large bird astride the remains.  An instinctive jerk of the wheel puts my car into the oncoming lane, at that moment vacant as I am able to report.  I pull off the road, needing a look at this strange, defiant chicken refusing to yield to traffic. 

I can tell you what I see, but I cannot describe the sadness.  The bird has a ragged wing, a crippled foot, and a tail the color of a faded fire truck. It struggles to hold down its meal with one functioning foot, to balance with one working wing as it tears at morsels of marsupial. A car climbs the hill. The driver reads the road and eases over.  Another, just behind, yanks her wheel at the last instant. The wrecked and famished hawk bends to the possum as if it has no choice, trusting somehow in a universal kindness, standing tall as cars pass but yielding not an inch. 

Car after truck passes the poignant scene. Drivers, bewildered and uncertain at the mayhem in the road, shake it off with quizzical shrugs, perhaps a frown of sympathy. But the outcome seems inevitable and I can not bear to be a witness.  I can't but recall that the last injured Red-tailed Hawk I tried to help treated me to a trip to the ER, blood spurting through a welding glove.   I have no glove today and hawk and possum could hardly have chosen a more parlous platform for their drama. There is no point in adding a human carcass.

So I leave, but the scene travels with me. No, the bird has no choice; a steep bank blocks its way off the road and it cannot fly.   No, I was right not to intervene because the bird’s chances, sparse on a hilltop curve, may be no better under the triage protocol of a resource-strapped raptor center.  And might it fly again, ever,  or soar only in Valhalla? 

Or can it fly? Desperation drove the lamed and gaunt raptor to the road kill, but the bird didn’t hitch hike to get there.  And there is a universal kindness that responds with an involuntary  wheel jerk to the courage and determination of another hunter badly behind in the race for life. In my hopes the bird drags its full crop and battered being to the low side of the road and launches, listing and lurching, for a perch to rest and digest.