The hawk circled overhead, lazy and unhurried. His wings caught idle rays of the sun, glinting gold, amber and bright cream. I made out his sharp beak and talons and thought he was looking for prey and wondered if it was me. Preposterous. Hawks hunted small game. Mice. Rabbits, maybe. But never people.

He took a slow pass in front of me, his eyes locked on mine. The wind from his wings brushed my cheeks and caused my hair to lightly furl and my heart skipped a beat. I recognized a like-minded soul, a kindred spirit, yet his boldness and closeness were unnerving.

I held out my arm hoping he would come to me. I must have been crazy. His talons would easily tear my arm to shreds. He landed and it was such a gentle alighting that I felt almost caressed. I did see a trickle of blood sprout from the softest part of my left arm where he roosted. An accident I was sure. Black eyes stared directly into my blue ones as he cocked his head then bent slightly toward me. His beak hung partly open and the serpentine tongue flicked once.

Tentatively and with a shaking hand I reached out and attempted to stroke his majestic head. Once. Twice. Three times. Then, before I knew it, two of my fingers were trapped in his mouth. Trapped, but unharmed as he stared me down.

At the same moment that he released my fingers I cast my eyes to the ground and shot my arm in the air. He flew. I knew I had been reckless, yet he had not hurt me, not really. With my hands shielding my eyes, I watched as he climbed back into the cloudless sky. From the corner of my eye, I watched my blood inch toward my elbow. Eventually, the wound would leave a small scar.

The next morning the hawk was waiting in the tree in front of my house. I could just make him out from my porch as the sun crested the golden hills behind him. He peered to one side then the other before lifting his wings and gliding to perch on the rail of the porch. He dropped a dead mouse at my feet then flew off. The mouse wasn’t dead after all and scurried into a bush as I gasped and jumped backward.

I watched for the hawk, I had come to think of it as my hawk, but how can one possess a living being? as I tended to my kitchen garden that morning. I might have heard his cry far off in the distance yet saw not a sign of him.

He came out of the sky at dusk and perched on the fence in the backyard when I brought out the table cloth to shake loose crumbs from it. Cocking his head and letting out a low call, he flew off again.

Three days went by before I saw him again.  He circled above me for a while before lighting on the ground beside me as I weeded my garden. Fear and joy gripped my chest and I did not reach out to him, but kept to my chore. He took two steps closer, his wing scarcely grazing my bare knee, head bowed. I dared once more. My hand slowly moved to his head. One. Two. Enough. He took to the air. I sat on my haunches, watching him, elated.

Two days later, as I hiked to the top of a hill behind my house, he followed me, appearing out of nowhere and gliding directly above me. A thread of kinetic energy pulsed between us. As I made it to the top he circled closer.

I saw a flat stump and sat down, pulling off my day pack and foraging for my canteen. The hawk let out a piercing shriek and bee-lined at me. I screamed and leapt to my feet, running then rolling as I tripped. I had just begun to trust him and he was attacking me. But he wasn’t. I heard the rattle before I saw the snake and my hawk was clutching it in his talons, crushing its skull with his powerful beak. The attack lasted less than three minutes before the snake lay on the ground bloody and ragged, meat exposed more than skin. The hawk seemed to smirk as he stood before his prey, then shot back into the sky. One long screech before he disappeared.

That night I put a raw chicken breast in a dish on the front porch. My thank you for saving my life. In the morning it had disappeared and the dish was in the bush where the mouse had fled.

The hawk didn’t come back for a week and I started to worry. I left out more chicken, but always found it the next day. Two separate nights passed where my eyes rarely closed as I listened for any sound that might indicate my friend had returned, a scratching on the porch, a soft squeal, but I was always wrong.

When he did return he simply came out of a cloud and delicately landed on my shoulder.  Plucking a strand of my hair into his beak, he flipped it onto his back then rested his head in the crook of my neck and I knew I loved him and I knew he loved me. He stayed with me all day as I worked outside tending to the garden, chopping wood and mending some broken rails in the backyard fence.

At dusk I went in the house and, on a whim, opened some windows. An invitation. When I went to the kitchen to wash dishes I found him perched on the window sill, watching me like a guardian. In the middle of the night, I spied him asleep on the dresser under the window.

In the morning he was gone but soon returned and from that day forward for months he rarely left me. When he did I knew it was to hunt.

It was after a hunt that he came back to me, his feathers in terrible disarray. It was mostly his right wing, but some on his chest and back, as well. Some were broken and a few, no more than a few, were missing, leaving bloody streaks. Along with all of that was a puncture wound on his head.

He was still as I did what I could to dress his wounds and clean him, but his eyes were angry and mean. As I wiped a drop of blood from his chest he dug a claw into my left arm exactly where my little white scar was. It was deliberate. I saw it in the flicker of his eyes. A trickle of my blood flowed from my wound and he rubbed his beak in it.

He was gone for three days after that and when he came back he was healed, though different.

We used to play a game in the backyard. I would tie a raw chicken to a thin rope and swing it over my head in wide circles. He would make some teasing passes before going in for the “kill.” That day, he dive- bombed the chicken immediately, savagely breaking the rope and ripping the chicken apart on the ground. Like he did to the snake. I turned, walked in the house, and closed all the windows. I cried for the loss, his as well as mine.

I wasn’t quite asleep that night when I heard the soft sound of a wing against my window. I leapt from my bed and opened it. He went to the familiar spot on the dresser where I had made a sort of nest and I crawled under my blankets feeling glad in my heart as I drifted to sleep.

There was a strange heaviness on my chest. I opened my eyes and the hawk plucked out my left one faster than I ever could have thought possible. I howled against the pain and backhanded him across the room into the adjacent wall. He dropped my eye. I considered picking it up and putting it back in, but there was no time. He flew at me, pecking and clawing at my head and arms as I struggled to free myself from my blankets and fend him off. With one hand, I grabbed him by the neck and squeezed as he snatched my thumb in his beak and broke it. Howling like a wild thing, I grasped my best friend in both my now mauled hands. Blood poured out of one socket and tears streamed from the other as I clamped my teeth down on his neck. Tiny bones were crushed and muscles torn loose under the assault and I tasted the warm nectar of his life slide into my mouth and down my throat. I retched, but kept my teeth clenched. He thrashed and tried to turn his head enough to gouge me with his beak again, but he couldn’t escape my grip. My tears fell in rivulets as I felt the hawk’s life leave him.

When I finally felt no more pulse or movement I spat the dead thing from my mouth and swept him to the floor. I made my way to the first aid kit in the bathroom. Using gauze and tape I patched the eye, ignoring the wounds to my face and arms. I grabbed my truck keys and high-tailed it to the hospital forty miles into town where they kept me for twenty-four hours.

When I got home I got my first good look at my bedroom. The wall by the bed and the one where I had flung the hawk were splattered with blood that had gone brown. My blanket was shredded and soaked in both his blood and mine, unsalvageable. The hawk lay stiff, covered in our blood, on the rag rug, still a smattering of his past glory refused to be ignored. My stomach lurched and I ran to the bathroom where I dry-heaved nothing into the toilet.

As I buried the hawk and my eye in the garden I wondered what had gone so horribly wrong. He was just a wild bird I reasoned. Any connection we had was only in my imagination. A thing like that can’t love. I continued to shovel dirt onto the grave long after the job was done. A speck circling in the sky cast a shadow on the ground in front of me. I quickly moved to the house, closed all my windows, and cleaned and oiled my shotgun.

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Elaine Zentner began as a correspondent for a national Buddhist magazine, World Tribune. She was honored to be one of the reporters covering the San Francisco/Sacramento, CA area. She went on to become Fiction Editor and Associate Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning college literary journal American River Review. Her work can be found in Piker’s Press, Short Fiction Break, and A Fable Online.

Photo: Pralea Vasile