Leather and Talons

I was forty-four years old last March, and until that week I had lived what my sister called a sensible life. Ski patrol paramedic, twelve seasons on the same mountain, a truck with good tires, a savings account I actually checked. I ate oatmeal. I replaced my boot liners every autumn whether they needed it or not. So when the winter sports conference in Turin got cancelled two days before it started, some forgotten pipe burst at the venue or something, I did not have a backup plan, because sensible men don't need backup plans, and that is exactly how I ended up sharing a ski patrol hut on a remote slope in the Italian Alps with Vernon, a falconer I'd known for three years and never once thought about the way I started thinking about him that week.

We had met at a conference in Innsbruck, back when I was forty-one, over late-night drinks in a hotel bar where neither of us knew anybody. He did birds of prey, education programs and pest control work mostly, and he talked about his goshawk the way other men talk about old girlfriends, with warmth and a little grief mixed in. We had kept in touch badly, a Christmas card, two phone calls, and then the cancelled conference dropped us both into the same hut because the local patrol chief owed me a favor and knew Vernon was stuck too.

The hut was functional in the way those places always are. A wood stove that smoked if you looked at it wrong, four bunks with thin mattresses, a big barn-style door at the back that separated the main room from a supply closet. Vernon had stashed his gear bag in that closet, which turned out to matter more than I could have guessed on the first night.

The snow came down thick and friendly, the kind that shuts everything down without hurting anybody, and by evening we had a fire going and a bottle of whiskey between us. Vernon was forty-six, broad in the shoulders, with hands that looked like they had done every job twice. He poured two fingers each and leaned back against the bunk frame with the satisfied air of a man who has nowhere to be.

"You know what your problem is, Louis?" he said, and I asked him what, because with Vernon you always did.

"You're too good at everything you do. It's boring. A man your age should have one skill that scares people."

I laughed and told him that scared people don't get rescued off mountains, and he waved that off like smoke. "Contest, then. One stunt each. Falconry against paramedic agility. Bragging rights only, nothing owed."

Now I say plainly that this was all a game, two grown men, forty-four and forty-six, drinking whiskey in a snowed-in hut, and nothing about it started as anything but a game. But the whiskey was good and the fire was warm and something in me, the part of me that eats oatmeal and checks its savings, stood up and stretched for the first time in years.

His stunt came first. He went out to the closet and came back with a heavy leather gauntlet and a whistle, and I swear he had somehow arranged the weather, though he swore later he hadn't. A friend's goshawk was being overwintered at a station two valleys over, and he couldn't fly a bird in a blizzard anyway, so what he did instead was talk me through the whole release sequence, hands and posture and the exact angle of the arm, and then he picked up a coin, tossed it spinning over his shoulder, and caught it behind his back in the gauntlet's cuff without turning around. He did it three times, dropping it only once, and the sound of that coin hitting leather, a soft smack like a bird landing, did something warm to the back of my neck that I didn't examine.

My stunt was the narrow crawl, a patrol trick where you go under a stretched rope on your forearms, boots and shoulders only, the way you'd slide under a crevasse lip. I did it clean, across the whole main room and back, and I came up breathing hard and pleased with myself, and Vernon clapped slowly like a judge who has already decided.

"Good. Very good. But mine was harder, and I'll tell you why. Mine took twenty years of hands. Yours took a Tuesday."

I argued, of course. We argued for a while, and I lost, partly because he was right and partly because losing felt, strangely, like being paid attention to. So Vernon poured us a short second round, set a jug of water between us, and said the words second round the way a man says dessert.

"Here's my idea," he said, and he got up and went into the supply closet, and I heard him digging around in that gear bag, and when he came back he was carrying leather. Straps, real falconry jesses, long soft strips of it, and the gauntlet, and a wide belt thing he called a wither strap, and he laid them all across the bunk as a man laying out a hand of cards.

"Falconry leather," he said, running his thumb along one strap. "Softest there is, once it's worked in. I've been thinking all evening about what the next game should be."

I remember asking him, carefully, what he had in mind, and he grinned at me, and the grin was the first honest thing in the whole game.

"Second round. New contest. Whoever can tie the other to that barn door first wins. And I'll say plainly what I'm after, Louis, so nobody gets tricked: I would like to tie you up, and I'd like it to be something you want too. That is the whole stunt. I've tied hawks to perches for half my life and I've never once lost a race to a knot."

The stove ticked. The snow came down. I looked at those straps for longer than a sensible man should look at anything, and I felt my own pulse in my throat like a bird I was trying not to startle.

"And if I lose the second round?" I asked.

"Then the straps go on you," Vernon said, easy as that, "if you're saying yes to that, and they come off the second you say. Nothing's owed either way. It's a game, not a debt. Just the leather and the door and whatever we both want after that, and we'll both be sober enough to mean it."

I will be honest about the moment, or as honest as I can be writing this, which is not very. There was a long stretch where I could have laughed it off, and we'd have finished the bottle and told the story at conferences for years, and that would have been the sensible ending, the oatmeal ending. And I sat there at forty-four years old with my good tires and my savings account and I heard myself say, "Deal. But you're going down, old man."

He stood up slow, the way he does, and took off his sweater, and under it he was built like the kind of work he does, solid and quiet. He picked up the gauntlet first and flexed his hand inside it, and the creak of that leather in a silent hut was honestly one of the best sounds I'd heard in a decade.

"Rules," he said, holding up one finger. "Count of three, no head starts. And you say the word slack if anything hurts or you want out, and everything stops, no arguments, no matter who's winning. That's how it works with birds and that's how it works with me."

I agreed to all of it, quicker than I meant to, and we set our glasses down on the bunk, and he counted, one, two, and on three I realized I had never once in my adult life wanted to lose at something this badly.

He got the first strap around my right wrist before I got a hand on him.

After that it went fast, the way avalanches go fast, one minute everything is standing and the next the whole slope has decided. He had my right wrist through the loop before I had finished my first lunge, and then my left, and he crossed them behind me so quick my shoulders barely had time to complain. I heard the leather creak as he drew the ends through, and I heard him breathe, steady and unhurried, as a man doing a job he has done ten thousand times. That was the part that got me, I think. Not the losing. The unhurried part.

"That's two," he said, stepping back to look at me like a farrier looks at a horse he has just shod. "You went left. You always go left. I remembered that from the crawl."

"I don't always go left."

"You did tonight," he said, and he turned me by the shoulder, gentle, the way you turn anything big that has already decided to be turned.

So there I was, forty-four years old, twelve seasons on the same mountain, a man who eats oatmeal and replaces his boot liners every autumn and checks his savings account like it owes him money, tied to my own barn door by a falconer I had known for three bad years of Christmas cards and two phone calls. And the strangest thing, the thing I have turned over maybe four hundred times since, is that it did not feel like losing. It felt like being handled by someone who knew exactly what he was doing and had decided, for reasons of his own, to do it to me.