Grosslittgen (Großlittgen), Germany, August 17th, 2008

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Rebecca and Steffi are doctors, working in Cologne. I met them in Guatemala in 2006 while I was on vacation. I took a trip to Europe in the summer of 2008 and planned a visit with them into my itinerary. It was nice to see them again. I stayed on Steffi’s couch for a few days, and since Rebecca had time off, we looked around Cologne and Dusseldorf together. Germany is usually far too expensive a country for me to visit, so it was nice to actually get to see some of it. When you see a country with local people it is the difference between looking at a house from the outside and being invited in.  We visited the sites, a few churches, the Gestapo museum, ate Berliner pastries, went to a Cologne store in Cologne, rubbed the nose of a weird statue, and they sang the 1980s song “99 Luftballons” in German, while we took a shortcut up a side street.

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We left Cologne one morning in Rebecca’s Volkswagen, down the highway and through hours of countryside to a part of Germany called Eifel to do some hiking in a trails system that goes through quiet woods and fields. After some debate between Steffi and Rebecca about where we were supposed to go, including a confused look at a guidebook and map, we started on our hike Our hike started in the small town of Grosslittgen. We went through woods, past clearings, and stopped in a large field for lunch, spread out a picnic blanket and watched the summer clouds.

 

As we were walking past a field, we saw a hawk limping. We asked each other what was wrong with it, was it hurt? We peered past a barbed wire fence while it hopped around. Rebecca was for capturing it and getting it to some sort of nature conservancy, Steffi thought nature should take its course. We were paralyzed into inaction by a group mentality, because once we started thinking as more than one person, we had to make a group decision.

 

They pulled out their cell phones and made calls. It took forever for them to get anyone on the line that could help. Good thing none of us were injured, they said, and shook their heads. Steffi again said we should let nature take its course, but Rebecca wanted to rescue it.

 

Someone on the line gave us the number of the nature preserve (or wildlife rehabilitation center) but no one answered. Before they gave the number, they said that they probably would not want to have the hawk (which the Germans call a Buzard) because they are not endangered. There were plenty of them.

 

Another hawk, off in the distance, flew back and forth just in front of the tree line. Was it the injured hawk’s mate?

 

“They mate for life,” Rebecca said.

 

I squinted and could barely make out its shape as it landed on a branch and watched. It was heartbreaking.

 

A large man with mid-length silver hair rode by on a huge, muscular horse. Both man and horse were giants, rumbling along the trail, throwing clods of earth and grass into the air. The chunks somersaulted stark against the sky, and the horse looked to move fast and slow at once. Steffi and Rebecca said hello to the man, who took no notice of them, looking straight ahead. I don’t know much German, but I could tell that they asked if he could help them and he completely ignored them, trotting past like we were not even there.

 

Rebecca and Steffi talked to each other a minute in German, they didn’t have to translate, I understood the gist of it. What if they were in real trouble or hurt? The man would have just blown through and not even helped or cared. It was bizarre.

 

Rebecca and I decided to capture the hawk. I wished that we had a box. One time when I was on one of the trails in the woods on the island in Maine, I met a kid carrying a little bird in a box. It had a broken wing, and being in the box seemed to calm it down while he took it to the vet.

 

Since we didn’t have a box, we took the picnic blanket to throw over it. The Germans have cool picnic blankets, plaid flannel on one side and aluminum colored material on the other. I made a mental note to buy a picnic blanket like that someday for myself. I still haven’t.

 

Getting through the barbed wire of the fence and into the field wasn’t easy, the barbs caught me on the way through, but on the other side I held the wire for Rebecca.

 

The hawk hopped away as we approached, so we came at it from different directions. The first capture was easy. I threw the blanket over it and caught it right away. Picking it up was an odd feeling, reminding me of the chickens that we owned when I was a kid, except that the hawk was much lighter that I would have imagined. It was like picking up a pile of air, hollow bones, and feathers. I had the blanket wrapped around it with its head sticking out, its shoulders hunched forward. I was delicate with it, worried I would hurt it. When we got to the barbed wire fence, Rebecca held the wire open and I gingerly moved through. I loosened my grip on the blanket and the hawk slipped out, hopping off. Before I could even get through the fence it was as far in the field as it had been when we started. Now that it knew what we were up to, it was even more cautious of us.

 

Our second attempt took strategy. The hawk hid in a low thicket of stinging nettles. Holding the blanket, I went through the weeds while Rebecca covered the other side. I was wearing bath sandals so the nettles stung my feet. I liked the honesty of these plants. They hurt right away, not like poison ivy, which waits until much later to get you. I pushed through the stinging bushes while the hawk limped and hid. With a quick lunge I covered it before it could hop again, this time making sure that the grip was a little tighter. Again, I felt the strange lightness of the bird, the bones, and the feathers. This time I got a good look at its eyes. It had a strange, grey, alien extra lid that moved sideways across the eye.

 

Now on our fourth time through the fence, the wire was easier to negotiate. On the other side they got on the phone a few more times while I held the hawk on the grass, trying to find the balance between letting it go and squeezing it. A trace of blood ran out of its mouth, thin and clear and red.

 

It reminded me of when I was a kid. One of our dogs, a black lab, got hit by a car, and then ran under a tall tree. Its claws tinkled across the asphalt, growing silent on the dirt by the side of the road. Like the hawk it also bled from its mouth, but its blood was frothy. As it lay on its side, we knew it was dying. My brothers and sister and I sat near it, huddled in a group, as if just by being together would help make it get up and walk again, healed as if nothing happened. It panted, slower and slower in the shade of the cedar. I used to climb that tree because the view from up there was beautiful. From the top I could see the marshes and the bend in the river. I would watch the ospreys dive into the water, coming away with fish. We waited at the base of the same tree, sitting with the dog until it died, its dark fur rising and falling until it stopped completely. I felt helpless.     

 

The Germans and I took the hawk to the road and flagged down a car, hoping that a local might have a better idea than the people on the phone. Unlike the horseman, the first car pulled over, but the driver acted a little drunk. He knew the local forester, though, and would go get him. They returned not very long after. The forester pulled a cardboard box from the trunk, and we put the hawk in it. He talked about how there were a lot of Buzards in the area so he knew the wildlife centers would not take it in and nurse it back to health. A dog in the back of his vehicle whined and struggled, wanting to get at the bird. Rebecca cried out as the dog almost escaped, paws clacking on the window as it tried to climb out, but the forester pushed it back in the car, mid-sentence, as he explained about the hawk.

 

When the forester examined the bird, I felt silly. He picked it up with no concern that it would bite him. He held it with ease and familiarity, turning it around in his grasp, moving its wings. They later told me that his German had a strange accent, but I couldn’t tell. He thought it had been hit by a car and had internal injuries. He said again that no one would want to rehabilitate it because there was a healthy population of them in the wild. I felt crushed. I imagined taking it back to Cologne so that Rebecca could feed it, letting it loose from a window of her apartment when it was healthy enough to fly. High above the buildings of the city it would soar, taking itself home by instinct to reunite with its mate, who would finally stop flying back and forth in front of the tree line at Grosslitgen. It was a childish and romantic notion that would never work. I might as well have been under the tree with the dying dog.

 

We opened the box. It hopped up on the edge of the cardboard, for a moment partially opening its wings, surprisingly large and beautiful when they spread out, mottled grey, white, and black. For just a moment I thought that it might fly, I wanted it to so badly, but it didn’t. As it raised itself on the edge of the box, but went nowhere, I felt powerless about the world. It hopped off and we had to drive it into a bush, where hopefully it could heal in safety. The forester said that it probably wouldn’t make it, but that we had to let nature take its course. The two locals drove off and soon we were alone together in a silent part of Germany, one hawk in a tree, another on the ground in the woods, the tracks of the indifferent horseman leading back from where we had come.

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