The Falcon's Nest
I
‘LIVE dangerously, ’ wrote poor Robert Louis Stevenson from his deathbed. It is a good motto — especially for corpulent, middle-aged men. Once let them settle down to a sedentary life and they are doomed. Before long they will be playing bridge of a Saturday afternoon and wearing galoshes when it rains. Beyond that loom up dieting, flannel bands, and the grave.
Wherefore, struggling against the encroachments of age and the blandishments of the flesh, I consort, whenever I can, with collectors, who, my experience has shown me, are among the few real adventurers still left in this country. There is my friend the Artist, for example, who takes me for long walks through the loneliest parts of the Barrens. Whenever he comes to an old house, he goes in, ostensibly for a drink of water. Once inside, he proceeds to bargain for bits of lustre ware, old bottles, pewter platters, and similar treasure. At the end of the day, waterlogged but happy, he comes home laden down with loot.
Another friend collects fresh-water pearls. Only recently, one morning before breakfast — but I have promised not to tell.
Then there are the botanists who drag me through bogs and up mountains after orchids. What happy days we have had among those nymphs fashioned from sun and snow and dew. Arethusa and Calypso and those with more sinister names, Calopogon and Pogonia, to say nothing of Tipularia, the crane-fly, and those lovely, lonely fringed orchids, purple, yellow, and white, or the still lovelier lady-slippers, ladies’-tresses, and whippoorwill shoes, in two sizes.
Of them all, however, I think the oölogists are the most interesting. In public those egg collectors pose as bankers, merchants, lawyers, and similar everyday individuals. In private they have adventures which would make the life of the average pirate or strike breaker seem drab and commonplace. Personally I collect nothing except information and little adventures and the joys of good fellowship and far journeyings, and this is probably why these experts tolerate me on their trips, for there are no folk more jealous of their secrets than oölogists. Wherefore when, in April 1925, three collectors of birds’ eggs, with whom I have forgathered for many years, invited me to go with them on a search for duck hawks’ nests, I accepted promptly.
That sky pirate, the duck hawk, the peregrine falcon of the Old World, who was ranked as an earl among his kind by the old hawkers, is one of the speed kings of the sky. A green-winged teal, a canvasback duck, or a redhead can fly well over a mile a minute, but the peregrine overtakes them all with ease and kills his victim with one blow of his great yellow knuckles. Invariably these falcons nest on the most inaccessible cliffs they can conveniently find, and their red eggs are among the most prized trophies of an oölogist’s collection.
That night, enlivened by one of the finest dinners ever served on the North American continent, and inveigled by false and flattering words, I agreed to go down the cliff in case we found a nest — a promise which I was to regret later. After dinner the Collector showed us his garden. In spite of its being in the heart of New York City, and about the size of a large pocket handkerchief, some twenty different birds had visited it during the past spring, including a hermit thrush, an olivebacked thrush, a fox sparrow, a myrtle warbler, a white-eyed vireo, and, rarest of all, a cerulean warbler, a bird which few bird-lovers, indeed, ever see.
That evening we spent in examining and admiring our host’s collection of eggs, one of the finest in the United States. There are in North America some twelve hundred and fifty species and subspecies of birds catalogued by ornithologists; of these my friend has collected some eleven hundred and sixty and has highly resolved to live until he secures the last ninety.
Apropos of this praiseworthy resolution, I told him the story of Jacob Quiggle, which I once heard while searching for the nest of a northern raven among the icy hills of Northern Pennsylvania.
Jacob was a bear hunter of renown, whose great ambition was to reach the century mark in bearhood before he died. In his ninety-ninth year, while out hunting in the late fall, he encountered a red bear, a rare color variant of the ordinary black bear. He missed his first shot, and his dogs took up the trail. Toward night Jacob denned the bear in a cave far back in the mountains. By that time the old man was so exhausted that he decided to go home and rouse some of his sons or grandsons to help him, leaving the dogs, tied to trees, on guard around the cave. When he reached home, in the middle of the night, none of his sons, who were all well over seventy, would consider the trip. His grandsons likewise were too decrepit, and it was not until the middle of the next morning that he could persuade anyone to go back with him. When they at last reached the cave, the bear had come out, killed the dogs, who were unable to escape, gone off over the mountains, and was never overtaken. The exposure and the disappointment proved too much for Jacob and he passed away without reaching the century mark either in years or in bears.
The Collector was much impressed by the story and promised me that he would not rely upon his children, his grandchildren, or even his great-grandchildren to complete his collection.
Among the high lights of his collection were such treasures as the egg of a great auk, that extinct bird of whose eggs only a few are now known to be extant, a knot, which in spite of its name is a water bird, besides another egg, about as rare as that of a roc, which I must not mention because its possession is prohibited by law. All thorough-paced oölogists, however, will know the one to which I refer.
II
Early the next morning, dressed in khaki, we were driven to the Dykeman Street Ferry, three as disreputable ragamuffins as ever desecrated the interior of a limousine. That car was our last gesture of civilization. On the other side we met the Naturalist and did the rest of our journey in a flivver, and ate and slept when and where we could.
Our first stopping place was at a point where a great tongue of rock juts out over a five-hundred-foot cliff. Halfway down, and directly beneath the promontory, is a ledge where every year a pair of duck hawks nest. To-day there were no signs of them. Moreover, anyone let down from the point would still be swinging twenty feet outside of the nest when he reached the level of the ledge where it was situated. The Collector explained to me carefully that if he had a rope long enough to reach the ground I could hold on to it while he lowered me by another rope, and the Naturalist could stand at the foot of the cliff and swing me in toward the ledge. It did not sound very practical to me and, as I peered cautiously over the edge and eyed the sheer drop of half a thousand feet, I firmly resolved that if the time ever came to visit that nest I would be the one who stood on the ground below and jiggled the rope.
As we sped past those wide, calm stretches of the Hudson which the Dutch have named Tappaan Zee, Eagle Mountain showed gentian-blue in the distance and as we came nearer seemed covered with rose-red mist from the blossoming maple trees. In the woods through which we passed on our way to the cliff, a ruffed grouse boomed up from beneath our feet, and everywhere showed the frail, wind-blown blossoms of the bloodroot, with their snowy petals and hearts of gold. I dug up a bit of the root like a branch of coral, and when I broke it drops of blood fell from it like that which oozed from under Anemone’s frightened fingers when she plucked the flower which sprang from Hyacinthus’s grave.
A dead stub close to the edge of the cliff marked the nesting site of a pair of peregrines, and holding on to this we peered over the precipice. Thirty feet below, on a ledge of rock, lay a blue pigeon with his head torn off and his azure feathers strewn all about, but there was no sign of any nest. Thinking that the hawks’ home might be in some crevice not visible from where we stood, I managed to clamber down a chimney of rock to the ledge. Directly beneath me the river stretched in sheets of turquoise and sapphire, and I could see far along the sheer side of the cliff on either hand, but could catch no glimpse of the fierce falcons anywhere.
Deciding to abandon the Hudson in favor of the Delaware, we shaped our course northwest and drove for hour after hour through a wild country, steering our course by the sun and disregarding roads and maps and signs. All about us were the colors of early spring, the peachblow of the swamp maples and the hyacinth blue and apple green of the distant hills, while along every brook showed the wine yellow of the twigs of the greening willows. Once we stopped and hunted for a woodcock’s nest in a wet meadow full of thickets, but Philohela either was not there or was brooding her four beautiful violet and gray eggs too closely to be found.
Toward the end of the afternoon we came to a stretch of wooded bluffs towering half a thousand feet above the Delaware, a much swifter and smaller stream than the wide and placid Hudson which we had left in the morning. As we skirted the edge of the cliffs, suddenly we saw a duck hawk wheel up from the rocks and disappear behind the tree tops on stiff and steely wings.
Leaving the car beside the road, we all scrambled out and scattered to hunt along the cliff for some sign of a nest. Halfway up, a wide shelf of rock extended the whole length of the bluff. After many unsuccessful attempts I finally succeeded in reaching this ledge by using a tall hemlock as a ladder, and explored it from end to end. There were many traces of the falcons, in the shape of the gray pellets which hawks, like owls, disgorge, and here and there were scattered feathers of flickers, grackles, and blue jays, but I could find no trace of any nest.
Finally, following the ledge, I came to Hawk Nest Hill, a great boss of rock jutting out from the cliff. Below this knob, and separated from it by a narrow chasm, was Devil’s Pulpit, a round rock some five feet across, with a sheer drop into space from its farther side of fully five hundred feet. It was not a difficult place to reach, although one had to be careful not to jump too far, and I sat for some time in his Satanic majesty’s rostrum, dangling my feet into space and watching the river wind below me like a ribbon of burnished silver.
That night we stayed at an old tavern in Milford, where a delectable dinner and much good talk made us forget all the fatigues and disappointments of the day.
The next morning, the fifth of April, began with a temperature exactly at freezing point, while a wind that blew out of nowhere roared among the hills that stretched away before us under an ice-blue sky. Our road was bordered by great black-walnut and shagbark hickory trees planted by some thrifty landowner a hundred years dead, whose good works live after him. In front of us a little lake gleamed like a huge sapphire, while on our right-towered a tremendous cliff with sheer sides too steep to be scaled.
Only at one point was there a gap in the ramparts, and up to that I toiled, digging my heels into slanting, slippery shale, and dragging myself up yard by yard by clinging to the underbrush and the chestnut oaks which covered the hillside. At last I reached the top of the cliff and saw field after field of farms stretch away before me in green squares, like some giant checkerboard, bordered in the distance by the old silver of the winding river. A mourning cloak butterfly drifted by, that first butterfly of the year, who wears a winered cloak bordered with cream and turquoise blue. Near the edge of the precipice I came upon a clump of prickly pear, the only species of cactus growing in our Eastern states, and it seemed strange to find that tropical plant so far to the north on a ledge of rock.
The bare cliff had a terrible beauty all its own. There were no trees or bushes to break the effect of its sheer drop. At one point I walked out on a great tongue of rock, with naked space on three sides of me, and found myself unconsciously digging my heels into the shaly soil even when I was some distance from the edge. It was an ideal place for duck hawks, but the perverse birds were not there.
From that cliff we journeyed on through the Delaware Watergap and explored in vain one rocky fastness after another, until after a long succession of hawkless cliffs we found ourselves back again at the Dykeman Street Ferry, from which we had started two days before.
III
Just as we were about to cross, the Collector suddenly remembered a spot not far from the Ferry where years before a pair of duck hawks had set up housekeeping, and insisted upon driving there. It did not seem probable to the rest of us that, after unsuccessfully exploring the wilder cliffs for two hundred miles around, we should find so rare a bird nesting just outside of New York City, but we were overborne by the enthusiasm of the Collector. Swinging the car into a disused road which ran along the edge of the cliff, he motored us to the spot he had in mind, and a few moments later we were all standing on a little point of rock which thrust itself over the edge of the Palisades, clinging to the branches of a stout dogwood tree which grew at the very edge of the precipice.
From the wet meadows behind us the high, clear notes of the first hylas of the year sounded like jangled silver bells, and the deep purple and misty violet of the hills across the river were laced with silver and rose where white birches and red maples showed.
The sky was full of fat, fleecy clouds, and in the far distance a feather of smoke curled up from a passing train, while the many-windowed prison at Sing Sing showed against the lavenderbrown trees like some squat yellow toad. Hundreds of feet below us a gang of men working on the road looked, from where we stood, no larger than ants. At our feet were the violet and green leaves of hepaticas, with here and there a six-petaled flower that seemed made of pale porcelain. From the cold sky above came down the caw of a passing crow, while behind us a northern chickadee gave his cheery call and was answered from the edge of the cliff by a phœbe perched with tilting tail on a bush.
Suddenly the Collector gripped my arm and pointed to the cliff, his face shining like the sun. Seventy-five feet down was a zigzag ledge some two feet wide. It sloped upward, and at one point, where a spur of rock jutted out, narrowed to less than a foot in breadth, Beyond that point, in a wide sloping niche in the face of the cliff, sat a female duck hawk. She was not more than a hundred feet away, and through our field glasses we could see the hazelbrown iris of her fierce eyes, her dark brown, toothed beak, hooked like a parrot’s, with the under mandible showing like a broken rain spout, and her enormous lemon-yellow feet, which made Audubon christen her clan the ‘big-footed hawks.’
Catching sight of us, she started up and stood for a moment, a fierce, imperious figure, the curved markings beside her beak looking like a curling black moustache. Then she launched herself into the air, giving a call like the creaking of a rusty pump or the cackling of a hoarse guinea fowl. As she left the ledge, four red eggs showed plainly in the little hollow scooped in the dry earth, which was all the nest she had. The Collector was much relieved at the sight, for duck hawks are temperamental birds. Some of them lay as early as April 2, or even in March, while others begin their family cares as late as April 28.
As I stared down the depths before me I realized that I had been a trifle hasty in agreeing to go down that cliff. I weigh one hundred and ninety pounds. It might strain my friends severely to lower and hoist so great a weight. Then too, owing to inexperience, I might fall off the ledge and break a valuable set of duck-hawk eggs. Moreover, as I stared down that cliff I felt that I must have eaten something which disagreed with me.
None of these perfectly valid reasons had any effect whatever upon my friends. Before I could think up any better ones they had spread a blanket over the edge of the cliff above the nest to keep the rope from cutting, and had tied the hauling and guide ropes around a small white-oak tree some distance from the edge. The guide rope was to be gripped by me to lessen the weight on the hauling rope, which was to go around me just under my arms in a bowline, that knot which will neither tighten nor slip.
There was some discussion as to whether what the Collector tied was a real bowline.
‘You can tell as soon as you start,’ said the Banker. ‘If it unties, it ain’t.’
I decided the argument by retying that knot myself painstakingly, not to say meticulously. Then I raised another question, as to whether the hauling rope was perfectly sound.
‘It’s never broken yet, ’ asserted the Collector reassuringly.
By this time I knew exactly how a condemned man feels just before the drop falls. Taking a turn of the hauling rope around his arms, the Banker sank his heels deep into the soft earth and announced that he was all set for the descent — which was more than I was.
Now the Banker is one of my best friends, but he leads a sedentary life (except during the nesting season), and it did not seem to me that he was the man for the job. In fact I felt strongly that what was needed on that rope was a flock of large, powerful young athletes. The Collector, as an expert, however, assured me that I should unconsciously do so much climbing myself on the guide rope that even a middleaged banker would be enough to lower me and bring me back safely, and promised that he and the Naturalist would lend a hand if it became necessary.
As they all seemed to feel that there was no possible reason for my delaying further, I gripped the guide rope, shut my eyes, and backed off the cliff. In another moment I was swinging over the six hundred feet of atmosphere which lay between me and the Hudson Boulevard. Immediately I felt that I had made a hideous mistake — but there was no returning. When I opened my eyes I could see far, far below me the tiny black figures of the laborers on the boulevard, who had stopped their work and gathered there to gaze up at me, and I reflected that if I fell upon that gawking crowd, who ought to be attending to their business, it would be their own fault.
Thirty feet down, there was an ominous cackle in the air just over my head, and out of a corner of my eye I could see the duck hawk bearing down upon me, her hooked beak half open and her black talons outstretched. A peregrine falcon will not actually attack a man, but I had an awful fear that this bird intended to make an exception in my favor. Fortunately, however, just when I expected to feel her talons in the back of my neck she veered off and never thereafter came so close.
A moment later I forgot all about her, as a stone about the size of my fist buzzed past my head like a bit of shrapnel and went on down in a long parabola to the ground below. I shouted up a warning, and a head was cautiously thrust over the edge of the cliff and the Collector called down apologetically that it was an accident. I found afterward that the Banker, while trying for a better footing, had dislodged the stone, which rolled over the edge before he could stop it. At the time, I remember, I reflected bitterly that if the stone had struck my head it would have made very little difference to me whether it was an accident or not. Then, as I went on down, the dark memory came to me of a collector whom we had all known, who had tried to reach a duck hawk’s nest alone and had been struck by a dislodged stone, and whose shattered body was found days afterward at the foot of the cliff.
All further forebodings were suddenly ended by my feet landing on the ledge below. As the cliff slanted in, so that I could not see my friends after I had once started, we had arranged a simple code of signals. One jerk on the guide rope meant to lower, two to raise, and three to pull up. I gave a single tug of the rope as agreed upon, and it was instantly slackened so that I could walk along the narrow shelf, which gave me the feeling of having no support at all, especially as I had to let go of the guide rope in order to reach the nest.
Then ensued one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. I had to sidle along that ledge, with the cliff on one side and a sheer drop of over five hundred feet on the other. The naked space which yawned beside me made me gasp as if I had suddenly been plunged into ice water. Of course I was in no real danger, for the rope would save me if I slipped, yet the horror of a great height is something which cannot be reasoned away.
The worst was yet to come. When I reached the point where the spur of rock jutted out from the face of the cliff, the ledge narrowed so that it was necessary to lean out into space, clinging to the rope, edge around the rock, and then crawl up the inclined ledge like a tree toad, holding on by the pressure of my palms against the rock.
I finally reached the nest in safety and carefully stored the eggs in a box, filled with cotton, which I had brought with me. They were an extraordinary set, each one slightly differing in color from the others. One was blood-brown, another mahogany-red, another rosewood, and the fourth terra cotta.
When, after another hair-raising journey, I came back to the point from which I had started, I found that the guide rope had blown away from the ledge and caught on a chimney of rock some distance above me, up which I had to scramble in order to loosen it.
At last, however, I gave the signal to be hoisted up and began to rise into space. At first I helped the Banker by climbing up the guide rope hand over hand, but ten feet of that was all that my wind would allow, and I sagged back, a dead weight upon the hauling rope. This sudden increase of his burden evidently caught the Banker unawares, for he let the rope slip some distance. Measured by space and time the drop was probably inconsiderable, but the intensity of sensation produced, if you leave it to me, involved several million foot-pounds. Then, in accordance with his promise, the Collector came to the Banker’s assistance, and with exasperating slowness the two of them at last landed my breathless body safe and more or less sound upon the sunny bank at the top of the cliff.
My last memory of that day was the sight of the duck hawk, black against the blue, as she swooped down out of the sky toward her eyrie. The Collector, from the depths of his experience with these falcons, assured me that she would proceed to lay another clutch of eggs in the same nest, and I highly resolved that, so far as I was concerned, they should remain undisturbed.