Atlanta Daily World

CHAPTER ONE

They say a hawk watch is where a man switches places with the hawk. It sounds innocent enough the first time you hear it - the way it sounded to me when my editors gave me this assignment.

"Do you good, Grant, to photograph hawks and eagles for a change. Get your mind off people."

All that was in a big mulberry and mustard-yellow room high above Rockefeller Plaza. I can still see the picture editor watching me from where he sat on the corner of his desk beneath the photographic murals. I liked the idea. For one thing, hawks have always had a sinister attraction for me. I don't mean I've studied them or even know anything about them. They just, somehow, appeal in a ruthless, unearthly way. I guess I was a little sour on the human animal. Months of doing picture stories of civilized men preying on each other, in large groups or as polished individuals, gets to you. Giving murder back to nature where it belongs seemed like a nice thought. So ...

... here I was, in a glassed-in box called a fire tower, jutting forty or fifty feet above the backbone of the mountain just to put us a little closer to the sun. They had said it was one of the best places for the hawk migration. Since I'm not one of these birdy people, I wouldn't know, but the lack of human beings and their nasty little ways, for the present at least, was refreshing.

Once every hour or two since noon a small breeze had found its way through the opened glass panels of the tower. Not enough to use for air, just the Indian Summer smell floating up, dusty-dry and tea-like. It wouldn't have been so bad if all day long there hadn't been this feeling of waiting. My Leica was ready on its tripod where I could cover anything coming at us from the north but, for some reason, we were seeing hardly any hawks. Red said it was the lack of wind. From what I'd got to know about Red since morning, I could say it wasn't rash conjecture.

Being shut up in here with another person wasn't my own idea but I couldn't have got here without him. He seemed all right, a quiet, big-boned six-foot angular guy about four years younger than I am - not over twenty-five - with crew-cut, red-orange hair. It grew all over him - at the open neck of his plaid wool shirt, on his wrists and on his shanks where his khaki pants never quite met the tops of his short Bass field boots. The slightly undershot jaw, straight nose and sensitive mouth gave him an almost classic profile but most of the time he had an expression of sunny, wide-open wonder and intense interest in what you were saying. With it all, he appeared to have a horror of going out on a limb and making any statement that might, in the next thirty years or so, mislead you and cause you to regret having taken his word for it. Which probably made him the most efficient game technician in West Virginia.

I reached for my binoculars lying on the topographic map mounted on the table. I focussed them on the foreshortened contours of our ridge, wishing something would happen. Earlier today I had found a ledge or spine of rocks, knife-edged narrow, a mile or more to the north of us. I studied them again. It was a stratum that would ordinarily be lying flat. These were shoved up nearly on end. From what I could see they dropped off sheer on either side. There was something fascinating about their bleached and jagged look like the bony dorsal fin of the mountain - the way a skeleton of a huge animal arouses your morbid curiosity.

I heard Red clear his throat behind me.

"It's nothing," he said. "I thought it was going to be a hawk but it's just a buzzard."

I swung my glasses back to the rocks up the ridge. Now, with a spot of sunlight on them, I got the odd impression part of them had moved. I brought the lens into sharper focus. There was something tan on one of the points. When it moved again I saw it was a man. His head seemed to be bare and in this light his hair looked white. If he was holding his hat I couldn't make it out.

"Spot something?" Red asked beside me.

"Just a man. On that narrow mass of rocks up to the north. He seems to be looking for something."

"Probably hawks," Red said.