Birds Attack a Falcon

It happened on the boardwalk in Orillia, across from the train that became a failed restaurant and the ice cream stand for sad men. It was a sunny day and I was walking with a lady. In my hands I was carrying books too interesting to read, the kind you look after until you don't know where they came from, on the slim chance that at some moment in this gasp of life an opportunity to read them will appear. Around us there were business travelers and retirees and teenagers and people that own boats, walking the same direction or the opposite or sitting. Of a sudden, we pressed through the membrane of a calamity. Shadows went askew, the air became blotchy, people were walking faster or stopping or turning around or searching the trees, the sky, the lake. No one knew what was happening but we all felt it. Then I saw it: there was a falcon flying low over the water just beside us and it was being attacked by a dozen or two dozen smaller birds. They were swooping around above it en masse, several different species together, all noisy and frantic. As a group they kept the larger bird pressed down, effectively preventing it from getting above them. Every now and then three or four would dart down and create these explosions of bird terror, chaotic and vicious. The falcon had become like one of the great dumb suffering beasts, silently shaping its movements in long curves along flat planes in the air. As the drama unfolded, I realized that the falcon had a falconer, a man walking along the boardwalk with the special wrist perch, but the falcon was unable to return to him. It would slip into a tree, wait a while and try again, only to be driven back, unable to ascend or rest. Finally, one small, sharp bird went into a sustained frenzy, flitting wildly in the air above the falcon's back and stabbing its head and neck furiously. The falcon reeled in confusion. It was very disturbing. Everyone there wanted to see the falcon rise, turn and strike, heavily and decisively, ripping the small bird out of the air and snapping it in its claws, then rising to devour it in the higher sky, the colder air. Instead, this sad display, this upset, and I think what we really felt was scared.