Kickass and Carl's Hawk by Bill Stokes

Attribution: Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Bill Stokes

Kickass, the doorstop dog, naps as the keeper remembers the occasion of his Chinese friend Carl Lee and the red-tailed hawk with the broken wing.

The keeper happened upon the injured hawk on a morning pheasant hunt and wrapped it in his jacket for transportation to Carl who was into falconry as a hobby. In Carl’s garage the hawk managed to sink its talons into Carl’s hand with a bloody vice-like grip that required the keeper to use needle-nose pliers to free Carl one talon at a time.

From that painful start, Carl treated and fed the hawk for weeks until its wing healed, and one morning the keeper joined Carl for a release of the beautiful bird on the outskirts of Madison. As those events always go, it was thrilling and satisfying and the keeper remembers shaking Carl’s hand, likely the one that carried the talon wounds.

Carl was recognized by the keeper’s kids for his “thousand-year-old eggs,” at deer hunt gatherings, but the keeper will always remember him for the stoic way he suffered the painful “handshake” with the redtail and then became its rescuer and friend.

As a former official in the Chinese government, it is too bad Carl is not around to lend some class to the current US-China conflab. As the Carl story is told to Phyllis, the keeper will include speculation that he might also be currently useful with his needle-nose pliers.