Arapaho

by Gary Hoffman

Norm Riddle raised his leather-gloved hand.  Arapaho, his huge Harris hawk, squatted down, spread his wings, and launched himself towards the top of a huge white oak tree at the edge of the field.  Arapaho watched Norm.  With just a slight twist of his wrist, the bird was sailing back towards Norm.  Norm was not his master.  He was an “assistant” to the bird.  The hawk was never tamed.  He simply stuck around for the food Norm provided him.

Arapaho landed on Norm’s gloved hand, and Norm immediately fed him a chunk of raw meat.  “Good boy.”  Norm slipped a small blinding hood over the bird’s head and walked a little further for the next exercise.  Training his hawk was a solitary and time consuming pastime for Norm.

Norm himself lived a solitary existence.  It wasn’t necessarily a lifestyle he might have chosen, but it was one that attached itself to him like a leech.  Norman’s parents were killed in a car accident when he was just five years old.  None of his relatives seemed to want to raise him, so he was placed in foster homes until he was eighteen.  During his thirteen years of foster care, he had been in twenty-five different homes.  The reasons were many and varied, but that didn’t matter.  What mattered was that he was shuffled around so much.

Even now, three weeks before his thirty-first birthday, he had no close friends.  His main contact with other people was at his job.  Since leaving his last foster home, he had tried dating a few of the women he met at work, but nothing seemed to work out.  The next Monday after their date, there seemed to be lots of snickering and joking around the office.  He was not included in it, but he was sure he was the brunt of it.  These Mondays usually made him wait a year or more before he asked anyone out again.

The last woman he had dated was Ellen.  He really knew nothing about her before they went out, but he found out more about her than he wanted to know when their date was almost over.  Ellen had invited him into her apartment for a nightcap and then tried to seduce him.  Norm knew what was going on, but since he had never been in that position before, he panicked.  He made a fumbling exit from her place.  The next day, several men in the office wanted to know what the hell was wrong with him.  Apparently, Ellen had told everyone about his ineptness.  He became Weird Norm after that.

Norm walked several hundred feet through the field until he came to a plowed area on the east end.  The field was full of watermelons.  He was ready for his latest test with Arapaho.  He slipped the hood off the hawk and held his hand in the air.  The bird headed for the tree tops.  As soon as he landed, Norm held both of his hands in the air.  The hawk left the branch and began soaring around the field. 

The excitement was building for Norm.  He had spent many weeks in Vermont training Arapaho, who was larger than most Harris hawks.  He had a wing spread of forty-four inches and stood almost twenty inches tall.  Norm had spent several thousand dollars on lessons and then on the bird.  The equipment needed to hunt with him cost over a thousand dollars.  To begin with, he wasn’t sure what he was ever going to do with Arapaho, but that didn’t matter.  He loved the bird.  He loved working with it.  He had something no one else had.  No one at the dorky office even knew he worked with raptors.  He smiled as he watched Arapaho riding the cool upper air and scanning the ground below. 

Norm took a laser pointer from his jacket pocket.  He held it against his hand when he turned it on.  He then pointed it on the target: the red dot glowed on the side of one of the watermelons.  He held it steady and glanced up to the sky.  Arapaho had folded his wings and was making a diving descent towards the red dot.  The watermelon exploded when he hit it.  Green rind and red watermelon meat was flying everywhere.  His eight razor sharp talons cut through everything in their path.  As he always did when striking a prey, he covered the watermelon with his wings to keep it from escaping. 

Norm took a silver whistle from his pocket and gave a blast on it. Arapaho rose up and flew straight back to him.  He got another nice piece of raw meat from Norm.  “Good boy.”  Norm slipped the chocolate brown colored hood back over his head. He stroked the bird’s back.  “We’ll show them old weird Norm, won’t we boy?”

* * *

Two days later, Norm did something he had only done three other times in the eight years he worked at International Computer Products.  He took a sick day.  Norm spent the day getting Arapaho ready for his performance.  One thing Norm had to do was weigh Arapaho.  If the bird weighed too much, it meant it had eaten too much food and wouldn’t be hungry.  He needed to be hungry to perform well.  He might even fly away if he didn’t need to come back to Norm for food.  Norm felt bad, but only fed the bird about a third of what he usually did.  He wanted his bird eager to do anything he was called on to do.

Norm’s office was located in an industrial park.  In the afternoon of his sick day, he was sitting in an undeveloped lot close to the building that served as a day care center for the entire park.   Arapaho perched on his hand as Norm waited for Ellen to come out of the office.  He had to use binoculars to see his office door.  When the first person came from the office, he raised his hand to help launch Arapaho into the air.  The bird landed on the roof of the day care.  Norm immediately raised both of his hands into the air.  Arapaho responded by springing upward and climbing to a soaring height. 

Norm kept his eyes moving from Arapaho to the front door.  He turned the laser pointer on, but kept his thumb over the front of it.  He would make sure no one ever wanted to go out with Ellen again.  Arapaho’s talons would scar her face so no one would want her.  He had debated about shining his laser at her throat so the bird would take out her carotid artery and kill her, but decided her living with a scarred face would be better.  He figured everyone would be too busy taking care of Ellen to see where the bird made its escape, and even if someone saw the bird, they would just think he went back to the woods.   He and Arapaho would be long gone by the time anyone figured out what had happened.  Arapaho was the perfect hit and run weapon.

While Norm was engrossed in his plan, two children came out of the day care center, heading towards their parent’s car.  “Hey, look,” one of them said to the other.  “He’s got one of those lasers, too.  Knock him down before he gets us.”  The other child took out his own laser pointer and aimed it at Norm’s head.  They loved to play the “laser tag” game. 

Copyright ©2006  Gary R. Hoffman    All Rights Reserved