Mercedes Lackey - Anthology

 
          
RAPTORS.
Birds of prey.
Everyone
gets a different mental picture when they think of birds of prey—birds who make
their livings as predators, the top of the food chain. Some immediately picture
the American bald eagle, the symbol of the
United States
, without realizing that the bald eagle is
more often a fisher than a hunter, which is why they are most often found near
large bodies of water. Some think of babies being carried off (not in recorded
history) or savage golden eagles preying on lambs (unlikely—they are more
likely to be taking advantage of a lamb found already dead; birds of prey
rarely attack anything too big to carry off). Some imagine noble thoughts going
on behind those enormous, keen eyes; others, even in this day and age, see a
"varmint," a creature that attacks a farmer's animals and competes
for hunting resources, and should be shot on sight.

 
          
Most
are at least partly or completely wrong in what they imagine.

 
          
As
a licensed raptor rehabber, I know birds of prey personally; sometimes very
personally, as a great horned owl puts her talon through my Kevlar-lined
welding glove and into my hand. . . .

 
          
There
are no noble thoughts going on in those brains. Real raptors have relatively
small brains, most of which is composed of visual cortex with the rest mostly
hard-wired with hunting skills. That doesn't leave a lot of room for social
behavior. I once read a passage in a romance novel describing a lady's falcon
perched in a tree above her, watching protectively over her, and nearly became
hysterical with laughter. No falcon in my acquaintance is going to perch in a
tree, protectively or otherwise, if left to her own devices.

 
          
Turn
your back on her, and she will be out of there without a backward glance—which
is why falconers in this day and age must fit their birds with jesses and
bracelets (the leg-restraints) that can be removed by the bird.

 
          
Nearly
every falconer has sad tales of the ones that escaped, and no falconer wishes
to think of his bird hanging upside down, entangled in her jesses in a tree, to
die a slow and horrible death. As for being "varmints," most birds of
prey neither poach on farmers' livestock nor compete with hunters. The single
two most common raptors in the US—American kestrels and redtail hawks, which
can literally be found anywhere— prey, for the most part, on insects, mice, and
sparrows for the former, and field rats, squirrels, and rabbits for the latter.
Redtails rarely bother with flying prey—they are built to hunt things that run.
As such, they do farmers more service than disservice.

 
          
Fascination
with birds of prey seems to have been with us for as long as we've walked
upright. A recent T-shirt called "Evolution of a Falconer" suggests
that the hawk may have been adopted by early man almost as soon as the dog.

 
          
Certainly
there is some justification for saying that there have been falconers as long
as there has been the written word. Falconers appear in ancient Persian and
Indian miniatures, on the walls of Egyptian tombs, and in medieval manuscripts.
There are falconers in every part of the world today, even in places where laws
make it incredibly difficult. There are falconers in
Japan
, where ancient tradition favors the
goshawk, and forbids commoners to touch the bird with their bare hands. There
are falconers in
Mongolia
, who carry on their traditions of hunting
wolves with golden eagles. There are falconers in
Africa
, in
South America
, and in virtually every European country.
The tradition of falconry goes back so far in
Saudi Arabia
that the Saudis cannot even recall its
beginnings. And needless to say, there are falconers spread all over
North America
.

 
          
There
is, in fact, a falconer joke which transcends all boundaries and sends
falconers of every nation into snickers. "How can you tell a man who flies
a falcon?
By the scratches on his wrist where the bird
decided to take a walk."
(Falcons are smaller, by and large, than
hawks, and those who fly falcons use short gloves to protect their hands from
the talons.) "How can you tell a man who flies a hawk?
By
the suntan that stops at his elbow."
(Hawks tend to be larger,
heavier, and grip far more tightly with their feet; only a fool flies a hawk
without a long glove.) "How can you tell a man who flies an eagle?
By the eyepatch."

 
          
(Self-explanatory.)

 
          
Kings
and emperors have written volumes on falconry; hawks and falcons figure
prominently in myth. The Romans seem to have been of two minds about eagles;
they topped the standards of their legions with them, and identified those
standards with the great birds so closely that the standards themselves were
referred to as "The Eagles." On the other hand, it is from the Romans
that we get the myth of eagles carrying off babies. Zeus and Jupiter were both
identified with the eagle. The Arab world gave us the roc, a bird of prey so
large it carried off elephants.

 
          
As
for history,
New Zealand
was once home to a flightless bird of prey
called the moa that stood over eight feet tall! But more impressive yet, at one
point in prehistory, South America bred flighted raptors the size of small
airplanes, which certainly were capable of carrying off, not just babies, but
full-grown adult humans! Could these birds—or the dim memory of them—have given
rise to the Native American tales of the Thunderbird? Certainly they would have
been the only birds strong enough to dare the deadly air-currents of tornadic
supercell-storms, so that their appearance in the sky would have been heralded
by the flash of lightning and the roar of thunder.

 
          
But—this
anthology is not about real birds of prey. This is about the intersection of
fantasy and reality, where raptors and other meat-eating birds are concerned.
This is a wonderful collection full of surprises. For Diana Paxton, the
"theme" was bent slightly, including ravens (who are, after all,
carnivorous). From Mike Resnick comes a little fable that mixes revenge with
reincarnation. From Nancy Asire, a spirit bird— From a dear friend, Dr. Sam
Conway, comes his first published story; I had warned him that I would be
ruthless with it, and if it did not match the standards of the professionals,
it wouldn't make the cut, but to the delight of both of us, it more than
qualified.

 
          
And
my own contribution, which came out of one of those odd cases of serendipity
when a character demands more attention than the author is immediately prepared
to give her. When I was working on The Black Swan, my own version of the tale
told in the famous ballet Swan Lake, one of Prince Siegfried's bridal candidates
suddenly took on a life and personality far be-yond that of a mere
spear-carrier. The falconer-Princess Honoria and her birds absolutely demanded
to be center stage. Unfortunately, I had another story to tell than hers.
Fortunately, she fit perfectly well into this venue, and I was happy to give
her the spotlight on a stage of her own, and a story that proves the adage that
what is hell to one may be heaven to another— or at least, an escape.

 
          
We
all hope you enjoy these highly unusual birds, and their flights of fantasy.

 
          
Diana
L. Paxson's novels include her Chronicles of Westria series and her more recent
Wodan's Children series. Her short fiction can be found in the anthologies
Zodiac Fantastic, Grails: Quests of the Dazvn, Return to Avalon, and The Book
of Kings. Her Arthurian novel, Hallowed Isle, is appearing in four volumes in
the next two
years,
with book one, The Book of the
Sword, in stores now.

 
          
THERE
was a man called Ketil Olvirson who
look
up land below
Hrafnfjall in the west part of
Iceland
. He had two sons, Arnor and Harek. Arnor,
who was the elder, liked best to go a-viking to
England
and
Scotland
and the isles, while Harek stayed home on
the farm. On one of his journeys Arnor took captive a young woman called Groa.
His parents were dead by that time, and though his brother said that no good
would come of marriage with a woman who had been a thrall, he made her his
wife.