The Falcon and the Snowman by Robert Lindsey Read Free Book Online Page A

there was a final battle of nationalistic giants.
    As Chris continued to develop his own concepts of the world, he realized that he was growing farther and farther apart from his father. By the end of his senior year he felt they agreed on very little. They still shared a love for history and sports and tradition, and they continued to go fishing together regularly in the High Sierras, and his father never missed seeing a game in which Chris competed. Theirs was never a stormy father-son relationship. Chris could recall being spanked by his father only once in his life, and there were seldom harsh words between them. But there were few overt signs of affection between them, either. Chris had become his mother’s son.
    Eventually, Chris would reject virtually all of the attitudes of nationalism and patriotism that were so fundamental to his father. But for the most part, he kept his heresy to himself; no one knew how deep were the doubts that tormented him.
    In June, 1971, Chris was graduated from Rolling Hills High School, 367th in a class of 505, with plans to enroll the following September at Harbor College, a two-year, blue-collar college in the port town of Wilmington, not far from the base of The Hill. When his parents asked what he intended to do with his life, Chris said he had two possible careers in mind—the priesthood and law.
    But Mrs. Boyce was worried. She had noticed that he had begun to miss Mass, and occasionally doubts about some aspect of the Church surfaced in his conversations with her. She decided to seek the advice of Monsignor McCarthy, for whom she had a special reverence, and the compassionate priest quieted her doubts.
    â€œLook, Noreen,” he said. “These are turbulent times he’s going through; don’t worry. It happens to a lot of young men; there was a time I wouldn’t go near a church when I was young either. Chris will come back.”
    When he was frustrated about his faith or his future, Chris retreated to falconry. It became not only a hobby but an obsession that consumed his every spare moment. He devoured every book he could find on falconry and plunged into its history, lore and traditions with the fervor of a religious zealot. To Chris falconry was a bridge to ancient history; in his fantasies he began to see himself as part of a continuum that had begun with kings in Persia, Egypt, China and medieval England. Flying a falcon in exactly the same way that men had done centuries before Christ transplanted Chris into their time. His greatest pleasure was to trap a passage (a falcon in its first season and juvenile plumage) that had followed its parents from the eyrie and learned to hunt and then coax it to become his own partner in the hunt. It was a strange transaction: a man offering himself to a bird. It usually began with an offer of the warm breast of a partridge or pigeon to the tethered bird; a quick, cautious jump to the wrist and then a slow courtship and free flight; and finally a kind of marriage between man and animal.
    Daulton never shared the full intensity of Chris’s passion for falconry, but the sport was a bond that kept them together long after other classmates drifted away and found new interests off The Hill. If it had not been for this bond they would probably have gone their separate ways. Instead, the two friends spent one or two weekends a month traveling to the Mojave Desert of California and into the mountains beyond to photograph birds, set traps and take turns holding a rope while the other, the rope tied to his waist, descended a cliff to inspect the eyrie of a bird. And when the day was over, they usually lit up a joint and passed it between them. It was in these moments at the end of the day that Chris loved to let his mind roam: he imagined how a falcon must feel as it soared above him with eyes so powerful they could find a tiny prairie dog scooting through sagebrush from two thousand feet; or how the bird felt in a stoop,