This is dedicated to Grace Jones, an eagle Operation Wildlife attempted to save after she got lead poisoning. I didn't meet her myself, but a friend who volunteers there held her when she was first brought in, and I followed her story on FB. She was a beautiful bird, but unfortunately she didn't make it.
They do good things at OWL, check them out.
Hello again,
I'm high atop the clouds, my tribe a black cloud of feathers against the sun. From up here I see your ice and frozen trees, glittering and glinting in that same sun. The wind is so cold up here, in my imagination it is warmer where you are if only because there is no wind. But here the sun heats the black and gray wings of our birds, and I think it must be warmer than under the ice.
When I met you I was thinking of the snow. Snow may fall on us, on the run, flying through the streams of wind, but it never collects. Only once a year do we camp so close to the ground as where you and I met: usually we are in eyries high and precarious, and the snow only piles into small fingers. But I think I was smiling when you found me; there, so near the ground and on a wide plain, the snow rose majestic in great drifts, far over my head. My tribe and our birds slept on a windswept cliff, and I smiled at those drifts, and you came.
You said you dreamt of those heights, of flying. That all you land-dwellers, in your pillars of ice, dream of flying. I didn't tell you that I dream of the land, the snow and ice, where I can stop and trace the movement of time. We circle, round and around the world, always escaping the horror that chases us, and hoping at the same time that we don't overtake it from behind. Every day is much the same, and the sun is always ahead, always ahead. But you see the sun cross over you, and you count the seasons. I envy that peace.
And so I say I beckoned to you not for you to live a life of comfort, or even to live the best life you might, but because I wanted you with me, and because you never beckoned to me to come with you.
I will send this letter by pigeon; he will await your response before returning to me. He is most faithful. We fly in a circle, of course, and so he will fly the other way to find me. I hope he will escape what follows, and we may meet again.
The reply.