The Collector

[Inspired by a true story.]

Stephen couldn’t decide which pain was worse; the pounding in his head from the blood that was rushing there, or the knowledge that all this could’ve so easily been avoided if he hadn’t decided to take off his coat, or if he'd remembered to tighten his harness again afterwards, or if he hadn’t tried to turn halfway around to tuck his cold gear into his climbing bag.

But he hadn’t done any of those things, hadn’t bothered with being careful; so here he hung, suspended upside down by a loose harness, halfway down his thighs, with one foot tangled in rope, over a sheer two-hundred-foot drop into a glacial lake in the remotest corner of Canadian wilderness, the gyrfalcon’s nest just beyond the reach of his arms. He had half of a mind to swing for it, just to see the eggs there, just to see the clutch that could’ve been his. But the tangle of ropes at his feet seemed in knots that were only for show, knots that gave no guarantee that they would hold anything for long.

He would probably see his death before he caught even a glimpse of that speckled brown and the perfect curve that would’ve been the crown jewel of his collection.

He lifted his torso and neck ever so slightly, hoping for a little relief from the pressure in his head and hoping to spot a handhold that he might be able to clasp onto, though he’d long since lost the feeling in his fingers from the early spring chill. He’d been climbing a long time. He certainly had the experience to adapt, though as he got closer to 50, he could feel that he was losing a bit of the old strength.

A stiff breeze sent him swaying slightly and he straightened out, instinctively reaching one hand back against the cool granite to steady himself.

The ropes groaned and creaked against each other.

He’d been suspended over so many nest sights before. He’d laughed off danger as he stalked mated pairs of raptors all over the world and filled the beer cooler on his waistband with their eggs. He’d even been lowered head first by helicopter into this very valley the previous spring, but this? This, he wasn’t sure how he would get out of. He was an escape artist out of tricks.

He remembered his first escape. He’d grown up in the village of Battisborough Cross in the southwest of England. It was a place full of overgrown and crumbling stone farmhouses that a passing tourist might point at with a smile, but not stop for. Even at nine, he knew this place was too small for him. But the neighborhood bullies didn’t seem to see him for who he believed he would one day be. They just saw a grubby kid in the dingy clothes his mum had picked up at the charity shops in towns big enough to have them.

He’d become fed up with the teasing, the cheap shots, and the names and had finally dumped Marcus Fletcher’s lunch out in the hallway when the others were still in class. He’d even stomped on his sandwich just for good measure, but didn’t think anyone would know it was him that had done it. Only he hadn’t quite got away with it. A kid in year two had seen him and told, and Fletcher and the others chased him out of the school yard and down the high street (if you could call it that).

He knew he wouldn’t be able to outrun them so he took a hard right into the alley between the village’s one pub and its post office, and then another hard right to creep behind the buildings in the hope they would run straight by thinking he’d continued down the alley to the next street. The ruse only worked momentarily, but bought him enough time to scurry across the street to St. Peter’s Church.

He burst in on a meeting of the “Battis in Bloom” ladies who had tables set up behind the pews piled high with cut flowers that they were using to practice “the feminine art of arranging”. They looked up, but seemed generally uninterested in his presence. He backed away slowly as they resumed their nattering and he slipped up the stairs to his left that led to the bell tower—long since relieved of its bells.

He didn’t like that he was running. But he did like that he seemed to be doing a good job of it. He glanced down through the arched windows to the boys below. He enjoyed watching their confusion. Arthur Bailey was looking up and down the street while the other two talked to each other. Fletcher absentmindedly glanced up and Stephen jumped back from the window knocking over an old chair and some dusty boxes in the process. He heard a sudden flutter of feathers in response. Up in the corner of the rafters, an owl settled onto a new perch. Its feathers were sleek and shining white despite the darkness all around it. Its face was perfectly framed in a circle of light brown plumage that came down in a little point at the top like a heart, as though it had been drawn there. It stared back at him with shining, quizzical eyes.

As he righted the chair and the old boxes, keeping one eye on the creature, he glimpsed another flash of white, one level below the bird, buried in the corner of the framework of the tower.

Eggs.

The afternoon sun was getting low enough in the sky now to shine up through the lower windows and bathe the edge of what seemed to be a nest in increasingly golden light. They were small, white, and huddled together. Stephen grabbed at one of the ropes that once sounded the bells and used it as a handhold, then swung his feet around the low beam and worked his way across until he could climb up to where the treasure lay. The owl above began to shift and adjust her wings in alarm, but something had taken over him. He had no doubt she must have sharp talons, but suddenly he didn’t have it in him to care. He crawled over to the nest and finally got a good look inside.

It wasn’t a circle of twigs and branches like other birds’ nests. Instead, the eggs lay clustered together in what almost looked like a mat of clotted mud and pieces of feather and tiny bones. It looked like some hellish swampland in miniature, but the contrast with their unpleasant backdrop only made the eggs look more perfect to him. There were six. They were smooth and unblemished, small, and perfect. They were the most pleasingly curved and flawless things he had ever seen in nature. Perfect potential in a tiny, unbroken vessel.

And he wanted them.

It wasn’t until he reached out to touch them that the owl above stretched out the full span of her wings and began to hiss and shift menacingly from side to side. But it didn’t matter. As far as he was concerned. It was already done.

He’d stepped into that parish church that day and found his own religion. A jealous god he had continued to serve until his collection contained numberless clutches of eggs from around the world.

Only they weren’t numberless. He knew exactly how many he had, had carefully catalogued them all. Knew just how many more eggs he had stolen from that first barn owl. Knew just how many clutches from bateleur eagles, Ovambo sparrow hawks, lanner falcons, and choughs; how many in each clutch, the location of every emptied nest, the best methods of preservation. He’d always been good with numbers; always remembered them and knew what they meant.

Known, for example, that the £85,000 that the Sheikh had offered him to bring the viable eggs of a gyrfalcon to him in Dubai would be enough to pay off the loan sharks whose threats followed him across oceans. He’d even get £15,000 more if the chicks turned out to be snowy white. That part was no guarantee, though certainly much more likely if he could see that the father was also white. He suddenly realized that if he’d had the chance to see that both parents were white, this might well have been the most money he’d ever gotten for a single excursion.

But he probably wouldn’t be here long enough to find out.

His vision was starting to become muddled and hazy, beginning to get that cloudy view that precedes a migraine, only he suspected this migraine might be one that was never going to go away if it came. He felt like a hanged man who survived the kick of the chair, swaying there waiting for an uncertain and yet increasingly likely outcome.

In the distance across the valley, he heard the screech of a falcon. Not one from this nest. He knew that timbre. It was a peregrine, he had seven clutches of their eggs in his collection. Three of them from this valley; four from the Rhondda Valley in Wales, and of course the nine eggs he didn’t get to keep.

The nine that Manchester airport security had found strapped to his bare torso knotted into three rows inside wool socks so he could keep them warm, though he’d confidently told them they were boiled chicken eggs, pressed against his muscles at the recommendation of a physical therapist. They hadn’t believed it, though he saw that as their problem, not his.

He’d been arrested then, for the third time in his deliciously precarious life as an egg collector; a life with just enough risk to keep things interesting. He had been sentenced to 30 months imprisonment. But he still considered it one of his great escapes. Sure, they’d taken his £70,000 worth of eggs this go-round. But they didn’t know who they were for, didn’t know about the rest of what he had or how much more he could still so easily get. And his 30 months was soon shortened to 18 months, which shaped up to a year and a half of free room and board in a manor house that used to belong to the Earls of Plymouth while he figured out his next move. It was hardly so much a punishment as a free vacation provided by the British government.

Most of all, he’d escaped the encounter with his dignity intact, had given confident and firm answers to all their interrogations, never wavered for a minute. Been called “Birdman” with respect and affection by all the other inmates, who unanimously agreed they’d been way too hard on him for a crime that could hardly be considered a crime at all. They’d even sought him out to hear about his egg raiding adventures and he’d told them like they were the stuff of legend.

He may have gone to prison, but he had escaped being reduced to a sniveling puddle of humiliation, like Carlton D’Cruze who, when the Liverpool police had discovered he may have an illegal egg collection and came knocking, had desperately tried to hide the evidence and been found in his mother’s guest bathroom in his underwear, crushing each egg into bits and weeping while he tried to flush them all down the toilet. Such a sacrilege to destroy the idols of their worship and for what? The authorities had found the pieces and their labels in a bend in the pipes and he was arrested just the same. He only managed to crush 138 eggs in time; out of a collection of 493.

No, Stephen had escaped a fate like that one. He’d always escaped. But would he escape death? Would he escape this death? Hanging like a fly in a web of his own making?

He’d chartered a helicopter to this valley a decade ago under the excuse that he was shooting wildlife photography for National Geographic, but the pilot hadn’t believed him. That was the pilot’s problem though, not his. But when the pilot came back to get him at their agreed upon time, the authorities had already been notified of suspicious activities. He’d escaped that too, but couldn’t take chances this time. So, he’d brought a sat phone, planned to use one pilot on the way out and call another when he was ready to come back. But the sat phone was perched on the top of the cliff in the lichen and brush, where he would never reach it.

No one was coming. No one would find him.

Well, certainly not while he was alive.

The shivering had stopped, but his muscles felt sore from it and the warmth that was beginning to settle in was hardly less alarming. His tongue felt swollen and cumbersome and he was beginning to find it harder to swallow as the pressure in his neck grew, but he also sensed something in his throat that he didn’t expect; a knot of emotion.

He hated it.

But there it was, nonetheless, threatening to fill his eyes with the tears. Tears that would flow up his forehead, collecting in his eyebrows before sliding off his face to a fall from so high they would probably evaporate before they ever made it to the glacial blue of the icy lake below.

This life, the life that had so often found him at the end of these ropes with frantic, predatory bird mothers finding out that they are not the apex after all, had cost so much.

Two marriages ended with nearly identical complaints of how he should “give this up” how it “didn’t make sense” and how he had “failed to provide” and put them all in jeopardy by refusing to stop his illegal activities.

Two marriages to women he now realized he could actually have loved. Either one. Susan, with her fiery red hair and the spray of freckles across her face. The way she threw her head back when she laughed. And Naomi, Shona goddess with such grace in the way she stood and the way she gestured, never realizing what he was doing every time they went back to visit her affectionate and boisterous family in Bulawayo with its convenient proximity to Matobo National Park and its population of rare black eagles.

Two kids he didn’t talk to from two mothers that now hated him. And for what?

2,743 eggs that no one was ever allowed to see. Stored in a place he rarely got to look at in case he was ever caught.

Even as the thought crossed his mind, a little ache grew within him to reach that gyrfalcon nest just above and to his right and find out how many eggs were in that clutch. Whether his overall number would’ve gone up by two eggs or four. He never had decided whether he would keep the perfect and never-to-be-broken eggs for himself or whether he would take the Sheikh up on his offer and incubate them until he could get them to Dubai and the chicks could crush the egg’s perfection into refuse, and ruin that infinite possibility that was an egg that would forever be whole.

One outcome could solve his financial problems, the other outcome gave him nothing but a momentary relief from a continuous, aching longing that couldn’t be slaked. The desire that had been ignited inside him by an unexpected afternoon in a church tower and the moment he had decided to look down at the barn owl’s eggs instead of bother to look up at their mother.

And suddenly, for the first time since that long-past afternoon, he felt a twinge of regret for not looking up at that owl, for ignoring her frantic hisses and cries. That fluttering, passing remorseful twinge released the knot in his throat. He could breathe no better for it, as blood continued to build up in his head with no system for release, but now an uninterrupted river of hot tears traced their unlikely paths down from his eyes to the top of his head.

Because he didn’t look up then, he looked down now and saw only the void over which his life hung in the balance. Over which it had always hung he supposed. And in this moment when your life is supposed to flash before your eyes and offer some clarity, he still didn’t know why.

When he heard a flutter of feathers and saw a flash of white, he almost didn’t react. He thought he had been lost in memory. He thought he was seeing a vision of that first barn owl, a vision that was breaking an unbreakable heart. But though the haze in his eyesight was growing, he refocused his mind and saw that the white feathers remained.

There she was. A mighty specimen of the largest breed of falcons in all the world; snowy white breast, with a cascade of black and white flecks down her back. A shrewd and skilled hunter with a fresh kill at her feet. The bird of kings.

The mother gyrfalcon had returned.

He knew that gyrfalcons were notoriously aggressive in the protection of their nests. He wondered vaguely what she’d do to him; hanging there, too close for comfort. But upon landing, she made no motion or movement in his direction. Just eyed him occasionally as she settled into her nest.

Maybe he was still enough to go unnoticed or maybe she could sense how little life was left in his cold body.

It wasn’t until then that he heard it. He couldn’t fathom how he hadn’t heard it before. Piercing through the hollow wailing of the wind cutting by the cliffs below, was a series of high-pitched and insistent chirps.

There were no eggs. The babies had already hatched.

He was about to lose his life for a treasure that never was.

He’d always looked down into the nests and never looked up at the mothers. But now, from his painfully inverted perch, he had no choice but to look up.

The mother tore bits of the flesh away from her kill and the fuzzy round heads of her young grabbed for it with earnest hunger.

The pieces were pulled from her beak nearly before she had the chance to offer them. He was close enough to see that she had a layer of tiny ice crystals on the feathers around her eyes and her chest puffed out with each passing breeze that picked up the edges of her feathers, but she persisted in her task and took no stolen morsel for herself. She was bathed in the golden light of afternoon sun that was already setting this far north. The same golden light that touched that first clutch he ever saw.

It was magnificent.

And for once in his long and remorseless life of collecting, he felt truly sorry for robbing the world of this. This sight that most would never get to see, but would dearly miss if it were gone forever.

He was so entranced by the scene that he didn’t see the smaller gyr land on the ledge just above. It was only in the last corner of his remaining field of vision, when the warmth was spreading and the light was leaving, that he finally noticed that the father had arrived. And he drew in his last breath at the realization that he too was snowy white.