One day I had walked for several miles along the cliffs toward Eastham, through thickets of scrub oak, and bayberry that smelled very pungently in the fall of the year. The sky was full of shifting winds and the day as I walked full of weather changes, from an edge of cold to warmth and back again. An early sun began to be covered by pale-gray clouds and there was a mauve light over the sea. I caught sight of a little wren along the way, and there was a number of sparrows, both seen and heard--song, chipping, seaside, and probably others. It was a low, shifting thicket world full of potential surprise, bordered by oceanic sound, rocking with light and air. I retraced my steps a few hours later over a narrow sandy road, at times no more than a track, and I saw a pigeon hawk flying off ahead of me, stroking deliberately and quickly with its long wings. Then I noticed another one roosting on a broken-off tree several hundred feet back of the cliff just outside a wood of pitch pines. The first one made off in that direction too, roosting not far from its companion on a dead stump, and they both stayed absolutely still, like falcons on an Egyptian frieze. I could hear a blue jay screaming somewhere in the background. I noticed feathers scattered on the path, gray and blue, blowing ahead of me; and then, there it was, a blue jay freshly killed, its breast bare of feathers and shining red like some rock wet with sea splash in the crimson path of the setting sun. What kind of a game led up to this? Could the two hawks, one tempting the jay by its distance, the other scaring it by its proximity, have managed to send it out into the open where it had no chance against their swift and effortless pursuit? I walked ahead for a short distance and then waited, watching through field glasses for the hawks to come back. The nearest one did, after a few minutes, beating down tentatively over the kill, then rising again and leaving with its supple flight. The other had moved a little closer and roosted on an abandoned telephone pole, full of an ancient poise, wonderfully still. After that, I am sure, they never went back to the road until I had gone for good. The grace and tension, the space in that formal scene stayed with me for a long time. XIV The Marsh