born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on December 17, 1958
PETER EUGENE GALVIN
born in Denver, Colorado, on November 15, 1960
MARGARET ELIZABETH GALVIN JOHNSON
born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on February 25, 1962
married Chris (divorced)
married Wylie Johnson; daughters Ellie and Sally
“LINDSAY”
MARY CHRISTINE GALVIN RAUCH
born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on October 5, 1965
married Rick Rauch; son Jack, daughter Kate
Part One
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
BRIAN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
MARY
CHAPTER 1
1951
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Every so often, in the middle of doing yet another thing she’d never imagined doing, Mimi Galvin would pause and take a breath and consider what, exactly, had brought her to that moment. Was it the careless, romantic tossing aside of her college education in favor of a wartime marriage? The pregnancies and the children, one after another, with no plan of stopping if Don had anything to say about it? The sudden move out west, to a place that was completely foreign to her? But of all the unusual moments, perhaps none compared to when Mimi—a refined daughter of Texas aristocracy, by way of New York City—clutched a live bird in one hand and a needle and thread in the other, preparing to sew the bird’s eyelids shut.
She had heard the hawk before she saw it. It was nighttime, and Don and the boys were asleep in their new home when there was an unfamiliar noise. They had been warned about coyotes and mountain lions, but this sound was different, the pitch high, the quality otherworldly. The next morning, Mimi went outside, and on the ground, not far from the cottonwood trees, she noticed a small scattering of feathers. Don suggested they bring the feathers to a new acquaintance of his, Bob Stabler, a zoologist who taught at Colorado College, a short walk from where they were living in the center of Colorado Springs.
Doc Stabler’s house was unlike any place they had seen in New York: a home that doubled as a repository for reptiles, mainly snakes, including one that was uncaged—a cottonmouth moccasin, coiled around the back of a wooden chair. Don and Mimi brought their three sons with them, ages six, four, and two. When one of the boys dashed in front of the snake, Mimi shrieked.
“What’s the matter?” Stabler said with a smile. “Afraid it’s going to bite your baby?”
The zoologist had no trouble identifying the feathers. He had been training hawks and falcons as a hobby for years. Don and Mimi knew nothing about falconry, and at first they feigned interest as Stabler went on about it: how, in medieval times, no one beneath the rank of an earl was even allowed to own a peregrine falcon; and how this part of Colorado was a prime nesting spot for the prairie falcon, a cousin of the peregrine and every bit as majestic, he said, a thing of beauty. And then, against their better judgment, both Mimi and Don found themselves fascinated, as if they were being let in on one of the great private worlds of a place they were only just beginning to understand. Their new friend made it sound like a cultish thing, an archaic pastime practiced today by a secretive few. He and his friends were taming the same sorts of wild birds once tamed by Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Mary Queen of Scots, and Henry VIII—and they were doing it very much the same way.
In truth, Don and Mimi may have come to Colorado Springs about fifty years too late. Back then, this part of the state had been an agreeable destination for, among others, Marshall Field, Oscar Wilde, and Henry Ward Beecher, all of whom came to take in some of the natural wonders of the American West. There was Pikes Peak, the fourteen-thousand-foot summit named for an explorer, Zebulon Pike, who never actually made it to the top. There was the Garden of the Gods, the looming natural arrangement of sandstone rock outcroppings that seem staged for maximum effect, like the heads on Easter Island. And there was Manitou Springs, where some of the wealthiest, most refined Americans came to partake of the latest pseudoscientific cures. But by the time Don and Mimi arrived, in the winter of 1951, the elite sheen of the place had long worn away, and Colorado Springs had gone back to being a drought-ridden, small-minded outpost of a town—such a tiny pinpoint on the map that when the Boy Scout international jamboree was held there, the jamboree was bigger than the town.
So for Don and Mimi to happen upon such a grand tradition right under their noses—the mark of nobility and royalty, right there, in the middle of nowhere—sent shock waves through them both, feeding into their shared love of culture and history and sophistication. They were goners. But joining that club took some time. Aside from Doc Stabler, no one was willing to talk about falconry with the Galvins. Falconry was so exclusive, it seemed, that conventional bird-watching groups of the time had yet to embrace the pursuit of these particular birds.
Mimi could never remember how, but Don got his hands on a copy of Baz-nama-yi Nasiri, a Persian falconry text that only in the past few decades had been translated into English. From that book, he and Mimi learned to build their first trap, a dome made of chicken wire, affixed to a circular frame the size of a hula hoop. Following the instructions, they staked a few dead pigeons inside the trap as bait, with wires of fishing line hanging from the chicken wire above. At the end of each line, they tied slipknots to catch any bird who fell for the ruse.
Their first customer, a red-tailed hawk, flew off, carrying the whole trap behind it; their English setter ran after it and tracked it down. This was the first wild bird that Mimi ever held in her hand. Like a dog chasing a fire truck, she had no idea what to do if she caught one.
Back to Doc Stabler she went, hawk in hand. “Well, you did pretty well,” he said. “Now sew the eyelids together.”
Stabler explained that a falcon’s eyelids protect them as they dive at speeds upward of two hundred miles per hour. But in order to train a hawk or falcon the way Henry VIII’s falconers did it, the bird’s eyelids should be temporarily sewn shut. With no visual distractions, a falcon can be made dependent on the will of a falconer—the sound of his voice, the touch of his hands. The zoologist cautioned Mimi: Be careful the stitches aren’t too tight or too loose, and that the needle never pricks the hawk’s eyes. There seemed any number of ways to make a hash of the bird. What, again, brought Mimi to this moment?