Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

They kept missing. “This isn’t working,” Yotam said, putting a segment of the fruit in his mouth. Gabi agreed, and helped himself to two segments. They ate in silence, and the pigeons cooed above.

“What else does a falcon like to eat?” Yotam asked.

“Nothing as simple as pigeons.”

“Let’s try stones,” Yotam suggested, and picked one up.

The stones missed, too. Dejected, they returned to the dormitory.

At dinner that evening, Gabi spotted Roni, who was on his own, and went over to sit down next to his brother.

“What’s happening?” Roni asked.

“Everything’s okay,” Gabi responded bleakly.

“What do you mean, okay?”

Gabi told him about the pigeon-catching efforts.

“What do you need pigeons for?” Roni asked.

“We just need them,” Gabi said.

Roni smelled of cigarettes, and his hair was overgrown. He thought for a moment and then said, “Okay.” And then, after thinking a little more, he added, “I’ll come by in the morning and we’ll go find some pigeons.”

Roni showed up with an air rifle that his classmate Tsiki liked to use for shooting at birds — and cats, if the rumors were true. Gabi and Yotam followed him off the kibbutz to an abandoned Muslim inn where dozens of pigeons were perched on the roof, flying off from time to time, returning, landing on the electricity wires. Roni approached as close as he could without attracting their attention, took his position with the butt of the rifle pressed into his shoulder, closed one eye, placed a finger on the trigger, and began firing. By the time the pigeons realized they were caught in a battle zone and flew off, two unlucky ones had fallen to the ground.

The two boys were unaware that serving the body of the pigeon as is to the falcon wasn’t the way to go. The falcon looked at the fat corpse and then at them. Had it been blessed with shoulders, it surely would have shrugged them — and if with lips, an incredulous smile would surely have followed. The boys revisited Yotam’s father, who explained that the meat itself was the answer. They looked at each other. That makes sense. Who wants to eat feathers? On the other hand, isn’t it the falcon’s job to get to the meat? After all, it doesn’t have cooks to prepare its food in the wild. When they returned an hour or so later, the pigeon’s status was unchanged. The falcon hadn’t gone near it. Gabi picked up the pigeon, went into the field outside the children’s dormitories, and, with the aid of the large penknife Roni received for his bar mitzvah and passed down to him, first cut off the dead bird’s head, and then its legs, and finally the wings. He tried not to inhale through his nose, and also not to see what he was doing while cutting into the bird. Yotam stayed back. Gabi then sliced down the length of the pigeon’s stomach, removed the internal organs, and did his best to cut away the breast meat and separate it from the small bones. “Bring a plate,” he said, continuing to hack at it. He heard footsteps leaving and returning, and a plate landed by his side. He transferred the pieces of butchered flesh to it, rose from his crouch, lifted the plate high in front of him with bloody hands, entered the building, and headed to the small storeroom. He placed the plate in the cage and went to wash his hands. The plate was clean when he returned. If the falcon used his tongue the way a human would, he thought, the pinkish puddle of blood on the plate would be gone, too.

Roni was a rare sight at the kibbutz; and when Gabi caught up with him one day during recess, in the smokers’ den behind the high school building, Roni said he wouldn’t be coming to the kibbutz anytime soon, and that he wouldn’t be able to bring the air rifle again, or ask for it for Gabi, who was too young to shoot it. So, after the falcon had polished off the meat of the first two doves, Yotam and Gabi were forced to upgrade their hunting tactics.

They first lured the pigeons to the window of the small storeroom in the children’s dormitory with the help of seeds and various pigeon delicacies they’d read about in the encyclopedia of birds, and after a sufficient number had gathered there, they frightened them inside and shut the window. It was pretty crafty, but pretty simple, too; pigeons, they discovered, are really dumb. They left the birds in the dark room for several days to blind them. Then Gabi went into the room and caught one — easy enough, given that the room was small and the bird was blind — and carried it out to the yellowish thorny field alongside the children’s dormitories. He gripped the head of the bird between the forefinger and middle finger of his right hand, lifted his arm high above his head, and with four or five lassolike twirls of his wrist to gain speed and momentum, he threw his hand forward, leaving the bird’s head between his fingers, while the body, disengaged from the head, flew five or six meters forward from the impact and landed on the ground, the wings still fluttering.

Gabi looked down at the head still in his hand, kissed it lightly above the beak, and tossed it aside; then he walked over to the warm, shaking body and, using the penknife again, sliced it open and cut away the best pieces of flesh and served them to the falcon on a plate. All told, the entire process lasted mere minutes once he had mustered sufficient experience, cool-headedness, and skill. Yotam helped with laying the traps and chasing the pigeons into the room. The rest of the work was left to Gabi — the carrying, the swinging, the decapitating throw, the discarding of the head, handling the meat.

And thus things continued until the grade’s head teacher got wind of the rumors spread by some of the girls who were grossed out by it all and turned up to confirm them. She told Yotam and Gabi that they weren’t allowed to keep a falcon in their room. It was to be released into the wild right away, and they’d been wrong not to go to see the vet. Who knows what diseases it might be carrying, and where it actually came from, and the whole business of killing the pigeons had to end.

Following their scolding, Yotam told Gabi he was sick and tired of the falcon anyway. Gabi agreed; the head teacher’s timing was good. They thought about releasing it on the mountain, but there was still a problem with the bird’s leg, they thought, so they handed it over to someone at the kibbutz’s livestock department. Then they returned to the small storeroom and issued pardons to the two blind pigeons that remained imprisoned there.

Not long after the falcon incident, Gabi was abducted while walking alone through the plum orchards toward the mountain. He didn’t know who abducted him — a man, an adult, large-bodied, with hairy arms and big hands — that’s what he had felt. Over the days that followed, he paid close attention to the arms of the kibbutz men. The abductor covered Gabi’s eyes and mouth with his hands and embraced him powerfully for several minutes with a force that far outweighed Gabi’s ability to resist — until Gabi got used to the idea and realized he’d be better off simply accepting his fate. The abductor then released his one hand and immediately tied a bandanna in its place — first over the mouth and then the eyes. He pulled Gabi’s arms back and tied them behind his back — Gabi could hear the flexing and clicking of the plastic — with a zip tie.

His abductor pushed him forward, into a walk. Because he had hiked through the area during nights of total darkness on many an occasion, he knew he was being led between the plum trees to the far end of the orchard, where there was a gravel road. Then he was loaded onto an open vehicle of sorts, a pickup truck or a jeep (over the days that followed, he paid close attention not only to hairy arms but also to the kibbutz’s fleet of vehicles, in an effort to find clues), and driven south, to the edge of the orchards and the cattle fields beyond.