The Accidental Coca Lord

Chapter 14 Part 2

For previous chapters click here

The Yellowstone Issue part 2

Jackson was a wonderful place to live. The winters were deep and long and cold. I’d spend my time snowshoeing into remote parts of the parks to set out camera traps – usually for wolves or mountain lions. I never got a decent shot of a wolf. They would avoid the camera traps usually before they triggered them. As I pointed out to my American friends, you guys have spent the last two hundred years shooting all the stupid ones, now you’ve just got super-smart wolves.

I did manage to get one shot of a wolf, which ended up featuring in the Yellowstone issue. I was fixing a camera trap I’d placed out on Wolff Ridge, a long, barren ridgeline that runs east to west in Grand Teton National Park above Spread Creek. My camera trap was tiny, a small camera in a box tucked into a nondescript cairn on top of the ridge line, and I’d check it every couple of weeks in winter.

The wolf on Wolff Ridge. (The ridge runs along the northern edge of Spread Creak where Gabby Petito’s body was found.)

On one occasion I arrived to find it all bent out of shape, with its wires chewed through by the local elk. As I got to work stripping the wires down to reconnect them, I looked up to find a large black wolf standing there watching me. I froze briefly, then slowly pulled my camera from its bag as the wolf walked up the ridgeline of the hill towards me. As it got within fifty feet it began growling, the hairs on its back and neck rising up aggressively. Lying down, I shot off a few frames, the wolf grey and black against the snow and the blue sky. Its aggression soon turned to inquisitiveness as I kept still, until it eventually wandered off over the ridgeline. I stood up slowly to catch another glimpse of it and saw it sprinting flat-out. It must have run a mile at full speed until I eventually lost sight of it when it entered a forest. The aggression it showed me was bluster, of course; it wanted nothing more than to get as far away from me as possible.

I spent one summer filming a pack of wolves in the National Elk Refuge, and they were wonderful and completely accepting of me. I’d film them catching ground squirrels, and they got so used to me that they’d walk past the car with them as they headed up to feed their pups in the den. There were twenty-three animals in the pack, just a couple of miles outside of the town of Jackson. Towards the end of the summer, when the ground squirrels went into hibernation and the elk remained to the north, they ran out of food and made the mistake of killing a cow on the Walton Ranch and injuring another one. The response of this heinous act by the authorities was to kill the entire pack. Twenty-three wolves killed for predating a cow. The Walton Ranch, Jackson’s largest, belonged to the family who owned Walmart at the time, one of the richest in the US. The ranch is worth perhaps $100 million, so you can understand the financial burden they must have suffered from the loss of a cow.

My son Fred was obsessed with falconry from a young age. He’d so annoy the shit out me with his relentless questioning that I’d have to ban him from talking on long car journeys. On one trip to Shetland he asked me, ‘Dad, what would be the most mediumest bird to do falconry with in Shetland?’ Not ‘Which would be the best?’ or ‘Which would be the worst?’ No, fuck that. Let’s go for the ‘mediumest’. It was and remains his stupidest question since he asked me as a two-year-old ‘Why don’t quad bikes breathe?’ I mostly ignored his fixation on falconry. I was an impatient father and wrote it off as yet another one of his obsessions, of which he had many. I suppose, after four years of his questioning and relentless reading of every falconry book ever written, I should have realised the problem was actually my dismissal and not his passion – and for that I feel guilty to this day.

I was working too hard. After the Yellowstone story ended I got more work in the area, and ended up being contracted 240 days a year to the National Geographic magazine as a photographer and separately to the National Geographic Society as their Innovation in Photography Fellow. All this made me stressed and impatient. Fred would ask me almost every day if he could have a bird to train, and I kept putting him off, then putting him off again. He reminded me about my childhood and the adventures I’d told him about, and the fact that I kept foxes and chickens and all the rest. But it didn’t work. My life was fluid and transient, and I imposed the consequences of this on my family. I travelled constantly and we were living in the US on visas, making everyone feel a sense of instability, that at any moment we could up sticks and leave. I said we were in no position to have a falcon.

Fred had always struggled at school. His attention span, like mine, didn’t really exist for anything he wasn’t directly interested in. This seemed only to get worse when he turned sixteen and began to fall behind on all his schoolwork, which meant a constant back and forth with his teachers, who, like his parents, were left in despair at his disorganisation and lack of effort. He was always tired and always complaining of headaches, but they were written off, by me in particular, as laziness. My stepdad had criticised me endlessly when I was sixteen for being idle and always being asleep. Fred’s headaches went on for a few months until eventually we decided to get his eyes checked, thinking that maybe something as simple as needing a pair of glasses could be the issue.

The optician had only been investigating Fred for a few minutes before he asked me to accompany him to another room. I thought this a little worrying but went off with him.

‘Has Fred ever been diagnosed with Lyme disease?’ he asked.

I shook my head. He looked concerned and told me that Fred had impacted optic nerves. He explained that Fred needed to see a specialist as soon as possible and he gave me the number of a guy in Idaho Falls.

Philippa drove him there that afternoon, an hour and a half across the state line. The optician examined him and said that Fed needed an MRI ‘as soon as possible’. She called me and I got on the phone to the hospital in Jackson, but it was too late to get him in that day. The following morning we took him in for a scan. He was cheery and all was fine. We sat outside the scanning room, waving at him and joking around until he was done.

As he left the scanning room he smiled broadly, then suddenly went rigid and fell on top of us having a seizure. Philippa grabbed him and we shouted to the scanning room staff, who hit the code blue button. This immediately emptied what seemed like the entire ER staff out into the waiting room. They took him off and put him in a bed in the ER room next door. We hurried in to be with him and he came round a minute or two later. He seemed fine, although a little out of it. Then a doctor appeared and asked to speak to us. We followed him out to behind the reception desk.

‘You need to see something,’ he said, pointing to a pair of large computer monitors.

I collapsed almost immediately when I saw the screens. I heard the doctor say, ‘This is serious,’ but the images on their own could have told us that. His brain had almost been overtaken by a huge tumour. I can’t remember much about the minutes after that as I was a whirring mess of tears, slumped on the floor. Philippa held it together, probing for answers, but they all seemed to be either unknowns or grim prognoses.

I righted myself after a while and took a photo of the screen, then texted my friend David Sandeman, a consultant neurosurgeon back in the UK. He called me straight back and told me to calm down.

‘You don’t know what it is,’ he said. ‘It could be anything. Yes, it’s a tumour, but it could be benign, for all we know. Let’s just work with what we’ve got and don’t freak out. It’s well circumscribed, at least, and it’s in a great place to have it removed.’ The peach-sized mass took up most of his right frontal cortex.

Fred was airlifted within the hour to Salt Lake City with his mother. I cried for the five-hour journey in the car, berating myself for being the stupid, impatient father that I was and convincing myself that if he survived this then I’d strive to be better. But all I could think about was that he was going to die.

Fred was taken into surgery the following morning. They took the whole side of his head off and removed the wretched lump. The wait was of course the most agonising thing Philippa or I could possibly have imagined. We walked and paced around the grounds of the Primary Children’s Hospital. We bought food in the canteen and stared at it, and eventually settled back in the waiting room for the surgeon to come, which seemed to take forever. Eventually Dr Brockmeyer appeared and sat down with us.

‘It’s all gone well,’ he said. ‘We don’t know what it is but we got it out, and now all we can do is help him recover and wait for the pathology.’

Of course all we wanted to know was how long that would take, and he assured us it would be a few days.

Fred woke up in the early hours of the morning, roused by a nurse at the end of his bed while checking on him.

‘Hello, Fred,’ she said loudly. ‘How are you feeling?’

He opened his eyes a little, fighting for consciousness.

‘I’m a falconer,’ he muttered before falling back to sleep. A little while later he briefly woke up again, and looked at Philippa and me sitting beside his bed.

‘Can I have a falcon?’ he asked, as he fought to stay awake.

‘Fred, you can have whatever the fuck you want,’ I replied.

A while later he woke up again to another nurse.

‘Come on, Fred. We’re going to get you up and take you to the rest room.’

He was slightly more alert this time, and he looked right at her. ‘You can,’ he replied, ‘But I warn you, it’s like a baby’s arm holding a peach.’

I pissed myself laughing. The nurse didn’t know what to do with herself. She was undoubtedly Mormon and a conservative, given that we were in Salt Lake City, but no doubt at the same time seduced by Fred’s ‘charming’ English accent.

Fred was in hospital for three days after his operation. He recovered fast. His twenty-two stitches, which formed a question-mark shape from the top of his head to behind his ear, were barely visible beneath his thick blond hair, and within a few days he was up and walking. I went and did the dad thing, buying him some waders and a fishing rod and teaching him to fly-fish in the Snake River, which lapped the end of the garden. He became so proficient that within three days he went out and caught six large trout for breakfast, something I suggested he stop doing and instead just release them after catching them.

The wait for the pathology results, however, just kept getting extended. The few days turned into a week, and that turned into a fortnight. The results were inconclusive and so they sent samples off to St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee for examination. We phoned Fred’s hospital frequently and were always reassured that they’d summon us the moment they had any news. They stressed that we’d never be told what the results were, good or bad, over the phone; we’d have to make the journey to Salt Lake for a sit-down consultation. One day while walking into the supermarket my phone rang. I stopped in the lobby to answer it, and my heart immediately started racing when I saw it was a Salt Lake number.

The lady on the other end told me they had some results, ‘and I’m going to tell you now what they are. Fred has a low-grade glioma, a grade one. It’s not benign, but it’s not going to kill him either.’

It was the single happiest moment of my life. And, of course, my promise had to be kept. Fred was going to get a bird.

Like most things in the US, the process of getting a bird was steeped in mountains of bureaucracy. In some instances it’s not a bad thing, the protection of wildlife being one area that actually benefitted from the process. What was weird about the US, however, was that the cost of protecting wildlife was often far greater than the cost of killing it. For instance, getting a permit to camera-trap mountain lions in the National Forest was, if followed to the letter of the law, an activity that could draw a fee of over $100 per day; getting a permit to kill a mountain lion by chasing it down with dogs until it took shelter in a tree, and then shooting it out of the tree, would only cost $16 for an entire season.

There seemed no logic to this at first as I watched the relentless conflict between animal lovers (particularly those involved with wolves), scientists and bunny-hugging cat-women on the one hand, and gun-toting Republicans, keen to rid the world of wolves in particular, as well as most other animals, on the other. One hunter shot a wolf, strapped it to the bonnet of his pick-up and drove around Jackson triumphantly displaying it, I assume with the sole purpose of outraging liberals, something at which he of course succeeded. But during my time in Wyoming I slowly began to realise the extent to which the Christian understanding of man’s dominion over nature had shaped American attitudes and policies towards wildlife. Killing mountain lions, for example, was referred to as ‘harvesting’.

Falconry legislation was complex. Fred was obliged to sit an exam and train under a ‘master’ falconer – someone who had achieved years of proficiency. Fred actually had two masters to defer his questions and understandings to: Roger Smith and Derek Craighead. Roger had founded the Teton Raptor Center and spent a lifetime flying hawks and falcons. He was high-energy and enthusiastic, keen to get Fred up and running after his hospital stay. Derek was a Craighead, a family famous in the West for their pioneering conservation work with grizzly bears and their falconry work with eagles.

Fred, of course, passed his exam with flying colours, his knowledge of the sport and the birds themselves now exhaustive (and exhausting). Roger and his buddy, along with Fred and I, then built a ‘mews’ in the driveway, which was basically a large shed with a double-door entrance and a room to house a hawk, with sufficient space for it to flap between perches and a couple of mesh windows so it could peer outside. Once that was built, assessed and signed off by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which involved an on-site inspection, Fred was good to go and could get a bird.

Now here’s where it became tricky. Fred was only allowed a couple of species. He wasn’t yet proficient enough to have a falcon or an eagle, and was only legally allowed a novice bird, specifically a red-tailed hawk. Red-tailed hawks are common throughout the US and as a result are in no way endangered. But Fred not only had to catch a wild one, he was obliged to catch a ‘passage bird’, a red-tail born that year and migrating south for the winter. If he caught an adult he’d have to let it go. Being Fred, he decided that he wanted a female red-tail and it had to be a dark morph. Red-tails come in three distinct morphs. The commonest are the standard brown bird with a red tail. There are also birds that are almost blond, usually from sun bleach, and then there are the rarer dark morphs, still brown but much darker than the standard – yeah, that’s the one Fred wanted, a female one of those . . .

Catching a wild hawk is naturally not easy, but centuries of falconry have refined the art down to a few methods, the bal-chatri trap being one of them. This was developed in east India, with the trap basically employing the services of a live mouse or bird, kept safe in a cage but connected to the outside by an array of wire or nylon nooses. The idea is that you find your hawk, get out of the car, stick the trap on the ground, then drive off a short distance and wait. The hawk sees the mouse or bird running around in the cage and stoops down to grab it. It can’t reach it, of course, but hopefully gets a foot or leg stuck in one of the nooses. You then run over and grab it – job done.

Roger was going to help Fred catch the bird, so the day before the event he and Philippa drove over to Idaho to buy some mice. Upon returning home that afternoon, Fred got a call from our neighbour Kelly, who said that there was an eagle stuck in our garden fence. Fred ran out of the house to find it and saw a raptor of some sort flapping around at the top of the garden. He went to rescue it, only to find, tangled in the sheep-wire fence, a dark morph, passage, female red-tailed hawk. He bent down, carefully disentangled it from the wire and took it back to the house with a big fucking grin on his face.

I’ve never really managed to reconcile this story in my head. The coincidence, particularly in the wake of what Fred had just been through, seems simply too bizarre. Mist – as he called her – was eating out of Fred’s hand within a week and flying to a lure a week after that. She was a proud bird, the largest red-tail Roger had ever seen, which was odd as she was a hopeless hunter. Fred and I would often get up before dawn and drive an hour and half south to the high desert to hunt rabbits in the sage brush. She never got one, so I eventually renamed her ‘Missed’, much to Fred’s chagrin. She flew off a couple of times but we’d find her again after driving tens of miles across the desert, always hoping that she hadn’t been dispatched by a golden eagle. Roger took her on in the end. Fred got himself a peregrine, which eventually went AWOL one morning, never to be seen again. Fred was broken by the loss and although he kept his love for falcons, he never regained his passion for keeping them. He assures me that one day he’ll get another bird, but he’s got a bit of living to do first.

Fred with Mist

(Update 7th Feb 2025 - Fred phoned me last night to tell me he’d just got his promotion. Fred works breeding the world’s best racing falcons at a facility in southern England - he’s really damn good at his job.)

For photos of the American West click here

In the next instalment I head back into the Amazon to tell the story of uncontacted tribes.