The bald eagle was only three months old, a baby, really. But she stood three feet tall with a seven-foot wingspan.
Those wings, unfortunately, were useless. She’d fallen 80 feet from her nest in a fir tree and now they were broken. That’s how she came to the Sarvey Wildlife Center where I volunteered.
Kaye Baxter, the director, worked on her with another volunteer, Bob. I’d actually worked with quite a few eagles during the two years I’d helped care for sick and injured wild animals at Sarvey.
Still, there was something about this bird that drew me. She stared at me with dark, glassy eyes. I could tell she was in pain.
“Take her to the vet,” said Kaye. We filled a dog carrier with shredded paper and I put her in. She was too traumatized to resist. That’s always a bad sign with an eagle. I lifted her and placed her inside the carrier. She wasn’t heavy, about eight pounds.
Bald eagles, like all birds, have hollow bones that make them light. This bird still hadn’t learned to fly. She might even have been pushed from her nest by a rival sibling. A homeowner in a nearby town had found her in their yard.
I took the front seat out of my old Ford Escort and loaded the dog carrier in. The vet was about 25 miles away. As I drove I gazed out at the beautiful pine-forested foothills of the Cascade Mountains and talked nonstop to the eagle. “You’re going to make it,” I kept saying.
The vet inserted stabilizing pins into her wings and wrapped them in bandages. I tried not to think about what would happen if she didn’t heal. I wanted her to be able to be a real eagle, to fly with her eagle brothers and fish for salmon in the river.
I kept up my reassuring chatter on the drive back to Sarvey. I was violating rule number one of working with wildlife. We’re not supposed to form emotional bonds because the goal is to return animals to the wild with as little human influence as possible.
I couldn’t help myself. I kept looking over at her. There was just something about her.
Slowly she healed, graduating from tube feedings to meals of chopped up rats, beef heart, quail and venison. She still couldn’t stand up. That meant she couldn’t tear apart her food. We had to chop it up.
She gained weight, but as weeks went by she made no progress standing. Every time I came to Sarvey, about twice a week, I made a beeline for her cage.
“Come on, girl,” I said to her. “You can make it. I know you can.” She seemed to trust me completely, letting me reach inside her cage and stroke her feathers.
Week eight. If she couldn’t stand by Friday she would have to be euthanized; this was no life for an eagle. Thursday afternoon I walked into the center to find everyone grinning at me. I ran to Freedom’s cage. There she was, standing on her own two feet. She would live!
A week later the vet removed the pins from her wings. I watched anxiously as she stretched out her right wing to its full length. She tried to stretch the left but it caught partway. “It’s as healed as it’s going to get,” said the vet. “This bird won’t fly.”
“She could be an educational bird,” said Kaye. Very few birds can be part of the presentations we did about wildlife and Sarvey for schools and other venues. An educational bird needs to be glove-trained.
“You’re obviously the man for the job,” Kaye said. An educational bird, unlike a wild one, could have a name. We decided to call her Freedom.
It wasn’t long before Freedom was stepping willingly onto my elbow-length leather glove. We created an outdoor enclosure for her to live in and I began acclimating her to long trips in a carrier with a perch.
Soon we were driving all over the Seattle area visiting schools and attending Eagle Scout ceremonies.
Freedom handled every event like a pro. She was so amazingly calm, so tuned in to my every thought and move. When I held Freedom I felt most fully alive.
Freedom and I worked as a team until one day, two years later, I felt a lump on my throat. I was a healthy guy so I didn’t pay much attention until a biopsy showed I had stage three non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “The survival rate is about seventy-five percent,” the doctor told me.
I started chemotherapy immediately and even went to the barber shop to have my head shaved ahead of time. I planned to beat this disease with quick efficiency and at first it seemed that’s exactly what I was doing.
After three infusions of the drugs the tumor in my spleen had shrunk. Two more infusions, though, and the tumor was still there. I had three infusions to go. The doctors said that with my type of cancer if the disease isn’t gone after eight rounds of drugs it’s not going to go away and they stop treatment.
Every infusion of drugs left me feeling sicker. And the tumor refused to budge. I thought of Freedom sitting in that dog carrier in my Ford Escort that first day I met her. “You’re going to make it,” I’d told her. I wasn’t so sure about me.
One night after the fifth round of treatment I had a dream. I saw a dark speck in the sky. The speck slowly grew until I realized it was Freedom flying toward me.
Her wings stretched out perfectly, huge and beautiful. She soared and banked then flew right at me. Her head plunged toward my chest and suddenly she rose back into the air, my cancer somehow clutched in her powerful beak. She’d ripped the illness clean out of me. She flew out of sight.
The day of the last treatment came shortly before Thanksgiving. I felt awful afterward but somehow lighter in spirit. On Thanksgiving Day I managed to visit Freedom and give her a turkey leg.
Bald eagles don’t get their characteristic white head feathers until they mature around five or six years old. Was I going to see Freedom’s white feathers? I had seen them in my dream. Looking at her now I hoped I would see them in reality. I had to live for her.
The following Monday I heard results of a blood test that would determine whether I still had cancer in my body. The doctor entered the room smiling. “There are no signs of cancer anywhere,” he said.
I drove straight to Sarvey and ran to Freedom’s enclosure. She stepped onto my glove and I strode outside the center and walked to where we could gaze out over the Skykomish River valley. The air was cool and moist and smelled of evergreens and earth.
To the west the river ran toward Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean. To the east rose the snow-clad slopes of the Cascades.
I breathed in and all of a sudden felt something on my right shoulder. Freedom’s injured left wing rested there. Her right wing swung around and reached all the way to the middle of my back. My head was enclosed in eagle feathers. Freedom was embracing me! She’d never done anything like this.
We stared at each other. Our heads leaned in and she touched my nose with her beak. You’re going to make it. I’d said those words to her so many times. I think all along she was saying them to me too.
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