Urban ramble…

Barb and I took a hike through Chinatown to downtown Vancouver last weekend, ambling past Canada Place to the Marine Building and then catching Skytrain, at Burrard, to make it back to East Van.

The pretty part of the walk is along Union Street, where there are lovely old houses with beautifully tended gardens, graceful well-aged trees, and the Union Street Market, a little mom & pop where you can grab a cup of coffee, a Portuguese custard tart, or a cod cake–whatever suits your fancy, and more besides.

Our only real photo op of the day came just as we were venturing out into the back alley behind B’s apartment: I saw a hawk doing the post-catch wobble in mid-air, with something small and gray in its talons. It paused in a tree: we gleefully gave chase. It hopped to the next, and we followed. In time it holed up in a big evergreen in a park that I’ve dubbed Iguana Park (because I saw a guy sunning a massive iguana there, twice, a couple of years ago). There was not even a glimpse of it to be had amid the dense piney greenery, and we would have questioned whether it might have eluded us, but for one thing: a little spiral of falling sparrow feathers, tuft after tuft after tuft, drifting out of the tree’s heart like a single line of snowflakes on a windless winter’s day.

Here’s the shot I got before it lost us. It reminds me a little of Dr. Horrible’s portrait of Penny.

Hawk

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About Alyx Dellamonica

After twenty-two years in Vancouver, B.C., I've recently moved to Toronto Ontario, where I make my living writing science fiction and fantasy; I also review books and teach writing online at UCLA. I'm a legally married lesbian, a coffee snob, and I wake up at an appallingly early hour.

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