Travelling up to the highest summits of the Sierra Fates, one soon leaves the world of people below.
–––
There is a raw and vital beauty present in the high places, here all is wild nature.
These summits remain untamed and feral and the lives of prey and predator are manifest.
This is where the last great hunters; the eagles, wolves, lynx, and bear may still be found.
Just now the day sky was graced by one of the greatest of those Iberian hunters – the Bonellis Eagle.
This is a species that is truly magnificent as she quarters the mountain in search of the reckless and the careless.
Those coal black eyes pierce the air with a knife like intensity and zero in on her goal.
With the subtlest shift of wing feathers, she banks and starts to glide down.
The focus is unshakeable and some hundred feet up, the wings fold in and around her like a cloak, and she arrows down onto the invisible animal below.
There is a soft thud, a muffled scream, a barley discernible plume of dust rises and then a silent pause as if in honour of the fallen.
A life has ended here in order for the eagle and her chicks to continue to grace this mountain.
This act contained no greed nor violence. It was simply the way of nature and a tiny part of the greater whole.
Soon enough, it will be the turn of the eagle herself to hear the stealthy footfall of the hunter as she turns too late to meet her fate.
So life continues in the great wheel.