Eagle Dreams

December 1, 2003
Travel writer Bodio's absorbing, plodding account of his search for Mongolia's fabled eagle hunters revels in mundane details but lacks enough information on the time the author spent with the hunters and the eagles. An image from a long-forgotten book of Bodio's youth stayed with him for almost half a century: a man with a weathered face on a horse, squinting into the distance, fur hat on his head and a large eagle on his arm."Those of us who become travelers seem to lock into certain images early," he writes. Bodio would eventually pursue traveling as a vocation and hunting with eagles as a hobby, and when Mongolia opened up to tourism with the collapse of the Soviet Union, getting there to observe the ancient practice of hunting with eagles became an obsession. Eventually, after endless meals of fatty meat, milk tea and vodka, and hard journeys across steppes and over mountains, he found hunters and, thrilled, participated in their hunts. While Mongolia is underserved by good travel writing, and the little-known ritual at the center of the book--in which game (such as rabbit and fox) is flushed out into the open for the eagle to chase, then kill--seems worth Bodio's travails, this account is too repetitious. A pared-down version of the story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 2001 and was subsequently chosen for The Best American Travel Writing 2002. Alas, in the transition from article to book, the author's padding of the story (e.g., meticulous recounting of how he financed and planned his travels) does not serve it well.