Alan Abdul Akbar Colussy is the official falconer of the Atlanta Falcons.

In 1997, I was driving a Potohar from Peshawar, Pakistan. That’s a model of jeep, the Potohar. It’s like a little Suzuki Samurai. I traveled all over Pakistan in that thing with a couple of birds in the back, hunting all over the country. I was on the way to see these ruins called Dera Ismail Khan—really beautiful, old Indus Valley architecture—when my fan belt broke. I am stranded. There are the Himalayas to my right and the desert to my left. The last village I passed was about 25 miles behind me, and I have no idea what’s in front of me. There’s not a human being anywhere in sight. I’m kicking the truck and trying to figure out what the hell I’m going to do, going through all my stuff trying to find something that could act as a fan belt. 

A couple hours later, these two boys come walking by. One’s about 12, one’s maybe eight. At the time, my Urdu wasn’t very good, and I certainly didn’t speak Pashto at all. The 12-year-old’s Urdu was better than the eight-year-old's, who was purely a Pashto speaker. So the 12-year-old asks, “Who are you and what are you doing here?” I said, “Well, I’m going to Dera Ismail Khan, and my truck broke down.” He said, “Oh, okay,” and they wandered away. 

I’m still working on this truck, trying to figure out how to get going.  A couple hours later, they come back. They’ve got bed rolls over their shoulders, a stack of tins of food, and a Kalashnikov. The 12-year-old says, “We were going to invite you back to the house, but all the men are gone, only the women are there, and you’re an adult, so we’re gonna stay here and keep you safe from the bandits.” I’m looking at these two kids like, “I could kill you two with my toes. You’re gonna protect me? Okay.” They pitched the tent on the side of the truck and started heating the food. They took their turns on guard duty and wouldn’t let me take a turn. 

Once they said, “We’re not leaving until the morning,” I was like, “Well, I’ve got two hours of daylight left, so let’s fly some birds.” I had a shikrabaz, which is kind of like our Cooper’s hawk, and a goshawk. They’re not high flyers. All the accipiters, goshawks and shikras, are from the fist to the prey, direct pursuit. With the goshawk, he stands on your fist, and you sling him at whatever gets flushed. The shikrabaz, which literally means hunter’s hawk, you hold him in your right hand, like a football, and throw him. That style of falconry is called musketry, because it was done with male sparrow hawks, and the name for them is musket. That’s where the term for the gun comes from. 

Falconry is very common, so I guarantee both of the boys had uncles who were falconers, or maybe their dad. It was not unusual for them. The 12-year-old said to the eight-year-old, “You stay here and watch over everything.” And the 12-year-old starts beating the brush for me, like, “Let’s see if we can’t flush some pheasants.” He was all about it. We flushed a bunch of stuff. Plenty was hiding in the bushes of the scrub of the desert. Deserts tend to be teeming with life. But I don't think we killed anything. Generally, it wasn’t stuff we necessarily wanted to kill.

When we woke up at dawn and I started making salat, they were like, “Hey, you didn’t tell us you were a Muslim.” I said, “You didn’t ask.” They’re like, “Well, we thought you were an American.” I said, “I am.” And they kind of look puzzled for a minute. I said, “There are Muslims in America, too.” 

Actually, falconry had a lot to do with my accepting Islam. Pakistan is to falconry what Scotland is to golf. So if you’re really serious about falconry, Pakistan is high on your list of places to go. One of my best friends in high school was from Pakistan, and I had a crush on his little sister, so in ‘94, I went to Pakistan to visit my friend’s family, buy falconry equipment, and have some life-changing experiences. There’s a bit in the fifth Surah of the Quran, where falcons are mentioned. It has this list of animals you can and can’t eat, and here’s how you have to slaughter them. Except that animals that are killed for you by other trained animals—by falcons, dogs, whatever—are permissible. If your hawk kills something for you, well, then that’s perfectly allowed. And so I went, “Oh, a religion that mentions falconry in its holy book can’t be all bad.” So I looked more into Islam, and about six months later, I accepted Islam.

It just didn’t occur to the kids. All they knew was that I was a stranded traveler, and they were going to do their duty. I’m from the South, born and raised in Atlanta, and the South likes to tout Southern hospitality. I would say there’s a fair amount of truth to that, but the South’s got nothing on Pakistani hospitality. I realized if I had been in similar circumstances on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere in the US, I would have seen hundreds of cars pass by before anybody stopped and said, “Are you okay? Do you need some help?” These were the only two human beings I saw, a couple of kids. Had their dads been home, they would have brought me into their house and put me up in a guest bedroom without question. But there weren’t any men at home, so those two boys were going to protect me. The notion of hospitality took on new meaning.

We all walked down to the village, which was about five miles in front of us. They got a guy with a couple of donkeys to drag my little jeep to the mechanic shop, got it all fixed up, and then sent me on my way. I paid for nothing. I drove around the block a couple of times until I found them again, and then I asked them to be my guests and bought them lunch. Then I drove on to Dera Ismail Khan.

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