After a year of marriage, Rachel Dickinson's husband, Tim Gallagher, confessed that the gift of a falcon had pulled him back into his addiction to the obsessive sport of falconry, the art of hunting with a trained bird of prey. In an attempt to understand her husband's interest in falconry, Dickinson chooses as her book subject Steve Chindgren, a falconer who never has conquered his addiction. Married with two daughters, Steve lives apart from his family five days a week. He makes the sacrifice to hunt sage grouse with a falcon. Dickinson mines the peculiar psychology of the falconer. Eventually she arrives at a sense of falconry's allure: the remarkable persistence required to train a falcon, the unpredictable nature of the hunt, and the soaring exhilaration of success.