The Goshawk (11 page)

I supposed that what I was going to write eventually would be the kind of book which would madden every accomplished falconer, and I was sorry that it should be so. I could imagine an aged austringer sitting at the very top of the tree which I was now so laboriously climbing. He had a pettish and know-all expression, soured by years of contact with intractable goshawks. So much of his patience had been absorbed by these creatures that he had none left for his fellow mortals. In appearance slightly crochetty — he would be wearing a twa-snooted-bonnet, and his long white moustachios would be waxed at the ends — he sat at the top of the ladder and proclaimed that he had been manning hawks for sixty years. What right had a cowardly recluse who fled from his fellow men, said he, to write about these almost fabulous creatures? Fools, he remarked in a very pouncy way, rushed in where angels feared to tread.

But I was sure of one thing that I still loved, and that was learning. I had learned always, insatiably, looking for something which I wanted to know. Of all things which I had begun to learn or thrown aside almost at once, the most wildly yet tranquilly and enduringly happy had been the mystery of the divine salmon and his exquisite fly. Perhaps, in the end, giving up all other attempts, I should grow middle-aged and acquiesce in my second-hand destiny, which would be to lie beside a highland ripple in which my monster dwelled. Meanwhile the search continued, and with it the necessity of earning a living. It was easier to combine the two: to learn and then to write about it, thus making money out of what one loved. I determined to tell my aged austringer to come down out of his tree (an American idiom) because mine was not a falconer's book at all. It would be a learner's book only: in the last resort, a writer's book, by one who might have tried in vain to be a falconer.

I was proud of Gos. He flew to the fist quickly, though not far, for a small tit-bit, when taken up in the morning. He ate, coming a yard or two, much of the flesh off a large rabbit's leg, given in small repeated offerings before noon. He was carried without unusual scenes from one o'clock till six, except for a small interval when I had to go off and shoot a rabbit, and then I decided to try him on the creance.

A creance is a long length of twine, strong string or fishing line, not too heavy for the hawk to carry in flight. Usually, I believed, some assistant would carry the hawk while the master called it, tied by the creance, from the assistant's fist to his own. But I had no assistant, and preferred not to have one.

I set Gos down on a quiet railing and tied the creance to his leash. As a fisherman I was fond of knots, could indeed occasionally entertain myself by tying the blood knot, which Chaytor made romantic and famous as well as beautiful (which it had been all along), on odd bits of string. But now the knot had become a thing to fear as well as to love. At the other end of it there was a bird momently more valuable than anything one had ever possessed, and one of the few things left that one did possess. Ceaselessly, day and night, the neat and ingenious knots of his jesses, the falconer's knot by which his leash was attached to the ring on the perch, the slip of the jesses on to the swivel, and of the leash through the swivel, these became critical and not untouched with fear. The suspicion with which the salmon fisherman makes all sure became a part of falconry, and one never tied a knot without the anxiety of a turnkey and a faint dubiety at heart.

My creance, which was made of brand-new tarred twine, was twenty-four yards long. At the end remote from the hawk — that is the end which was tied to the railing — there were bound in two yards of strong catapult elastic so that he should have no chance of snapping it by a sudden jerk. I stood twenty yards away from him — with the result that he would in any case have a surplus of four yards slack — and began to whistle the accursed hymn. He had previously shown himself much fascinated by the rabbit.

I must have gone on at this for an hour, sometimes giving up for a moment and lying down among the cows (who had just come out from being milked and caused some anxiety by sauntering over the creance, as it lay stretched in a double line from the railing outwards for ten yards and back to the hawk), sometimes standing up to redouble my efforts. The problem was to make Gos understand that though he was still tied he was now free to come those extra nineteen yards.

I tried coming nearer, up to six yards, but he was still bemused. Taunted by the feeding hymn, whistled from a distance which he had never before been free to fly, the unfortunate tyrant blew out his feathers to their full extent, paced up and down his railing, glared about in all directions and practically bit his finger nails with indecision. I tried tweaking at the length of the creance between him and me, holding the twine in the hand which flourished the rabbit as a lure and jerking it in time to the ‘Lord's my Shepherd'.

After more than an hour of failure I decided upon what I took to be drastic measures. Standing ten yards away, I pulled Gos off his railing by means of the creance. He fluttered to the ground and flew back. After more tweaking I pulled him off again. Again the same, and again and again.

At the fourth attempt he remained on the ground. Picking his way between thistles he hopped to and fro, finally in my direction. I retreated before him as you do when training a retriever. Skipping and leaping, fluffed full, a terrible toad, he bounded in my train. The last two yards of the twenty-four were flown to the fist: and the reward was, before he went to bed, a good two-thirds of a crop of fresh young rabbit.

At this time two interests were going on simultaneously. There was the excitement of hoping to accomplish the fourth or penultimate great step of his education — the moment at which I wanted to see him fly one hundred yards on his creance — and there was the bother of getting him properly manned to the surrounding world. Living as we did in a wood, so far even from a road, his had been a sequestered life with few novelties. Seeing so few strangers, meeting no motors unless carried a couple of miles to do so, he was at present unaccustomed by habitat as well as by instinct to the bustle of the modern world. Yet he had to learn to stand that bustle, as we all have to do, however little we visit it.

On that Wednesday, determining for the first time to hazard him against the gentle traffic of a country town, I walked to Buckingham and back, in order to introduce him slowly. He stood it well, except for two bad bates, one on entering the market square and one on leaving. His bates at the people were less annoying than the people's reaction to him. Nervous mothers wheeled their children's perambulators to the opposite pavements, exclaiming women stepped out on the road in front of motors, rather than pass us within a yard, while troops of children followed us about. To evade this nuisance he was left in a back room of the Swan and Castle for half an hour, while I did my shopping.

It was a great joy to shop in Buckingham, especially when you had a shopping list which began with ‘bit of ribbon for kitchen curtain' and went on through ‘leather for lure, two big staples and bit of strawberry netting, scales, stronger string, rabbit nets, blue paint for door, screws and nails, seccotine, good penknife, darning wool, cotton, needles', until it reached ‘Bert's
Treatise of Hawks and Hawking
, For the First Time Reprinted from the Original of 1619, with an Introduction by J. E. Harting, Librarian to the Linnaean Society of London'. For you were more likely to come across a copy of Bert, of which there are only about 102 in existence, in the ironmonger's or the saddler's at Buckingham than you were to find it at Bumpus or the Bodleian. There was a kind of glory about the backward parts of the better shops in Buckingham, in which you might find anything. If I had wanted a battle axe, or a quiver with some arrows, or a pair of skis, I should have found at least two of them at Herring's: while I was sure that Mr. Evenson could have found for me, somewhere about the premises (if only he could put his hand upon it), an eighteenth-century coach or a billiard table.

Sated with these excitements, and with the walk of twelve miles, we got home at eight o'clock. The hawk did not like cars or cyclists or numbers of people, but if he were in a good temper he could be persuaded not to bate from them. It was perhaps in this side of manning that he was most backward of all, and I could not really assert that he was at ease with my own right hand. All the way home I had been boresomely jerking it about at varying intervals to accustom him to its movements.

We got home at eight and he was put at once on the creance. Immediately, or at any rate after less than five minutes of hymnody and hesitation, the great bird was sailing owl-like through the twilight. I cowered as my master stooped upon my shrinking shoulder, and then gave him gleefully five ounces of beef steak — previously weighed out on the scales — deciding that on the morrow the ration should be increased to seven.

I lay in the long grass at Silston cross roads with Gos on the fist. The cars came past pretty regularly there. It was shady where we lay, with a good breeze keeping the trees alive, two men making hay in the fields opposite. Gos himself stood with full fluffed feathers and semi-contented eye, meditating standing on one leg. When he was in a good humour he would rouse his feathers, and this would leave them ruffled. Before he had done this, while the feathers lay close and sleek, you might be sure that he was not content. But if he had done it, and if he began further to stand on one leg, then you knew that you were in for peace.

It was a lovely day, and Gos was being as good as gold. He stood there, lifting the spare leg with clenched talons in tentative thrusts: a monocular or uhlan-officer expression on his face, as the eye remoter from the sun dilated more than the nearer one.

It was a scene perfectly idyllic — until another of the cars came by. Then down would go the rising claw, the erect posture would be lost, the hawk would flinch upon the fist with mad round-questing eye that meditated a bate, the feathers lying flat to his body.

I lay in the warm afternoon and thought about Gos. If one were to give him a proper name, what should it be? Hamlet would be suitable, or Macbeth (as he was subject to illusions): then there was Strindberg, or Van Gogh, or Astur, like the giant warrior in Macaulay (the hawk's Latin name was Astur Palombarius): there was Baal, as in the poem by Kipling, or Tom (he who had the host of furious fancies), or Medici or Roderick Dhu (‘fierce lightning flashed from Roderick's eye'), or Lord George Gordon of the lunatic riots, or Byron, or Odin, or Death, or Edgar Allen Poe, or Caligula, or Tarquin, or, for his happier moments, Gos: a cross between a gosling and a goose. Reflecting upon this problem I decided that the best solution would be to call him all of these. The last Duke of Buckingham had been called Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, and I could derive my goshawk's lineage no lower than his.

On the way home Gos had a proper bath in a roadside ditch, ducked his head, toppled over, flapped his wings, splashed, paused to meditate and scratch his chin in the middle of it: all in the lovely sun and ripple.

At six o'clock we went out to the well and he was set down on the railing which enclosed it. While at Silston, half a pound of beef steak had been bought, and this had been divided into two equal parts. (The hawk had been given a rabbit's hind leg that morning.) I had been out previously to the well and measured a piece of twine fifty yards long. One end of this was attached to the rail of the well, the other end extended down the ridings to its full extent. It had been doubled then back to the place where it was attached, so that at the well head there were two ends of twine, one tied and the other free, while a double string stretched twenty-five yards to its bend which lay in the grass.

I put Gos on the railing and retreated to a distance of forty yards, giving ten yards law in order to prevent his being checked in flight, and began to call and whistle. The pursed lips repeatedly proclaimed the Lord their Shepherd, urgently, caressingly, madly, nobly, slowly, rapidly, continuously, with pauses. ‘Dinner!' they blew, commandingly, pleadingly, majestically, rapaciously. ‘Come along, Gos,' they panderingly, whiningly, peremptorily, softly articulated. ‘Now, now,' they remonstrated, feeling rather thankful that this could be done without an audience, ‘don't be silly, come-along, be-a-good-Gos, Gossy-gossy-gos.' And Tiddly-tum, tiddly-tum, Tiddly Tum Tum repeated echo to whistle, whistle to echo.

For nearly ten minutes the extraordinary uproar went on in the still ridings. So far away that even his flaming eye could no longer be distinguished, the loved goshawk stood with his back to me, turning his head this way and that. At last he turned upon the perch, roused his feathers into a greedy puff, began to hop upon the railing. The pleas, the tuneless whistling, the staccato notes rose to an orgasm of lust for beef: in vain. They relapsed into the majestic, the quiet, the filled-with-silence pauses. Suddenly, after ten minutes during which he had cocked his head at the creance and visibly pondered its reliability as he moved about, suddenly, and without relation to the pathos of my music, sweet Gos began to fly.

To fly: the horrible aerial toad, the silent-feathered owl, the hump-backed aviating Richard III, he made toward me close to the ground. His wings beat with a measured purpose, the two eyes of his low-held head fixed me with a ghoulish concentration: but like headlamps, like the forward-fixed eyes of a rower through the air who knew his quay. The French called him
rameur
as well as
cuisinier
. Too frighteningly for words (when I had taken him up to bring him to the well — and given him the shred of beef with which he was always rewarded for a voluntary jump—he had flown to my shoulder and fixed his talons in the unprotected flesh, taking me by the scruff of the neck), too menacingly he flew, not toward the at-right-angles-held-out beef, but directly toward my face. At five paces nerve broke. I ducked, still holding the beef at the stretch of my arm, and stayed coweringly for two beats of the heart.