The Goshawk (21 page)

But he lived on this side. He did not know what sanctuary he would find away from us, and he was determined on breaking back. The ragged wings were after him, were within a yard, and my heart was praying encouragement and advice, begging her to strike now. It was like being an onlooker at an athletic meeting who kicks to help the high-jumper. The talons were within a foot; and the rabbit squatted.

Cully shot over him, tried vainly to stop herself with the half a dozen shattered feathers of her tail, and landed on the empty ground. Her quarry was on his feet at once, streaking straight back to me. Cully ran after him, bounding like a kangaroo. It was horrible to see the creature which ought to be able to fly, running pathetically after him with a leaping gait. But she gained flying-speed, managed to get into the air. I ran, waving at the rabbit, to head him off; could see the bird's yellow eye boiling with fire. The rabbit turned sideways to run round me. She grazed his back. Landed. He turned again, but she turned with him. It was hop, skip, jump. She was there!

I took out my hunting knife and was with them in half a dozen paces. It was a long-bladed sheath-knife, and very sharp. She held him down, quite powerless, with one great talon on his loins and the other on his shoulders, I put the point of my knife between his ears, and pressed downward, pinning the split skull to the ground.

Blood-lust is a word which has got shop-soiled. They have rubbed the nap off it. But split it into its parts, and think of Lust. Real blood-lust is like that.

Well, Cully is safe to moult in her mews. I am in my badger's room, with a big goblet of Venetian glass which was given to me by one of the finest women in the world, for just such an emergency. It is full of champagne, a silly sort of drink, but symbolical and medicinally quite sound. It is a beautiful, beautiful evening, and I go out with the goblet to Cully in her mews. She looks at me with her head on one side, over a crop which is so stuffed with rabbit that she really has to look over the top of it, like a pouter pigeon. The red setter has come too, looking bluish in the moonlight, and stands hopefully, with her head cocked also, between the two maniacs. ‘Well Brownie,' I say, raising the goblet politely to the setter, ‘we may be mad north-north-west, but when the wind is southerly, at least we can tell a hawk from a hernshaw.'

PROVIDED that one was living in 1619 and training a goshawk according to the principles of the austringer Bert, the whole of Part One is true to life. Falconers do lose their hawks, all too often, and always with such a downward somersault of the heart that it almost suffocates them.

But one was not living in 1619, and it was not until a couple of summers after my first engagement with Gos that I met a living hawk-master among his feather-perfect raptors, watched him at work, and discovered that falconry was a living art. It was not a dead one, something that ended in 1619, but a growing and progressing skill which had developed into something quite different by 1950, and which will continue to develop.

Imagine the Tudor staircase in a country house, with all its coats-of-arms and carved balusters and heraldic griffins: compare it mentally with the chromium staircase in a modern hotel: and you will have imagined the difference between what I had been doing to Gos and what a reasonable austringer would do today.

It is quite unnecessary to ‘watch' a hawk in order to man her.

A proper austringer would have set about the training as follows, whether it was for an eyas or a passager.

First he would have provided himself with a ‘block', though a bow-perch is practically as good.

Having dressed the hawk in her jesses and leash, he would have taken this block to the very most secluded part of his garden, thrust the spike into the ground, and tied the hawk's leash to the loop in the ring with a falconer's knot.

While we are about it, and since it has been mentioned in the body of the text, and since it is a beautiful creature, we may as well have a picture of this knot. It possesses the necessary merit that it can be tied with one hand in ten seconds — falconers only have one hand, because the hawk is always sitting on the other — and it is impregnable.

Well, having tied his goshawk to the block, he would leave her in her privacy, only visiting her once or twice a day to feed her. He would throw down the food beside the block, the exact quantity necessary to keep her in health, and he would go away at once.

After a few days, he would move her block to a slightly more populous part of the garden, where she might perhaps be passed by the gardener every now and then. He would continue to feed her as before. A few more days, and she would be on a distant edge of the lawn: she would see the traffic at the front and back doors. A few more, and perhaps she would be slap in the middle of the lawn, though the lawn-mower would give her a fairly wide berth. Later, people would be allowed to go and look at her, perhaps not too close, and she would have begun to know and anticipate her regular hour for food. She would tolerate her future master, would let him stand by for a little when he brought the meat, and she might even begin to jump toward it before he could set it down. Thus all would pass off pleasantly and easily, imperceptibly and naturally — almost lazily.

I have always noticed that the true maestro gives an impression of leisure and laziness in performing his feats.

From this point he would decrease her rations, would begin to make her jump to him for them, would have her on the creance quite soon, would decrease the gorges severely to the point of real hunger, would discard the creance — some people call it the ‘cranes' — and he would be flying a loose hawk without anxiety in about the same time as it took me to start my second watch.

But he would weigh the hawk every day: he would have calculated the amount of food needed to keep her sharp set with such nicety that he had to weigh the meat on a letter balance: and if he took his attention off her stomach for one day, he would be just as likely to lose her as I was.

6.2.51

No doubt it would have been charming to introduce a little fiction later on, in which, one spring morning when I was sitting white-haired at my lonely cottage window, there came a gentle peck on the window-pane, and there, looking sleek and happy, with his new wife peeping shyly at her toes and the cosy crocodile of babies lined up behind them....

Unfortunately those things do not happen in the wild life led by hawks. Nothing is more certain than that Gos entangled his jesses in one of the myriad trees of the Ridings, and there, hanging upside down by the mildewed leathers, his bundle of green bones and ruined feathers may still be swinging in the winter wind.

He would have died of apoplexy, or he may have been shot by a keeper, but it is almost certain that he would not have lived. For it is an odd fact that goshawks generally have to be taught to kill. In the natural state, their parents teach them. In captivity, the austringer must.

Except for the shrew-mouse which he killed by himself, if you remember, I had probably not reached that stage with Gos. He would have decided to come back to his perch to avoid starvation, or he would have hung himself, or he would have been destroyed by a human. I can only suppose now that those ‘majestic and leisurely circles' of the free and happy Gos on page 143 were either a delusion caused by a lot of distant rooks circling round a lot of distant rooks, supposed to be mobbing him, or else they were a lie written in the effort to give the reader of the book which I was then trying to write some sort of happy ending. It is to apologize for that kind of ignorance or deception that I have been allowed these pages of postscript.

As a matter of fact, it was far from easy to turn the day-book into a journal for Parts Two and Three without telling lies, for there was a guilty secret which had to be concealed at all costs. I had to twist and turn the matter about with desire and indecision, and one of the reasons why I eventually threw the whole thing aside for fifteen years was because I did not know how to conceal this secret, was too ignorant to be certain whether it was a secret, and had in fact failed to conceal it.

The secret was the Hobbies. They are among the rarest of all falcons which migrate to breed in England, so rare that one absolutely must not tell anybody about them, and particularly not in print. All the names in my book are real names. Any unscrupulous ornithologist had only to identify the place or me, hang about it with a pair of binoculars at the right season, and then diminish the number of English nesting hobbies by one pair.

I should still be unable to publish about them today,
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except for the fact that in the Second World War a prodigious aerodrome was built on their door-step, which is now being used by a set of beetle-men who buzz round and round it in motor cars, and the lovely hobbies have cleared off of their own accord.

9.2.51

Falconry is as old as Babylon. It has never been a dead sport, and it does keep on developing. At the present moment it is developing in America, where young and enthusiastic and progressive falconers are doing wonders by not fussing. If a good American falconer would come over to Europe and show us how he does things, it would make the old fogies blink.

Falconry is extraordinarily tenacious. To have existed since Babylon, it must have had a regular fount of sap in it. Like ivy, it finds its way around obstacles and keeps growing.

When Pteryphlegia or the Art of Shooting Flying came into fashion, one might have thought that the Purdey would supercede the hawk. But Prince Albert decided to build his Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition round a tree, and the cocky London sparrows refused to abandon the tree. It was found that the beautiful exhibits in the Great Hall, and the observers too, were getting speckled by the sparrows. Queen Victoria, in despair, sent for the Duke of Wellington. ‘Try sparrow-hawks, ma'am,' he said, and she did, and it worked.

Even in the Second World War, the art managed to find a foot-hold. It was discovered that the small birds on airfields were lethal to aircraft, if they happened to collide in the wrong places. A lark could go through a windscreen like a bullet. So the Royal Air Force set up a section of falconers of its own — such an open-minded thing to do, and so typical of that great Force — and it was the business of the Squadron-Leaders of the Falconry Squadron to train hawks and to keep little birds off airfields. The science was officially recognized, and it kept alive.

That arm of the Air Force has now been abolished. No hawk, except possibly the little merlin, can any longer be kept on a meat ration of four ounces a week in England, because, during the moult, they must be maintained from the larder.

The thing will go on in America, and we must console ourselves with that. But what Purdey did not achieve, what Hitler did not achieve, has been achived now.

10.2.51

‘To Attila King of the Huns,' says Aldrovandus, ‘the most truculent of men, who used to be called the Scourge of God, the goshawk was such a charmer that he bore it crowned on his badge, his helm and his helmet.' He adds the quotation from Lucan:

His praeter Latias acies, erat impiger Astur.

11.2.51

The thing about being associated with a hawk is that one cannot be slipshod about it. No hawk can be a pet. There is no sentimentality. In a way, it is the psychiatrist's art. One is matching one's mind against another mind with deadly reason and interest. One desires no transference of affection, demands no ignoble homage or gratitude. It is a tonic for the less forthright savagery of the human heart.

Did He who made the Lamb make thee? Well, yes, he did.

12.2.51

When a hawk is flown at game, it must be rewarded for the kill. When a falcon has eaten the heads of about three grouse, she ceases to be sharp-set and therefore becomes unsafe to fly.

So no falconer can indulge in a battue.

If we were able to add up the number of rabbits killed by a free goshawk in one year, and the number killed by a trained one which had to be maintained from the larder during the moult, the numbers would probably be equal. Unlike the shooter who kills his tame pheasants by the thousand, the ferocious austringer is probably not adding to the number of rabbits who would be slain in any case.