The Goshawk (7 page)

The day, like all austringer's days, would begin at six o'clock. One would finish writing at about eleven in the evening. Between these times the hawk would be carried for about six hours, and fed three or four times. There was in addition to this the housework and the pleasant occupation of making him spare jesses or other furniture. In the afternoons there was the shooting to be done, and on the Friday I had despaired of a pigeon and shot him a Frenchman — out of season. Gos, while he was being carried, began to keep his eye on external objects rather than on myself, and to bate from them rather than from me. The illegal Frenchman was a great success: half eaten at his evening dinner, with greedy pounces and madly gripping claws.

I got up at six o'clock as usual, and for confused reasons decided to get my own breakfast before the hawk's. I was too sleepy to know very clearly what I was doing (one would make plans as one fell asleep and break them when one woke up) but there was some sort of idea at the back of the mind. There were about five great milestones in hawking: the moment when the hawk first ate, the moment when it gave in to its master after the watch, the moment when it flew to his fist, the moment when it flew to him a distance of a hundred yards, and the moment when it made its kill. I have left out the moment when it could be said to be manned to loud noises, bustle and traffic: it was difficult to determine that moment, so the list may be allowed to stand. As the day broke, then, we were still upon the threshold of the third step: we had been trying for days to make him fly for reward, without success. I knew that half the partridge was still left, of which the bird was madly fond, so that greed and hunger might join battle on my side: and I put off his breakfast until after my own, in order that the hunger might be increased.

At half past seven I went out to the mews, spoke a few words in unlocking the dead keeper's door, confronted the unfathomable raptor. Gos regarded me like the sphinx. I held out the partridge.

It seemed that partridges were not attractive. Rather pathetically trying to cry up my own goods, I turned it this way and that, so that he could get a good view, ruffled the feathers like one of those travelling Indians trying to sell a rug, plucked out a few as if I intended to eat the horrid morsel myself. I could never make up my mind whether I was the master. Gos regarded me with tolerant contempt. He had no doubts about who was the slave, the ridiculous and subservient one who stood and waited. For himself, he had the whole day to fill in.

I looked at my watch and stood still for fifteen minutes, saying: ‘I will give him a quarter of an hour.' It meant standing motionless beside the bird, about a yard away from him, leaning forward like a butler and staring out of the door with the butler's distant gaze. Even to look at one's watch, one merely dropped the eyes without raising the wrist. The mangled bird lay in the leather glove, on a plane with the hawk's line of sight, catching the morning sun. The leash was more than a yard long. The hands of the watch went round.

I began to sigh, to straighten myself up, to lower the glove. The time had expired and I began to go away. Began. The reflexes for all these motions were already half way down their nerves, running with the messages of movement to shoulder and knee and back: but before any change had been made, in the moment between the outset and the arrival of the messengers, the great dun-coloured wings had unfurled themselves in half a stroke, the murderous thighs had bent and unleashed themselves for the leap, and Gos was sitting on my shoulder.

An exultation! What a bursting heart of gratitude and triumph (after the first terrified duck) as the ravening monster slowly paced down the arm with gripping steps and pounced upon his breakfast! The rest of the day was a glow of pleasure, a kind of still life in which the sun shone on the flowers with more than natural brilliance, giving them the high lights of porcelain.

One had these moments, when everything seemed to conspire to please. On Saturday even the sun came out to grace our feast: and it was a feast, for Mrs. Osborne had asked us to luncheon. Lying on my back under an oak tree in the afternoon, I waited for pigeons as a reward for Gos. But it was such a hot, sunny day, and the chicken and the cream were so comfortable inside, and the light blazed so twinklingly through the leaves, and on my side the shade was so grateful: it became impossible to resent the caution of the pigeons. What a peace-loving but prudent race they were, not predatory and yet not craven. Of all the birds, I thought, they must be the best citizens, the most susceptible to the principles of the League of Nations. They were not hysterical, but able to escape danger. For panic as an urge to safety they substituted foresight, cunning and equanimity. They were admirable parents and affectionate lovers. They were hard to kill. It was as if they possessed the maximum of insight into the basic wickedness of the world, and the maximum of circumspection in opposing their own wisdom to evade it. Grey quakers incessantly caravanning in covered wagons, through deserts of savages and cannibals, they loved one another and wisely fled.

Meanwhile one was still hard at work making Gos with the one hand and unmaking him with the other. No sooner had he flown a yard or two to the glove than he must be given a full crop as a reward. It seemed reasonable to reward his advances. The full-gorged bird would then, of course, refuse to fly at the next visit, because he was not hungry and there was no inducement to do so. Baffled and anxious, one would be driven out into the fields for titbits: a bit of feather instead of fur, some more liver, some tender beef steak, anything to make him come. I ought to have kept him hungry.

What all this meant to Gos was a thing the educationalist too seldom thought about. For nearly a fortnight now, it must have been a continuous murder in his nervous centres. To me it was a sort of marathon, but one in which I knew the objective and rather less than more how to get there. For him it was all unnatural and all unknown. I sat in a hay-field writing on my knee with one hand: Gos on the other was surrounded by terrible wheeled (like mad eyes) and toothed machines, battered by the thunder of tractors, terrified by strange men. Strange men! I was strange, the machines were strange, the very life and nourishment and sleep in captivity were insanely strange, to the heir of free German eagles who twittered like a skylark on my fist. For two weeks he had been in a nervous pandemonium. Was I introducing him to new things too quickly?

Yet it was sometimes difficult to believe that he was not merely being naughty. Speak harshly to your little boy And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy Because he knows it teases. Unfortunately the Duchess' remedy was not open to the austringer.

For two weeks he had only fed on the wrist, had been on it for innumerable walks, had come to it quickly enough sometimes of his own accord. But if he was in a bad mood he would still bate from me as if he had never seen me before. Could he be so utterly stupid? He suffered from persecution mania, I thought often, and longed to wring his neck.

Meanwhile the harvest of human people went on. Under adverse conditions and during the worst summer many could remember, the lush grass fell sideways, leaving the whitish under-colour which recalled other and better haytimes. I could not make my friends understand that I was working too. I could not spare the time to help in their emergency, even on one of the two or three fine days spaced months apart. To stop carrying Gos was to let him go back like lightning. All longed to be in the fields, helping in however small a way to get the earth's spontaneous yield safely to store, and one could see the look of disappointment in the farmer's eyes. Any evasion of responsibility to the earth seemed treachery. The hay spoiled, was stacked wet to make sillage: the men cut their hands and went out of action at critical times: but the austringer, sitting dourly on a tree-stump, wrote with one hand while Gos sat on the other and bated at the tractors.

Om, mane, padme, hum. There were fifteen hundred million people in the world, and all of these, of which I was one, would not provide a year's food for one breed of all the fishes in the sea. Of all the quilled creatures which nature in her plethora of species had reared to sing and to prey over the fields of England, and the prairies of America, and the grey, warm tundras and steppes and pampasses and forests and brakes and marshes and jungles and flat deltas and mountain chains and sun-lonely moors, Gos was one, as I was one of the other: so insignificant as to be significant, so transitory as to be eternal, so finite as to be infinite and a part of the Becoming. How should we feel fear or impatience, being so large and small? Rouse, Gos, I besought him, warble and preen yourself: sit, austringer, on God's fist quietly as Gos on yours.

We stood in a field, an object of interest to ten young bullocks who surrounded us. They stood, an interested half-circle or village class, humbly licking the muzzle of the gun (something in the powder must have been tasty, so I took out the cartridges to make it safe) or my pockets, or trousers, or boots. One of them, obviously the backward one, held a straw in his mouth, the personification of rustic ignorance. At last the bold roan, with cool, wet, unslimy muzzle and rasping tongue, licked my left hand: which I, holding out, stood quietly with, as I had once stood in a mountain village in Italy long ago, while the small, humble, grubby children ran to take the stranger's knuckles in their cold fists, for a superstitious kiss.

No doubt the bullocks thought it lucky, like saying good morning to the sweep.

One result of this timeless universe, in which sometimes night was day and sometimes there was neither day nor night but only the desire for sleep, was that time itself became illusory. One stood still for fifteen minutes by the watch, but it seemed neither a short time nor a long time: it became merely a time. The concentration on imperceptible improvements became so profound and fascinating that each day became an era, lost all contact with the calendar. Finally, becoming muddled with chronology altogether, I got the idea into my head that the hawk had been in his mews for three weeks when the actual time was really a fortnight.

Thinking that I had been teaching him for three weeks, I began to be frightened that he was not making sufficient improvement: flew into a panic and decided upon drastic forward steps. The puzzles which were always demanding a solution, the way in which one was compelled to invent contingent solutions, the shipwreck which threatened them, and the need to go back to the beginning and start again when things went wrong!

Gos had gone neither forward nor backward, and it seemed more than three weeks. He would step, crooning but suspicious, from perch to meal: but could not be depended upon to jump. One day I managed to shoot a dove for him, and he would eat it ravenously; but my holding the stuff before him, going away if he did not jump to it, merely tended to make him bad mannered. When he did get it he would grab and snatch in a way which was dangerous to me. Something had got to be done.

What I invented to do was this. At night I
loosed
him in the mews — no leash, and the jesses separate at the ends — and then washed some beef steak in strips.
[1]
Next day I intended to give him a strip of this steak at six, if he would come down from the rafters for it, a bit of more nourishing and tasty food (a pigeon's wing) at seven, beef at eight, pigeon's wing at nine, etc. Each time should be a separate visit, and he was to be forced to come down from the rafters if he wanted to be fed at all. It was an admirable plan, and would have worked if I had possessed the experience and courage and patience to carry it out to the end. It was experience that was needed mainly, experience which would make one know that it was really safe to withhold food for several days if necessary, without being visited by that common finale of all keepers of wild animals — finding the canary dead in the cage.

And oh! the agony of patience, the brooding and godlike benevolence which had been exerted. At the thousandth bate in a day, on an arm that ached to the bone with its L-shaped rigidity under the weight of the bird, merely to twitch him gently back to the glove, to speak to him kindly with the little mew which of my conversation he seemed to like best, to smile past him at space, to re-assure with tranquillity, when one yearned to beat him down — with a mad surge of blood to the temples to pound, pash, dismember, wring, wrench, pluck, cast about in all directions, batter, bash, tug and stamp on, utterly to punish, and obliterate, have done with and finally finish this dolt, cow, maniac, unteachable, unutterable, unsupportable Gos.

If one could adequately express those early vigils, the uncertainty of their inexperience, the fascination and triumph of their patience: the endless modulations of a voice endlessly reiterating assurance. Mine was a good speaking voice, but no singing voice at all. It had been for weeks a picture of a monomaniac rather tired — one night it would be five hours of sleep, another six — standing motionless on the brick floor of the barn. The floor would be streaked outwards round the perch with white squirts of mutes, so that it looked like a sundial. In one corner there would be a pile of empty jars, in another the disused, rusty oven. All the time there was the housework to do and the food to get. Reflecting upon the latter problems, the maniac would be reciting Shakespeare:
Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II, Othello, The Tempest
, the
Sonnets
. His utterances were supposed to calm and to propitiate the hawk. The man would be the blackamoor now. Soft you, a word or two before you go: he had done the state some service and they knew it. No more of that.

But the tragedy had to be kept out of the voice. Soft you. You were to be quiet, to be patient, to be safe. He was not a blackamoor really, but a rock, a safety, an invariable refuge for winged creatures. They must trust him. Even as Macbeth, even meditating those bloody instructions which, being taught, returned to plague their inventor, the voice was kind and protective. The foulest slaughter provoked the tone only to a world-sadness. Besides, this Duncan — the voice modulated endlessly on, and the hand held out a dead rabbit.