The Goshawk (10 page)

So an anonymous genius had invented the fox-hunting legend. The great hoax had been perpetrated with every resource of a Machiavellian psychologist. Fear, Pavlov told us, was the mainspring of human activity.

Those two unfortunate women squatting on their little pegs, those ninety out of every hundred later in the season, they were held in thrall by fear: afraid that if they did not do it they could not be of gentle birth; afraid that if they did not jump over the hedge that Mrs. Skinflint jumped over then Lady Industrial Revolution would think they were afraid; afraid that their hats were not on straight, that their crops were in the wrong hand or upside down, that their noses wanted a touch of powder, that the secretary would swear at them if they did come out, that the county would not call on them if they didn't; afraid of being cursed for being in front, afraid of being sneered at for being behind; afraid of talking about the colour of men's coats (often a deep mulberry) because they did not know whether it ought to be called scarlet, or pink, or red; afraid that a hunting crop ought really to be called a hunting whip, or a riding crop, or a riding whip, or a crop, or a whip, or a switch, or God knows what: terrified by a 100,000 taboos which were so irrational as to make it hopeless to be sensible about them and so numerous as to make it hopeless to remember them without being sensible: petrified by the suspicion, often a well-founded suspicion, that the horse they were sitting on would fall down and hurt: tangled up in a maze of fears so cunningly contrived that they were finally afraid of being afraid, the unfortunate scapegoats came out twice weekly to their Calvary, and often took to drink in their effort to forget about it in between.

The ostrich when alarmed buried his head in the sand. As far as my two sacrificial victims were concerned, the badger was not there.

But the badger, she too was worth thinking about. She was a young sow, for I opened her mouth and looked at her teeth when she was dead. You could kill a badger by knocking it on the nose, although hounds found it difficult to kill them by breaking them up, on account of the tough skin. The nose was their heel of Achilles. Mine had been killed like that: and now, scarcely torn, was slung over a gate by the whip and left to my reflections, while the riot went elsewhere. Brock: the last of the English bears: I had been proud that her race lived in the same wood with me. She had done nobody any harm. Her home was tidy, her habits industrious by night, her claws and forearms agriculturally strong. Hob would be a good name for a badger.

She dripped blood gently over the gate, while I held up her muzzle in the falconer's glove and looked into her small, opaque, ursine eyes. She was dead. What could I use her for? Surely, being killed, some definite good would ensue.

But I could think of nothing I could use her for. I could not eat her: I could not make her into shaving brushes or an ornament, because I had a shaving brush and badgers at this time of the year were in a kind of moult: I could not congratulate myself that she was no longer in a position to steal chickens, for probably she never had stolen them. For a little time I thought of skinning and stuffing her head to put beside the fox-mask in my small study, as a memorial to this great day. But I did not want to remember the day. I did not want to remember a young, shortsighted, retiring, industrious, ultimately prolific female who had been turned back by two frightened ladies, cornered by lusty and unlettered puppies, knocked on the nose by a peer.

I was ashamed for poor badger. No skill of mine had gone into her slaughter and there was no sense in it for me. For the hounds there was said to be some kind of sense in this otherwise useless murder, and therefore for the master of those hounds. I was not ashamed for him.

Only, vaguely wishing that foxhounds might confine themselves to destructive animals, I dropped the dead head a little sadly but without recriminations: a ‘sentimental slaughterer' as the green-blooded intellectuals put it. Never mind. I was a badger too, in my snug cottage that lay in the badger's wood: and when the war-world came to tear me apart with whoops and halloas, the young sow and myself would be quits.

It was a sabbath of ripe flavour. A flea, to begin with, had somehow violated the sanctity of the castle. He had failed to wake me more than to the borders of consciousness, for austringers sleep deep, but he had bitten all over. Then, for austringers were allowed to sleep till nine o'clock on Sundays, I was woken by the arrival of the milk. I got up, covered with flea bites and fully conscious that it was a holy day, and set a kettle on to boil: then, sitting naked on a chair in the kitchen with my feet in a basin of ammonia and hot water I washed myself carefully over the flea-bites, put on clean silk and a black suit, made a cup of tea, fetched Gos from the mews, and walked two miles across the fields to church. I left him outside on a tombstone, with the setter to guard him and the glove.

My neighbour had cooked a fine Sunday dinner, and by half past one I judged that Gos — now sitting on a bow perch out of doors — would be hungry enough to fly two yards for his meat on an extra long leash: but I judged incorrectly. From that moment until eight o'clock at night I sat on the kitchen chair outside the back door, within the hawk's line of vision, and walked round him every fifteen minutes with a fragment of food. When not offering him these bribes I was trying to cope, from the chair and elsewhere, with another side of his manning not mentioned before.

You must remember that a goshawk is the most highly strung member of a family which breathes much faster than does the human being — and, in the latter, quick respiration and forcible motion of the heart are a sign of mania. For Gos the world was a place in which life took place on a much more vivid level than on mine, a place in which he could see further and more quickly than I could. For him everything was danger and exaggeration, life was a qui-vive far more taut than anything known to us. However quickly I might have tried to bring my hand toward his head, his head would have more quickly turned in the direction of my hand. Not only could angry words, or frowns, or strangers, or loud noises upset him, but also sudden movements. It had been necessary all through his early manning to regulate one's actions, and as much as possible those of other people, so that he should not be subjected to anything sudden, in sound or sight. This state of affairs, however, could obviously not be allowed to continue throughout his life. For the sake of comfort and peace of mind, it was necessary to accustom him to suddenness, unless I wanted to live the rest of my life in slow motion. Now, therefore, it was necessary to make him tolerate movements less leisurely than what I had been forced to offer him hitherto. Holding him on the left hand, I would raise my right hand quickly to take a cigarette out of my mouth, and the result would be a bate. The movement would have to be repeated again and again, at varying intervals of time, until he was accustomed to quick cigarettes. Sitting on that sabbath kitchen chair, I would suddenly spring up, or move in an unusual way, or speak unexpectedly and loud. Each experiment would have to be repeated a hundred times, until he began to accept me as a spontaneous creature not necessarily static.

Another trouble was that I was dressed in my Sun day suit of black. Until then I had purposely, and perhaps wrongly, worn the same riding breeches and check coat all the time, hoping to get him used to a certain person as seen by his brilliant eye. At tea-time I changed back into the accustomed clothes, except for the stockings. He was friendlier thereafter, although he kept looking at my legs, and it was not until eight o'clock that, having failed to make him come, I took him gently up, gave him a small piece of liver, and carried him without fuss to bed.

DELUDED and imaginative recluse, I was beginning to feel that I could talk about the training of short-winged hawks with experience. It had before been a fumbling among conjectures, with only the printed word to help; but now, inside, there seemed to have begun to grow the personal flower of knowledge. Secretly and not quickly enough to be visible as motion, the roots had begun to push their filigree net through the loam of the unconscious mind. Gently and tenderly the smallest buds of intrinsic certainty had begun to nose out of the stalk, fed with the sap of life rather than theory.

Goshawks were Hamlet, were Ludwig of Bavaria. Frantic heritors of frenetic sires, they were in full health more than half insane. When the red rhenish wine of their blood pulsed at full spate through their arteries, when the airy bird bones were gas-filled with little bubbles of unbiddable warm virility, no merely human being could bend them to his will. They would break before they would bend. ‘A fat hawk,' said the old austringer's adage, ‘maketh a lean horse, a weary falconer, and an empty purse.' A week of full, bloody crops would send the best reclaimed goshawk in Europe bating from the best hawk-master in the world. Now, at last, I had learned this from the inside of my heart, the first commandment of the austringer's decalogue, a saw of three words which were the beginning and the end of falconry: Regulate the crop. Terrified by the horrible hunger trace which he already possessed, I had spent the weeks of my novitiate in over-feeding him, to guard against a repetition of the ill. No wonder he had refused to come to me, had been intemperate and intransigent, while his small body burned with high living and lack of exercise. He had exercised himself by rage.

I saw now that I must learn to feed him with diligent and minute observation. Suddenly I realized that this was the secret of all training. I had thought before, without understanding the thought, that the way to the heart lay through the belly. The way to government lay through the deprivation of the belly. Every great overlord had known this about my companions in the lower classes. On £90 a year those who lived in workmen's cottages were just on that happy borderland of being sharp-set which kept us out of presumptuous courses. We were in perfectly good health, but not in a surplus state, not riotous, not fierce with surfeit. They kept us efficient and well-manned.

So with good mastery. The trainer of horses had to look first to their oats. I wondered that schoolmasters had not discarded the ferula for washed meat. Perhaps, when I recollected the food at schools, they had: or preferred to run them both together, because of the pleasures of flagellation.

Gos was to be trained now as Napoleon's army had marched. It was this that must be called the fundamental of the trainer's eye in every branch of training for the blood sports. Those checked and gaitered men at Newmarket, with their lean faces and bow legs, ultimately they were assessing the amount of food given. The lines of the blood horse on which I should lay my money next point-to-point season would not be artistic lines, not lines of force or beauty or bone or muscle: they would be lines of judicious deprivation. Of course they would not be lines of starvation, but they would be lines whose axis was the belly. This was the first law of mastery.

Gos was hungry enough to make enormous strides, and at last I was determined to keep him so. It was a strain and a problem at first, a strain because to reward him with food was a great pleasure and temptation, a problem because it had yet to be found out how much food was necessary to keep him healthy. He had been fed low for two days now, so that this day I allowed him a foreleg, a hindleg, two kidneys and half the liver of a rabbit, feeling that I was being over-generous
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and that he would go back next day. A third of a pound of raw beef was laid down as the daily ration for a peregrine, and I reckoned that Gos, being a tiercel, must be about the size of a female peregrine and should merit the equivalent of the same weight. It was evidently a matter of exquisite assessment which could only be judged by the austringer who knew his hawk (it would vary with different hawks of the same species) — by the austringer whose subconscious mind was in minutely contact with the subconscious mind of the bird. Every alteration in its mental behaviour, every feel of its weight on the wrist, every premonition of greater acuity in the breastbone when stroked: these and all other manifestations must tell the austringer of the fitness of his mate. Too hungry: too flourishing: the exact equipoise was the whole secret of falconry.

The morning was spent in making Gos come quickly to the fist, off the bow perch, a distance up to two yards. He was fed with small scraps at each flight, and he behaved well. In the afternoon he was carried from one o'clock until six, and taken to the main road at Lillingstone Lovell in order to re-introduce him to the motor cars. It was a blazing day (which had its effect in raising his temperature) but on the whole the visit was successful. I sat down with him on tree-stumps, first one hundred yards, then fifty yards, then not more than one yard from the main road: and he bated from nothing except two brightly dressed country lassies who glided by on bicycles. He bated at, not from, a brood of pheasants, and took deep interest in jays and a kestrel which put out of a hedge beside the oats. Home, he came obediently the whole length of a double leash immediately for his evening meal, and ate the rabbit's hind leg in its entirety, finishing bones, claws and all. It gave him something very like hiccups.

Sitting on the night perch of his mews he looked up at the ceiling, wriggled his head and neck like an eel or snake dancer from Ind, attempted to thrust down those three enormous bones into his interior with a kind of shimmy, regarded me, hiccupping, with glassy eye.

Reluctant to say good night I stood at the door, observing this astonishing and vaguely disquieting spectacle (would he be able to digest such a mouthful?) and thought about the morrow. It had been a splendid day. He would go back. He was sure to. Goshawks, and this was the second thing I had learned from experience, went back two paces every time they went forward one. ‘There is no short cut,' said the good book, ‘to the training of a Gos.'