The Goshawk (12 page)

But the sudden movement, or the sudden discovery of the red setter fooling about in the long grass at my side, had put him off. Before I could see where he had gone, while I was still bunching together for the strike, Gos slewed off on a miss-stoop, flew to the nearest tree of the riding, missed his grip of it because the creance caught him short (very luckily), hung inverted for a moment, dropped into the hedge.

I called him for another few seconds, and then, going to disentangle him, took him back to the wellhead. For letting me pick him up without protest (he jumped to the fist) he was rewarded with another shred of beef.

We started again. This time, after only five minutes, the attack was launched again. I stood to my guns. Imminently confronted with death, stared in the face by those two Athene-noctua eyes which were coming at my head rather than at the beef a full arm's length away from it, I braced the breast muscles not to flinch. It was too much. At two yards humanity became again the inherent coward, and cringed away to the right, averting face from the eyes of slaughter, humping shoulder, powerless to remain erect. But Gos bound to the shoulder with a decisive blow, stepped quickly down the arm, was feeding on two ounces of beef.

When he had eaten it (and tried to eat the paper — which had been kept as a visible lure) I took him back to the rail. He left me for the rail reluctantly and avariciously, insisting upon taking the paper with him. After I had returned to the distance of forty yards, which had increased by five, he dropped the paper and, showing more interest in it than in me, jumped down to make a final test of its edibility. I waited till he had jumped back to the rail.

Now, for the third time, the calls were reiterated: and then, with less than a minute's pause, the brooding death was launched at the face. I stood, and scarcely more than an inch or two flinched: for the second two ounces of beef steak Gos came quickly on a creance nearly fifty yards.

There was no progress at all that day, and not to go continuously forward was to go back. How often, and for how long periods, did human life suddenly dumbstrike and confuse itself: becoming as it were curdled or criss-crossed, the surface not coherent and the grain influent. This solitary life was one of almost boundless misdirected energy, but even misdirection was a form of direction. For months at a time I was content with that. Then suddenly the blow fell, a kind of stroke like that which afflicted Orlando, and even misdirection failed. All kinds of going and doing turned inward upon themselves, incestuous cannibals, and like the serpents of Limbo consumed their tails. Nothing served, nothing wanted itself to be done, nothing went forward.

Sullenly and shiftily I lay abed until nine o'clock, fetched Gos to his bow perch after an abortive effort to make him feed on a creance, watched my chimneys being swept, hemmed curtains, made a stiff catapult, tied up a new full-length creance with its two yards of elastic at the hook end, arranged tools in a tool-box in the coal shed: but all the time knowing that I ought to be walking to Silston with Gos, in order to man him to the road traffic and village life: all the time not wanting to do any of the things I did, and doing them ill. It would have been better to have lain insensible.

What was it that man wanted and what force made him always so bitterly to strive for it? At last we should come to nothing, with all our creances in a tangle about us, our curtains unhemmed and unravelling, and the tools confused and broken.

Festina lente, as one did when pouring out a bottle of Guinness. The devils had vanished next day as suddenly as they had appeared, and the weather seemed really to have set in for good at last. A late summer or blazing autumn, the world had turned to fire just as the barley came down and after the oats. The motionless air was everywhere humming with the tractors and elevators as the last hay went to the rick. The tines of the elevator marched incessantly upward, a metal cavalry like the jingling squadrons of the harrow, but more sedate. In a double and inexorable rank their endless mobilization stormed the hayricks, an army with banners.

In the ridings the free beasts lay motionless under the tree-shade, horses under one tree, ewes under another, bullocks under a third. Only their tails flicked. The austringer, with two miles to cover across country to the nearest main road and compelled to wear a coat in order to save his arm and shoulder when the hawk dropped on them off the creance, paused in the hedge-shade after each gate, getting his breath again as it were for the almost physical immersion into sunlight as he crossed the next field. It was a series of dashes across the desert, a series of endurances which were summed up field by field in advance, a series of dives into the scorching air which partook of a blue sky almost violet with heat.

The farmers and their men had in one day gone a deep mahogany: their faces had resolved themselves into the lean lines of the brown skull, gaining much in power and character and passion. The eyes were deep in tangled crow's-feet. They and the white teeth gleamed more in contrast with the flesh, so that everybody gave a vivid impression of humour and madness. It was the harvest mania.

Nothing in forenoon, noon, or afternoon moved in the ridings: only the wise and timid pigeons, so clever at coming out on the opposite side of a tree and instantly swooping downward for the cover of the hedge in which it grew, made a fore-running in front of the austringer, leaving the green seclusion in which they had been ‘listening the pleasant sutherings of the shade' with a loud clap of their wings.

The hawk bated toward the shade of each tree as they passed it, sitting in the intervals with open mouth and protruding tongue. The arm, which would carry the bird in rigid right-angularity from ten in the morning until eight o'clock at night, with only an hour's break for what masters called luncheon and men called dinner, began to ache increasingly as the burning sun descended. Late and languid, with the hawk fed and mewed and the bitch baited, the austringer made a luxurious meal of cold salmon, while the full harvest moon burned outside. She was no longer an exhausted and reflecting satellite, but a living personality; she also was afire once more, a shadow-caster brighter than the headlights of a car.

All day the heat raised Gos's temperature and made nothing suit. He bated at almost every car on the Silston turning, and refused to come on his new creance at Tommy Osborne's. I had tried to feed him there at seven o'clock, not wanting him to associate a particular place with coming to the whistle. But there was too much doing. Baulked by inquisitive bullocks, distracted by the comings and goings of the farm, myself faint from heat and hunger while he from both was far from temperate, we had to give in. I wound up the creance and plodded back to the cottage, tied him to the well-head, paced off seventy-five yards, and began to whistle. It was a day of almost unrelieved failure, one of those days in which one worked long and hard without measurable reward except the knowledge that one had worked. I held out the lure with an arm almost palsied and a heart quite unexpecting. After half an hour I would give in, take him up, and feed him without a conquest.

But before The Lord had been my Shepherd for one bar, he was coming. Surely, low to the ground, well-mannered and without panic, he was beating all that long distance with his eyes fixed on the food. The creance made a little whisp of disturbance in the long grass as he carried it after him. He ate two ounces. I hurried back to the well-head, deposited him, ran back a hundred yards with my heart in my mouth lest he should follow before I was ready — he meanwhile crouching on the bar full-fluffed and ravenous — and began to whistle again. It needed two verses of the signal-hymn, during which he hopped on the bar of the well-head — and here there flashed through the mind all those things which have not been described in my book, the dangers of the creance catching short on snag or thistle, the necessity of keeping all clear, the mental alertness which was needed to keep all details (and how much could go wrong with how little in this world) clear in one's head, and the quickness of the decision in acting in one way or another in the face of emergency, training desiderata and accident nondesiderata being summed simultaneously and instantaneously — but while they flashed the gos was coming again. It was not that he came. At a hundred yards, the first time he had ever come this distance, it was a question of ‘was coming'. It was a matter appreciable in time.

Thus, when being seemed hopeless and nothing left but to endure, often God would turn a kind face in real reward for labour and, at a dark moment, surprise with his present: so much more lovely as a surprise.

I did an unwise thing, but could not help it: gave Gos a full crop of beef (four ounces) new-bought at Silston, a sparrow, and the foreleg of a rabbit. Stuffed full, startled by the unusual generosity, on the point of making a Falstaffian belch, Gos said good night in the burning moonlight with a rather dazed expression: and I, writing up the day-book in the circle of the lamp, cried Prosit loudly and repeatedly, quaffed fiery liquids of triumph, drank damnation to all enemies, and smashed the glasses on the floor.

[1]
One hindleg would have been enough.

WELL, there it was. The job was practically finished and it had turned out not to be such a difficult one after all. In a few days I should catch two or three wild rabbits alive in my nets, and, when Gos had killed these on a string in the open, which was illegal, he would be ready to fly loose. I could flatter myself that he was practically made, although his manning to crowds and motors was still behindhand. I breathed the air of achievement with some displeasure. It was easy. I should have to find something more powerful to pit myself against next.

It was this that had been working in my mind for several days now, since I had bought the big staples and the strawberry netting in Buckingham. It had been there unconsciously since I first saw the supposed sparrow-hawks in Three Parks Wood, so many weeks ago. Now the boy, who had helped me to dip that distant tail in boiling water at the beginning, was writing to say that a sparrow-hawk which I had kept for him, had been allowed to escape, and that he was without a hawk. I wrote back that I knew of a pair and would try to catch one for him.

Almost certainly vain promise, these were ‘haggard' hawks, the adult creature in the wild state: and I was not even certain of their species. I had only seen them once or twice, and circling so high up, and with such little knowledge in myself of hawks. I had been accustomed to think of only the kestrel as ‘a hawk' and to shoot at him when I could. So far as I knew, the kestrel hunted the fields by preference, had a long tail like a cuckoo, and hovered motionless in the air by inclining his angle of incidence against the wind or possibly by finding thermal currents of upward air. He agitated his wings occasionally by a rapid fraction, had a red back if you had a chance of looking down on him, with whitish underparts, and was a slim, long-bodied, long-winged-looking bird. He was the common churl, the medieval villein.

The hawks in Three Parks Wood did not hover: they circled in the way which falconers aimed at when they taught the reclaimed peregrine to ‘wait on': that is to say, they sailed round and round at a good height. Their tails seemed short in relation to their breadth of wing, and they were compact in appearance. They seemed to spread their tails in flight, where the kestrel usually held his shut like a fan. They hunted the wood rather than the fields, and were generally to be heard in it. They were a pair, with perhaps a family unless they had by now driven the youngsters out: whereas the kestrel seemed usually to be a bachelor peasant. They were in the wood much more often than not, mewing to each other as they hunted in couples. I had only seen them close once, as they chased each other in play a month before, and then I had not known enough to notice whether their wings were rounded or pointed. They had struck me, in the fraction of a second as they sped round the tree, as having the speckled or
barred
or at any rate mottled khaki underparts which I remembered in the boy's sparrow-hawk.

I was pretty sure that they were not kestrels, though not sure; could not dare to hope that they would be the cliff-haunting peregrines of Scotland and Wales: and so I called them sparrow-hawks.

The new craze was in full swing, and I spent nearly all the day making a bow net. It cost the price of two yards of strawberry netting, four large staples and hours of experiment.

The pegs were of hazel, the bow of ash freshly cut. The bow was hinged to its staples by leather joints. When set, it lay in a semicircle on its pegs: when sprung it pulled into the complete circle of shaped netting, which took two hours to knot into shape. On the diameter of the bow there was pegged down a stout section of rough branch with a metal loop in the middle of it. The theory was that a lure — a live pigeon or blackbird — should be tethered to the loop on the rough branch: that the spar-hawk, observing this morsel from above, would stoop upon the lure; and that the austringer, nasconded some fifteen yards away, would pull the string, thus enclosing both lure and spar-hawk in the meshes of the full circle. On the whole, the principle was similar to that of the oldfashioned sieve under which small boys used to catch hungry birds in winter.

When all this was completed, and the leather found to be working firm and easy, I walked over to Tom's cottages and enlisted the aid of Cis. Tom had said that I could borrow four hurdles, and these Cis carried up to the wood: while I trudged beside him, carrying the bow net, the creance, the falconer's bag, a bill-hook, and Gos.