The Goshawk (22 page)

13.2.51

By some sport of chance, the nice word ‘tiercel' has not cropped up in any part of this book. Among the raptors on the whole, the female is always about one third bigger than the male. So the male is called a tiercel. Gos was one.

14.2.51

There is an old proverb which says: ‘When your first wife dies, she makes such a hole in your heart that all the rest slip through.' It is a true one.

Since the days of Gos and Cully, this writer has trained, apart from owls, two merlins, five peregrines, and even been the titular owner for a few brief weeks of a gyr-falcon from Iceland, one of whose siblings was solemnly flown over to Germany in a corrugated-iron aeroplane and presented to General Goering.

Each one of these assassins had his or her own character: they were as individual and different from each other as eight separate anarchists. One remembers them with love and interest. But the chieftain of them all must always be Gos.

The Goshawk, says Aldrovandus, is known as the Bird of Apollo, because he is sacred to the sun. This can only be due to his flaming eye. Looking back through the rather thick mist of fifteen years, I remember him mainly by his armour-plated shins, with the knotted toes ending in their griping scimitars. I wear a beard, and for some reason which I cannot now recall, he once struck me in the chin. I can remember standing, grinning like a wolf, as the blood plied and roped itself in the hairy tangle, while Gos went on with the meal which he was being given. I can remember the feathery ‘plus-fours' which covered his upper thighs, and the way in which the muscles there would clench convulsively when he was in his tyranny. He was a Hittite, a worshipper of Moloch. He immolated victims, sacked cities, put virgins and children to the sword. He was never a shabby tiger. He was a Prussian officer in a pickelhaube, flashing a monocle, who sabred civilians when they crossed his path. He would have got on excellently with Attila, the most truculent of men. He was an Egyptian hieroglyph, a winged bull of Assyria. He was one of the lunatic dukes or cardinals in the Elizabethan plays of Webster.

[1]
Of course
I
stopped trying to catch them when
I
realized they were hobbies.

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1951 by T. H. White; copyright renewed © 1979 by Lloyd's Bank Trust Company (Channel Islands) Limited

Introduction copyright © 2007 by Marie Winn

All rights reserved.

Cover painting: Bruno Andreas Liljefors, Goshawk and Black Game (detail), 1884 Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden/Bridgeman Art Library

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

White, T. H. (Terence Hanbury), 1906–1964.

The goshawk / by T. H. White ; introduction by Marie Winn.

  p. cm.— (New york review books classics)

Originally published: London : Cape, 1951.

ISBN-13: 978-1-59017-249-0 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-59017-249-3 (alk. paper)

1. Falconry. 2. Goshawk—Biography. I. Title.

SK321. W5 2007

799.2'32—dc22

eISBN 978-1-59017-546-0
v1.0

For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit
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