The Goshawk (4 page)

The first stage in training a hawk was called ‘manning' him: and this meant to make him accustomed to man in all his activities, so that he was no longer frightened. With a falcon, you first accustomed him to yourself in the dark, later in shaded light, later by day: finally you brought him to a stranger who had been instructed to sit quite still without looking at him, and so on. A goshawk might take about two months, before he would tolerate motor cars and everything else. This was the reason why the fisherman's visit had been an interesting step, why the introduction of the boy, in full daylight, was now to be a crisis.

The crisis was successful. Thinking about it in advance, as one had to plot extempore each step in the training of a hawk, I had kept back the rabbit's liver, a tit-bit, as a bribe similar to the jam in which they used to give us powders. I told the boy my plans, went down to Gos and fed him with half the liver; admitted the boy five minutes later; waited till the hawk had taken stock of him: brought him, on the left hand, three times up to my chest — nearer, nearer, finally touching — and at the fourth time, passing the right hand gently over his back, held him soft but firm in a single movement. Talking to him, holding him compactly so that because he could not struggle he would not afterwards remember it as a struggle, we dipped the tail feathers into the saucepan, changed the worn jess for a new one, substituted a proper leather leash for the piece of string, and pressed Gos gently back on the fist, without an unhappy memory. Immediately, although the boy was there, Gos fell upon the remainder of the liver, and wolfed it as if he had never eaten anywhere but on the glove: square-straddled, grip-taloned, mantling over the bloody morsels, tearing at them like the eagle of Prometheus.

‘Isn't he lovely!' said the boy, with awe and reverence, and a proper lust to have one too.

A keeper of long-winged hawks used to be called a falconer, of short-winged hawks an austringer. The word was derived from the same root as ostrich, the biggest of birds. The training of the goshawk, the largest European short-winged hawk, might be expected to last about two months. In this time an ungovernable creature would have been taught to do, under government, what it would instinctively have done in two or three days in a free state. Two months was a long time.

What a goshawk learned in one day would rarely be appreciable to anybody but its master, so cautious and delicate was the progress, and the real difficulty of writing a book upon the subject would be to know which detail ought to be left out. I had decided to write a book. In the hawk's day-book every meal was entered, as it happened, with its time and amount, and every step, forward or backward, was noted with the tedium of true love. From this a patient reader would have to be spared. Yet half the interest, if there were any, in a book about falconry, would obviously reside in these very details. Then again, there was the danger of being didactic or too technical, and there was the folly of thinking that anybody would want to buy a book about mere birds — with no filmstresses in it, and no close-up hug in the last chapter. All the same, I had to write a book of some sort, for I only had a hundred pounds in the world and my keeper's cottage cost me five shillings a week. It seemed best to write about what I was interested in.

My intellectual friends of those days, between the wars, used to say to me: ‘Why on earth do you waste your talents feeding wild birds with dead rabbits?' Was this a man's work today? They urged that I was an intelligent fellow: I must be serious. ‘To arms!' they cried. ‘Down with the Fascists, and Long Live the People!' Thus, as we have since seen, everybody was to fly to arms, and shoot the people.

It was useless to tell them that I would rather shoot rabbits than people.

But what on earth was the book to be about? It would be about the efforts of a second-rate philosopher who lived alone in a wood, being tired of most humans in any case, to train a person who was not human, but a bird. These efforts might have some value because they were continually faced with those difficulties which the mind has to circumvent, because falconry was an historic though dying sport, because the faculties exercised were those which throve among trees rather than houses, and because the whole thing was inexpressibly difficult. There were two men I knew of by correspondence, to whom one could turn for advice. They were busy themselves, and might take a fortnight to answer a letter. With the aid of these answers, and of three printed books, I was trying to reconquer a territory over which the contemporaries of Chaucer had rambled free.

Down with the rabbits then, and long live the people. If my readers liked to take a patient excursion into the fields and back into the past, so. And if not, well; at least I would not shoot the ones who did not read me.

I would have to start with sleep. There must have been many thousands of humans living then who had had no sleep for three days and three nights, on account of the first World War. But the point was that the austringer, since he rode to battle in the train of William, had been accustomed to perform this feat for three nights, every time he acquired a passage hawk. Man against bird, with God for an umpire, they had sat each other out for three thousand years. When the austringer was married or provided with assistants, it had no doubt been easy to cheat in the great match. He would have taken a sea-watch now and then, while another carried on the battle. But when he was a bachelor, when poor and without assistance, he, in his own person, had vanquished the endurance of the king of birds by pitting against it the endurance of a servant of man.

From that Monday morning until four o'clock on the Thursday morning, I had six and a half hours of odd sleep. It was enjoyable. The watching of hawks, the triumph over them (as it were) man against man, the extremely beautiful experiences of night denied to so large a percentage of civilization, the feeling of triumphant endurance which emerged from so many hells in which sleep was lusted for, the weary joy with which the succeeding capitulations of the enemy were noted one after the other, it was these things which, under the heading of their days, I must try to remember.

It would be better to leave them in the jumble to which the greed for sleep reduced them, just bringing to coherence that maze of almost somnambulant entries in the day-book, stragglingly written with one hand while the hawk sat on the other. They were a cry from hell, but of the triumphant and delighted damned. ‘If you don't mind the inconvenience of sitting up with him three nights,' said my authority, Gilbert Blaine, ‘the falcon may be tamed in three days.' Magnificent meiosis! Unconquerable martyr to the noble science!

There were two places: a small kitchen, with a fire in it and an easy chair, was one, and the other was that lamp-lit barn. The wind came through the cracks in the weather-boarding on one side, went out through the lattice work into the night which the lamp made black. A few sticks, bottles, half bricks, spider's webs and part of a rusty oven adorned the Rembrandt interior. This was the torture chamber, the medieval dungeon in which the robber baron was to be tormented. One felt like an executioner, very much as if the black mask ought to have concealed one's face, as one worked by dim wick-light in solitude amid the shrieks of the victim. Like a hare, like a child in agony, like a crazed captive in horrors of the Bastille, Gos screamed as he bated, hung twisting upside down with yell upon yell. And then, suddenly, there was an owl outside. The screams were answered. ‘A moi! A moi! Auita! Hilfe!' And ‘Coming! Coming!' cried the owl: ‘Be brave, we will help, hold out!' It was eerie, terrifying almost, to stand between the counter-answered shrieks of the martyr and his compatriot, in the dungeon silent and night-stricken.

The day-book holds forgotten pictures. There was the man swaying gently to and fro on his feet, like a pendulum. He held the hawk on one fist and a rabbit's leg in the other, and he was reciting. His eyes were shut, and so were the hawk's. Both were asleep. There was the man counting the diminishing number of bates at each visit: there were the walks along solitary ridings during the day-time, the mental calculations at each advance, the half-hours by the kitchen fire in which pen and whisky tried to keep pace with sleep, the fingers which smarted from pecks, the fetching of coal through the dewy night grass under an enormous orange moon in its last quarter: there were mist, wet boots, silence, solitude, stars, success and obedience.

On the last night everything came to a head. Man's stamina had failed with hawk's, so that now I had convinced myself that he might be watched in the kitchen. It had a tiled floor which his mutes would not stain, a fire, an aladdin lamp, and a chair. My dear bitch Brownie sat on a chair to the right of the fire, myself to the left, and the hawk stood on an improvised perch in the middle. Screaming no longer, but cheeping like a robin, Gos did not know which way to look. As the strong lamp was turned up he watched it closely, for it was magic. The beam rose to the ceiling, and he followed it upward to its circle of light. I turned it up and down to keep him awake, and his head went with the light. Raising his tail, he squirted a jet of mutes across the floor, looked round in tired pride of creation. The hours went and his head drooped, his eyes blinked and sealed. I got up to take him on fist so that he should not sleep: but was stupid with watching also, and fumbled the knots. The wings swept out at the wrong moment, the leash slipped, and the worn-out eagle was sitting on the top of a Sèvres tureen, the only piece of valuable china in the room. The sleep-shotten man collected his wits to face the new crisis. Both were too beaten to give each other trouble. But, just as the hawk was being tied to the perch again, the bitch, as a third party, joined in. Brownie, who had lived as often my sole and always my chief and most beloved companion for two years, had for days and nights been without notice. Her anxious face, watching this incomprehensible desertion, had become more and more pitiful without receiving pity. Suddenly it was too much for her. She came humbly, heart-brokenly, asking with fear and desolation for any re-assurance. Of this new, mad-eyed and absent master she was even afraid, and came up in a way which it would hurt to describe. She said: Am I for always thrown off? So now the man had to pull himself together for a new demand, to comfort the poor creature out of a heart with no energy to spare. Her puzzled and sorrowful face was too much for exhaustion.

When Gos finally gave in, the conquest was a visible one. Sitting on the fist, his head drooped, and his wings mantled. No longer firm and spruce at the shoulders, they hung down on either side of the body, humbly resting their forward edges against the supporting arm. The eyelids irresistibly rose up over the capitulated eyes, the head nodded for the sleep which his master, as tired as he was, was forced by a gentle movement to deny him. Between the two protagonists a link had been established, of pity on the one side and confidence on the other. We had waited patiently for seventy-two hours for this moment; the moment at which the hawk, co-erced by no cruelty of mine but only by the desire for sleep (which he did not connect with me), could first say with confidence: ‘I am so sleepy that I will trust this glove as a perch to sleep on, even though you stroke me, even though you have no wings and a beak of pliable gristle.'

A solitary and self-supporting austringer had little time in which to live a life of his own, could not, in fact, live at all except in so far as his life was his work. In this respect he resembled the agricultural labourer of the last century. For every holiday which he took away from the hawk, the hawk would go back in its training twice as fast as he could hope to make it go forward. Theoretically he ought to have carried the creature with him wherever he went, from dawn till dark, and ought only to have visited the places which suited the hawk. He was manning it now, introducing it successively to one shock after another. Its excursions were to be planned on this basis, so that it met a stranger standing still, a stranger walking and running, two strangers, children, groups, a bicyclist, a motor car, traffic, and so on. All the time it ought to have lived, and had to eat, on the glove alone. It had got to learn to regard that glove as its natural home and perch, so that, when the great and distant day arrived for flying it free, it would return to the glove automatically, having no life outside it. The quickest way to train a goshawk would have been to get up at six o'clock and to carry the bird about for twelve hours every day, for a month or two, without intermission.
[2]
So that even a retainered austringer would have been a busy man.

I got up again at noon, for now the problem of food was becoming pressing. There was not only the ideal of carrying Gos all day, but also the necessity of killing his food and dressing my own. This brings in the next picture, not that of endurance by night nor of the ceaseless daily hardihood implicit in this kind of colonist's existence, but the picture of the weather and the season. Nothing was more woven into the stuff of falconry than the sun and the wind. Being so much out in the open gave a tone to the whole thing, a background to life very different from any local background of tree or house. The same field or hawk was changed in rain, the same circumstances were happy or sorrowful as the sun shone. When I had been about the business for a month or two, farmers would ask me whether it was going to be fine on the morrow in much the same way as one is supposed to ask a mariner. They reposed but little confidence in my judgment, it is true, but occasionally they would take the trouble to ask and to reflect upon the answer; for they knew that my eye was in the sky as much as theirs. I was wrong about as often as they were; which was generally.

So there should be given a picture of the weather as we started. It was at the end of July, and, though the spring and summer had been miserable in England, just then we had a few fine moments. This cast a happy tone over the first days with Gos, so that they remember themselves as days of long walking. In the afternoons mainly I used to go out for his food, for it was preferable that he should be given fresh food every day. There were long tours, very contented to be alone at last, with the gun-barrel warm in the sun: there was the busy life of the summer hedges, with the wide stalks, and the quite untroubled murder of rabbits sitting. One was shooting not in the least for sport, but for the pot, and it was necessary to get back to the hawk as quickly as possible. The necessity of wasting no time and of killing with certainty had a terrible effect upon the shooting, making one poke out of anxiety, and I wondered what would happen when the next World War had reduced us to savagery and hunting for ourselves. The art of shooting flying would fall into abeyance then, with the looted cartridges scarce and the food so precious. When the cartridges had run right out the goshawk would be a real blessing. The French called him
cuisinier
, the caterer for the mess.