The Goshawk

  I wondered now whether the falconer was there at the time, and whether the goshawk was still being trained like Gos. If so, did the falconer assist his own goshawk to eat his own merlin? A nice question.

  It was drowsy in the kitchen, with the music and the rain outside. I was stroking a murderer, a savage. Gos knew that might had always been right, that the Vikings slew the last two kings of Northumbria because the Gokstad ship could come so strongly in from sea, that William had cavalry at Hastings as Edward III had archers on the wings at Crecy, that the press barons of the year I was writing about were right about re-armament in spite of the New Statesman. It was a sad truth, but we still lived in the Middle Ages. The New Statesman was a platonic organ unfortunately, which believed in logic and ‘right and wrong’ and the world of noun-plus-verb ideas. Hitler and Mussolini, Gos and the irreclaimable villein kestrel, seals that preyed on salmon and salmon that preyed on herrings that preyed on plankton that preyed on something else: these knew that God had given a law in which only one thing was right, the energy to live by blood, and to procreate.

  Unfortunate, dark, and immoral goshawk: I had myself been subjected to his brutality. In the beak he was not formidable, but in the talons there was death. He would slay a rabbit in his grip, by merely crushing its skull. Once, when he thought I was going to take his food away from him, he had struck my bare forefinger. It had been a Bank of England apprehension, a painful impotence, a Come-you-here arrest by all-powerful police — I should only have hurt myself horribly by trying to get away, and was already being hurt. He had held the glove with one talon, the bare forefinger with the other, so tightly that only one method of escape had been open to me, and that had been to tear him in half. In the process I should have pulled all the flesh off the finger, like stripping the rubber off an insulated wire. Not from courage, but from necessity, I had stood quiet and unprotesting, speaking to him calmly until he let go.

  A homicidal maniac: but now he was enjoying to be stroked. We were again in love.

  Saturday

  It was another pouring day and the wireless had suddenly died. There was nothing to do until the battery was replaced, and then I would carry Gos in the kitchen, let him listen to his music as before. I walked a mile or two to telephone for the battery, and then thought that I would fill in time, until it arrived, by painting the woodwork in the front-door passage. But note this. In order that Gos should be as comfortable as possible in the meantime, I opened the door of the mews and tied an extra six yards of the tarred twine between the end of his leather leash and the ring of the mews perch. I struck the bow perch into the ground just outside the door. By this arrangement, since he now had about seven yards law in what he was tied by, he could fly out to the bow perch to take the air between the showers or back again to the perch inside the mews when the rain made his feathers uncomfortable. I set to work.

  After the passage I thought I would give the kitchen door the coat of blue which it had long needed, but the blue paint lay in a corner of the mews. I went to fetch it, as I had previously fetched the red for the passage. I noticed that the ill-weather and my preoccupation must have put Gos into one of his moods, for he bated away from me when I came in for the paint, and, being on this long twine, flew right up to the rafters. I paid no particular attention, but went on to look for the paint, while Gos, changing his mind about the rafters, flew out of the door toward the bow perch outside. Evidently he preferred not even to share the room with me today, for I was refusing him my full attention. I took up the paint and came out of the door. Gos was not on the perch. I looked round the door. I could not see him.

  I cannot remember that my heart stopped beating at any particular time. The blow was stunning, so final after six weeks of unremitting faith that it was tempered to me as being beyond appreciation. It was like death in a way, something too vast to hurt much or even to upset you. I saw the end of the twine lying loose, with no leash tied to it. It had snapped quite clean. Gos had gone.

  Gos, in the rain and hurricane, was gone. I did not even know where he was gone. I told my neighbour. I went out with a lure of dead rabbit, walking vaguely all about among the trees and whistling of the Lord, my Shepherd, in a stupefied way. I went from tree to tree in a radius of a hundred yards, but mainly down wind, whistling and trying to think. It was best to be calm: to remember, if possible, what contingent advice, if any, had been given in the books. Failure. My living had depended on writing about him: but now not.

  They went downwind: but, on the other hand, the well-head at which he had always been fed on his creance was up wind. I went twice round all these trees. It was noon, the time of dinner.

  If one could convey the hopelessness of the task, the hundred thousand trees, the hawk never really manned. I went in to the dinner, thinking that it would be best to have a little break: to be calm: to think gently. Perhaps I should remember some simple instructions in one of the books. With a book open in front of me, I began to eat. But it was impossible. Knowing that my neighbour was going to Buckingham I thought to ask that she would buy me some beef steak as a lure. I went out half fed, tied various parts of my remaining rabbit to the bow perch, in the mews, and on the well-head. Then I stepped over to ask for the steak.

  I was standing outside the door when I noticed a rook cawing at a tree. A couple of hundred yards away downwind, he circled the top, cursing. I ran at once, and there was Gos. Confused, obstinate, too wet to fly, he sat on the tip of the topmost branch and radiated indecision.

  I stood in the sousing rain, hatless and coatless for half an hour, holding out a piece of liver and a handkerchief as a lure. He would not come.

  The tempestuous air came gustily, increasingly, until he was exasperated. Half thinking to come down to me he shook out his wings, but wheeled in a stream of wind which came just at that wrong moment, but swung, but was blown away. I ran, trying to mark him down, but the wet wind went too fast.

  Three hours later I was pretty sure of his position, having noticed the cursing of blackbirds, magpies and rooks in a certain quarter, but I could not see him. I came home to think and get help.

  At six o’clock I went back to the place at which I had last suspected him, knowing that he would still be there on account of the rain. Hawks did not like to fly when thoroughly wet. William came with me, my present help in time of trouble. I left him at various key places which commanded a wide horizon, going round myself whistling. Quite soon we had marked him at the top of a tree in the middle of the wood. The wood was thick, almost impassable. I went in, leaving William to observe from outside in case the hawk should again swing out of the wood’s restricted purview. From then till eight o’clock I knew where he was, all the time. William went back for the tame pigeon and this I now used as lure, in desperation making the poor creature flap its wings and finally fly at the end of a creance. Gos began to stoop at the pigeon, but turned aside as the creance checked it: a series of half-hearted stoops which carried him from tree to tree, like a swing. If only I had gone on with this, I should have had him. But the brutality was too much. I had known this pigeon: it had sat on my finger: I could not bear any longer to cast it in the air and to pluck it down, terrified and exhausted.

  The daylight began to fail and I ceased to disturb him. There was another plan, which depended upon marking him to roost in a particular tree. If I could succeed in doing this, I knew that I might go out again at midnight, with rope, ladder, hooked salmon rod, and an electric torch. I should then have an even chance of taking him up, sleepy, dazzled and forgetful of his recent circumstances. Before, I had reckoned the chances as many thousands to one.

  I got William, and Graham Wheeler, who had appeared meanwhile, to go away upon some pretext or other. It was important that the one person who enjoyed some measure of Gos’s confidence should be left alone with him while he went to sleep. I did not explain this to the boys.

  I stood under the tree, whistling, moving about, accustoming him to the bustle which would later attend
my ascent by ladder and rope.

  The accursed rottenness of that new twine, my imbecile stupidity in going on using it when I had already been twice warned by breaks, and now the fatal enthusiasm of the young. Graham wanted to be in it, wanted not to miss the fun. He made a pretext for coming back. I cried to him to keep away, but it was too late. A silent, an invisible shadow in the deep twilight, it had sloped away even before I cried. Gos, slanting off the tree at the moment of nightfall, was now definitely untraceable.

  My last fifty-fifty chance, my thought and life for six weeks, my lunatic from the Rhine: I searched for him with an electric torch for two more hours, but he was gone.

  PART TWO

  Sunday

  THERE were two days of dejection, of distracted and ineffectual plans, skirring the country round. In them there was little sleep and much walking, while Gos, an enormous and distant kite, sailed in a five-mile radius among a cloud of furious rooks. I saw him sometimes closer than that: the free slave rejoicing. Like the parents of Peter Pan, I left his mews door open, and food tied to his perches: but the pigs got in and ate that. I had an extraordinary feeling as I watched him on his majestic and leisurely circles, a feeling which I had never had before with a wild creature, for I knew what he was thinking. I could distinguish his circumstances a mile away, and forecast his reactions. He looked very happy.

  It meant beginning all again, and at a bad season of the year. Hawks were taken from the nest as eyases, to supply the small market which remained for them. They hatched somewhere about June and I could not get an eyas until next year. There was one other way of obtaining a hawk, and that was to get a passage hawk captured on the wing in autumn. They were rare. In the old days when the great falconer’s toast could still be drunk (Here’s to them that shoot and miss) there had been a village in Holland which lived entirely by its trade in hawks and falcons. It lay at the edge of a heath situated directly on one of the great migratory routes of birds; the heath took its name from the falcons which followed the birds: and this name was given also to the village. Valkenswaard: Falconsheath: you had to speak it aloud to hear its music. There the hereditary families of falconers lay out in their huts to catch the lovely wild birds, with incredible ingenuity and patience, and there a great fair was held, to which the austringers and falconers of principalities and powers resorted for the purchase of adult hawks: often at great prices in the public auction. All was gone. Mollen, the last representative of a noble and ancient trade, had given up catching passage hawks ten years ago: the heath had been broken up, the link broken. The duke’s men, the prince’s men, the king’s men who congregated at the great fair — hawk masters with lean and worried looks who, like the Latham described by David Garnett, would be ready to ‘gallop off with an expression of torment on their faces’ — they and the hawk-catchers with their centuries of experience in patience and cunning and benevolence (nobody could be a master of hawks without benevolence) and the very raison d’être of that village name near Eindhoven: all, like my own Gos, were now gone.

  It happened like this in the world. Old things lost their grip and dropped away; not always because they were bad things, but sometimes because the new things were more bad, and stronger.

  Meanwhile there remained my lonely problem. No austringer worth his salt would wish to buy a hawk trained by anybody else: eyases were out of season: the passage hawk was a rarity, probably an expensive one beyond my means, and I might get no answers to my inquiries for these creatures in England, Scotland, Holland and Germany. There seemed to be only two things which I could do. One was by some means to catch Gos again, the other was to catch one of the two supposed sparrow-hawks in Three Parks Wood.

  I leave out the shifts and expedients of two miserable days, and tell about those things which seemed to concern the future. If Gos did not previously get himself caught in a tree by his jesses, and so hang himself to death after forty-eight hours of dear felicity, I would attempt to establish the route of his daily round. I supposed, like a kestrel, he would have one. If so, I would make a trap for him that consisted only of a dozen feathers and a piece of fishing line— no more twine. I had also begun to make a portable hide by buying an army blanket which, having soaked it, I had planted with grass seed and mustard. If this grew in a satisfactory way, I should be able to lie down under a blanket of grass before my trap. It might work.

  The other thing was the question of the sparrow-hawks. I had been up every day to visit the live decoy, to ease his jesses, and to change his food and water. Yesterday I had given him a new high perch from which he would find it difficult to entangle his leash. Today I had found him killed. It had been necessary to look closely at the scene of the tragedy, in order to find out what had killed him. In the first place his leash was not at all entangled, so that it did not seem likely that he had become hitched up at ground level and there killed by a fox. Nor had he been barbarously eaten. Something had plumed his breast carefully and neatly picked the flesh off one leg. He had been eviscerated. All this pointed toward a sort of hawk. There were, on the other hand, disturbing features. The whole head had been eaten, and it looked as if part of the viscera had been. This did not at the time seem to me characteristic of a hawk: I thought that the head being so wholly consumed pointed to a fox or rodent (though the plucking of the breast cancelled this) and the eating of the bowels seemed like a carrion crow. The latter, indeed, especially with the head eaten also — though hawks liked brains — seemed the most probable guess. Whatever the truth, it was worth hoping that it might have been one of the hawks. This being the case, I should go up tomorrow at three in the morning to wait all day with a new pigeon. (I had bought two more, and would be able to spare the friend who sat upon my fist.)

  But all the same, nothing would ever be as fine as Gos. The great and good Mr. Gilbert Blaine, whose book I cherished, had confessed to me in a letter that he did not love goshawks. Their crazy and suspicious temperament had alienated him from them, as it had most falconers. Perhaps for this reason, I had loved Gos. I always loved the unteachable, the untouchable, the underdog. And it had been difficult. For every minute of patience in quarrel my understanding of him and queer affection for his brave and somehow pathetic mania had grown insensibly. I felt lonely without him and caught myself at moments wondering what I ought to be doing now. After all, it had been quite right of him to resist to the last: to recognize, long after a falcon would have given in (you could train two or three falcons in the time of one goshawk), that I was an unnatural force. Why should he, a wild princeling of Teutonic origin, submit to an enforced captivity? He had hated and distrusted me, the intransigent small robber baron. He had had guts to stand up against love so long. I hoped he would snap his jesses safely, the ungovernable barbarian, and live a very long, happy life in the wild world: unless I could catch him again as a partner whom I should never dare to treat as captive. He deserved to be free, but I wanted him still. Love asketh but himself to please, To bind another to his delight, Joys in another’s loss of ease, And builds a hell in heaven’s despite.

  Monday

  The passage hawk was said to be what the racehorse was to the hack. Wild, well-kept, sleek, noble: he was the opposite of the dowdy eyas who, having been taken from the nest, had depended on the clumsy mothering of a human being for his diet and toilet. No broken feathers there, no straggling plumage and lumpish, ill-kempt education. He had been educated by nature into perfect poise and sensibility: he, by curved beak and sudden gripe, had learned to be a natural gentleman, an epicure, a confident noble, as we by means of civilization had ceased to learn to be. Certain, inexpressibly clever without mean suspicion, buoyant, whole in mind and body, this was the creature against whose personality I had now to pit my human wits.

  Poor Caliban rose from his bed obediently at three o’clock, and sat with his head in his hands on the edge of it. Everything in the little room was white, except the rich iron-rust of the pile carpet and the golden eiderdown and the brown shell pattern o
f the curtains. Even the dog was red. She lay under the bed as a special concession, cosy, sleepier than her master and under no compulsion to rise so early. She would only be a nuisance and a danger in the hide. The candle made a weak brightness in the room.

  He rose at three, but it took the slow, early fingers an hour to dress themselves and to collect their gear. It was raining with cold persistence outside, as the tortoise fingers toiled over the great boots and heavy gaiters. To tie the false jesses on a stupid cock-pigeon took time and time.

  But the long walk up to the wood gained by its deliberation. Far down in his silurian mind he was conscious of circumspection, closing the gates silently when he was within half a mile, blessing the dim and blurring rain which warred on the man’s side against the violent moonlight of the season. Already a growing wind masked his small noises, blowing away from the wood in his direction. He walked close to the hedge.

  They were there at last. When the pigeon was leashed to the centre and the trap in working order, he lay down on a ground-sheet in his hurdle cave, conscious that no bird or beast had been disturbed by his manœuvres. For an hour he went to sleep.

  There was an invariable resident population in this small quarter of the wood, and they woke that day in this rotation: rook, blackbird, robin, pigeon, jay. A small and unexciting cast, this slow drama with its prodigious entr’actes and Aeschylean chorus was all the interest which I was to have for fourteen hours, framed on a stage a few yards square between the boughs. The west wind, which all day grew and grew, till it had blown away the rain and become a hurricane, made sea-music in the ash-poles to accompany the play. The same wind kept the hawks from working, and I only heard them twice. Even then I may have been mistaken.