The hours of patience showed a single tragic character on the stage all day. A kind of Cassandra, with little or no scope for acting, the pigeon lay flat on its stomach in the middle of the trap. A fat pigeon, a cock pigeon, at home an assertive and talkative pigeon: here it elected to lie on its stomach because its feet were tied. If it had chosen to take one pace backward it could have stood erect, have moved and fed itself in a comfortable little circle: but it preferred to take one pace forward, thus going to the limit of its jesses, which now threw it on its stomach. The tragic action consisted of lying there and looking in various directions at long intervals. Every hour or so one of the other actors would cross the stage aimlessly: a humble dunnock flitting over the trap, or the yeomanly blackbird giving Cassandra a wide berth. At noon the drama reached its climax. A magpie entered shiftily on foot. Reminiscent somehow of Venice, of Italian comedy, this masked and cloaked carnival figure perked gingerly yet prancingly about the stage. Punchinello, Pagliacci, he was doomed to some calamity; meanwhile he strutted about in craven braggadoccio. He was joined by another. A weak sun, blown into brightness by the gale, shone gloriously on the blue sheen of their folded wings. Sinister and pathetic conspirators, with sharp tails for swords under their cloaks, a fresh plot soon entered their weak heads. And for them, but not for me, the scene changed to another part of the wood.
Before I left in the evening I altered the trap a little, so that it pulled more easily, re-thatched the roof of the hide with thicker boughs, tied up a ground-sheet as a kind of waterproof ceiling, and made myself a little bench to sit on out of hazel poles. To lie all day in a cramped position, with nothing to do but shiver and watch Cassandra, made one more tired for writing the day-book in the evening than a walk of thirty miles.
I left Cassandra on a long leash like his predecessor, to see what might betide.
Tuesday
The great wind had mauled the trees, combed the grasses and made the woods a multitudinous sea for two days. The year had turned, so early and after such a mockery of summer. Today there had been a touch of north in the wind, who was veering with the sun, and tomorrow we might have fine. But the prime was gone.
All news was of sorrow and disaster. Ploughing along with binoculars in Dante’s second circle—it was here that the remorseless wind carried Semiramis and her train, whom lust made sinful, round like cranes—sitting in hedges for a windbreak, or sucking up the sodden rides of Three Parks Wood, this day I had not seen Gos nor either of the spar-hawks. All sorts of possibilities presented themselves. Any one of them might be the single cause, but laid together they presented a picture like this: Gos, on his wide circuit, had come across the smaller hawks and killed or driven them out. He then had himself been driven by the wind far away to the east, and there, caught by his jesses, was hanging to starve and die of apoplexy.
It might have been that the hawks had not liked to move in the wind. Gos might simply have migrated on. Any smaller part of the picture might be the whole.
So, though it was useless to lie out in the hide next day, without knowing that the hawks were there, the tragedy might not be complete. It would be worth fetching a circumbendibus with the binoculars round the Lillingstones, Whittlebury, Silverstone, Biddlesden and Chackmore, or some part of that great circuit. Three Parks Wood ought also to be watched for an hour or so. If the hawks could be placed, it would be worth hiding again on the day after. But they must first be marked down for sure, on a day with less wind.
Cassandra was unharmed when I went to him—his sex did not alter his classical nature. He had tied himself up as much as possible and ended by securing himself in a thicket. I unravelled him, altered his jesses, although with a new loop they had not constricted his legs at all, put him on the trap (but free to reach a perch out of fox’s way) and left him to his stupid vigil. These creatures did not afflict one by seeming frightened or aware of their circumstances. Impassive and idiotic scapegoats, they showed nothing but a complacent lunacy.
Then I amused myself by making a new trap for the spar-hawks, outside the wood. This I laid on a tree-stump beside a hedgerow, about four hundred yards away from the wood, in case the creatures (being there after all), did not make a habit of killing actually at home. I thought I had heard them hunting this hedgerow. The trap, although it was the first time I myself had tried to construct it, had been a recognized method of catching hawks under certain circumstances. It was used with a lure the day after losing a hawk. It might or might not be efficacious (provided the hawks were still about), but it was delightful to make and accurate to work.
An iron bar was driven into the ground beside a tree stump and about six short feathers were stuck round the perimeter of the stump. A fishing line was tied to the bar and passed (preferably using the eye of a rabbit wire), in a simple loop round the feathers. It then went on to the hide, for the austringer to pull at the critical moment. A lure—in this case, since these were wild spar-hawks, it would have to be a live blackbird tethered—was attached to the tree stump at the place marked with a cross. If the hawk killed and began to eat the lure, I was to pull the fishing line. The loop, sliding up the pliant feathers, would whip into a knot about his legs. The height at which this loop became a knot could be altered by making the attachment to the iron bar higher or lower. I tested it repeatedly by catching my binoculars and finally left it at a height which would, by reckoning, take the hawk below the knee when it was standing on a blackbird.
It was well enough to construct these traps, but it was the watching them for a day of fourteen hours that tested the basic metal of the historian. Every falconer was an historian, a man who had found the hurly-burly of present-day lunacy to be less well done than the savage decency of ages long overpowered, and overpowered because they had not been wicked enough to conquer the wickedness that time had brought to accost them.
Nothing else was worth writing down except that I fell in with a local kestrel and got on close terms with him by means of the binoculars. I was looking at a tree whose upper branches had been killed by the ivy and thinking what an admirable tree this would be for a hawk to sit on. Hawks liked to sit on dead, high branches, because this gave them a good view in all directions. I began to focus the glasses on the top, when a bird anchored himself there. I stared at him long, thinking that he was not a hawk but ought to be. A far way off, he sat with his body inclined forward, where a hawk would have sat upright. As I was approaching he flew again, giving a first chance to observe his flight; and certainly he was a hawk. His body had been inclined forward to breast the wind. I chased him for some time, long enough to be sure of his russet aura, his bachelor habits, and to feel more and more certain that the creatures which I was after in the wood were really sparrow-hawks. The kestrel seems to be most easily distinguished by his lonely peasantry. He, unlike the hunting pair of woodland bandits, went solitary and monastic about his low-flying rounds. Linnaeus, apropos of this, named the chaffinch coelebs, because the male flocks separated themselves from the females after the autumn.
Thinking of these flocks, and at a still further remove, I noted that my great namesake of Selborne defined September 15th in his Naturalist’s Calendar with the few words: ‘Ivy fl., starlings congregate.’ And so they did. The starlings and felts were already in their congregations, as the rooks were, thus causing many short-sighted shooters to wonder if the second of them were not coveys of partridges. But note the verb he used. Starlings ‘congregate’. One could be struck into a kind of muse, thinking that starlings have been upon the face of the earth longer than man has been, and wondering what kind of yearly business is transacted at these moots, so much more ancient than the witangemoot from which we trace our dying human parliaments.
Wednesday
To write something which was of enduring beauty, this was the ambition of every writer: as it was the ambition of the joiner and architect and the constructor of any kind. It was not the beauty but the endurance, for endurance was beautiful. It was also all that we cou
ld do. It was a consolation, even a high and positive joy, to make something true: some table, which, sat on, when it was meant only to be eaten off, would not splinter or shatter. It was not for the constructor that the beauty was made, but for the thing itself. He would triumph to know that some contribution had been made: some sort of consoling contribution quite timeless and without relation to his own profit. Sometimes we knew, half tipsy or listening to music, that at the heart of some world there lay a chord to which vibrating gave reality. With its reality there was music and truth and the permanence of good workmanship. To give birth to this, with whatever male travail, was not only all that man could do: it was also all that eclipsed humanity of either sex could do: it was the human contribution to the universe. Absolutely bludgeoned by jazz and mechanical achievement, the artist yearned to discover permanence, some life of happy permanence which he by fixing could create to the satisfaction of after-people who also looked. This was it, as the poets realized, to be a mother of immortal song: to say Yes when it was, and No when it was: to make enduringly true that perhaps quite small occasional table off which subsequent generations could eat, without breaking it down: to help the timeless benevolence which should be that of this lonely and little race: to join the affection which had lasted between William the Conqueror and George VI. Wheelwrights, smiths, farmers, carpenters, and mothers of large families knew this.
It had been a day of profound depression. Too misty at six o’clock for it to be possible to see twenty yards, it was useless to start the circumbendibus in search of Gos before light. The postman had brought a message from Tom that the rooks were making a great to-do in Hoptoft Spinney. Able by then to see two fields ahead, I had set off on a stern chase which lasted till dusk and showed nothing. A little owl, seen for the third time, habited the south side of the wood: the kestrel worked from the east: the sparrow-hawks had definitely left. Gos was lost. Somewhere in the million trees which made a musical shade about his sometime mews, the young Absalom hung by his jesses.
Rooks at this season of the year moved about in enormous throngs, at dawn and sunset, many hundreds together. Trailing along with their loud and prolonged Hurrahs, they introduced my favourite evening quotation from Shakespeare. Night thickens and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood. But notice, as with Gilbert White, the words he used for their flight. ‘Makes wing.’ How better could be described that laborious and visible manufacture of flight, the wings hoisted and depressed, with which this particular bird made its way through the air? Just as that immortal man beat everybody at everything, so he naturally beat the naturalists at their own game. He took us in his stride.
It was startling to read Shakespeare after a course of falconry. The Taming of the Shrew was pure hawk-mastery and must have been a play of enormous vividness to a generation which understood the falcon. It was as if a great dramatist of today were to write a play in which, by subjecting her to the applied laws of tennis, or golf, or cricket (or whatever footling theoretical game might be said to be the public favourite nowadays), a woman were brought under her husband’s government. Petruchio tamed his Kate as an austringer did his hawk, and he was conscious of the fact. When you had watched a hawk and regulated its appetite, this kind of speech burst into life:
Thus have I politicly begun my reign,
And ’tis my hope to end successfully.
My falcon now is sharp and passing empty;
And, till she stoop, she must not be full-gorged,
For then she never looks upon her lure.
Another way I have to man my haggard,
To make her come, and know her keeper’s call,
That is, to watch her, as we watch those kites
That bate, and beat, and will not be obedient.
She ate no meat today, nor none shall eat:
Last night she slept not, nor tonight she shall not.
‘Falcon’, ‘sharp-set’, ‘stoop’, ‘full-gorged’, ‘lure’, ‘haggard’, ‘watch’, ‘man’, and ‘bate’, were technical terms still used, each with a definite meaning. Kate, by the way, sounded very like Kite to me.
And then Othello:
If I do prove her haggard,
Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings,
I’d whistle her off, and let her down the wind
To prey at fortune.
To one who had just lost his hawk, and seen him whirled away down-wind, this was one of the most devastating oaths in Shakespeare. If I shall prove that she is a wild adult or haggard falcon (i.e. not a virgin, as a nest-taken eyas would be, but one who has already learned her sport before coming into my possession), though the strings of my heart were used to hold her with (as of course they are with all hawks), I would throw her off down-wind to chase after anything she liked. In fact, I would have done with her: intentionally lose her, for falcons must be flown up wind. The awful finality of this gesture of abnegation bloomed for the falconer, to whom the loss of temper in purposely hurling away a hawk (how often I had wished to do it with poor Gos), seemed practically the sin against the Holy Ghost.
Meanwhile the mews stood empty. The pathetic arrangements, the perches, the lock on the door, the spare jesses, all stabbed me when I dared go near. Even the blanket of mustard and cress was painful, for the sparrow-hawks were lost with their more beloved kinsman.
Thursday
Tom, in high good-humour because it was raining on the day when he had to serve at the Agricultural Show, being one of the Committee, and this meant that he had not lost a day after all, because the rain would have stopped his own farm-work anyway, crowed out a greeting to me before I was half way down the passage.
‘Well, Mr. White: we’ve seen your hawk, you know. We tried to get a message to you all yesterday. Mark said he thought he saw him sitting on the clover rick. We were working in the wheat when I saw him come down on the ground. I sent Phil, but he must have gone on a bit. But I saw him myself. I’m sure he was your hawk. I saw his underparts.’ (Here Tom stopped doing up his gaiters, extended his arms, tried to look like a goshawk, and banked over sideways.) ‘They were light coloured. He came down so.’
My dear friend now pausing to come down in a graceful side-slip, I doubtfully interjected: ‘Are you sure he wasn’t a sparrow-hawk?’
‘Pshaw,’ cried Tom. ‘I don’t know about that. I don’t know what he was, but I’m sure he was your hawk. Certain. Sure. I saw him myself.’
‘Did you see his tail?’
‘No, I didn’t see anything, but I’m certain he was your hawk. His underparts were white.’
‘My hawk had five feathers missing from his tail. If you saw his tail you could not have failed to have noticed them. His tail would have looked like this.
I extended my two hands with the first, second and third fingers of the right hand clenched, at the same time peering anxiously but suspiciously into Tom’s face.
‘He flew queer,’ affirmed Tom, as a concession.
‘But you didn’t notice his tail?’
‘I’m certain,’ cried Tom for the last time, intransigently nodding his head, thumping his gaiters, and giving me quelling looks. ‘I’m sure. I saw him myself. His underparts were white. He had nothing on his legs. I couldn’t see his legs, but he had nothing on them. I’m certain he was your hawk.’
If Tom and Cis were certain of a thing, whatever its contraditions, a lesser man had to be ready to act on their belief. Later in the day Cis had himself pointed out the hawk to Tom, flying after two carrion crows; and Cis could see, catch or kill anything that ran or flew. In my heart I was not yet convinced, for so many rumours made one doubtful. (As an instance, Jack Davis’s man was said to have ‘seen your hawk, with another one, at his place on Sunday’. This seemed to me almost certainly to refer to the (?) sparrow-hawks driven out from Three Parks Wood.) The whiteness of the underparts in Tom’s might equally or better have referred to a kestrel. Also Gos would not have rid himself of his jesses. He might have broken their jointed ends at the swivel, but g
et them off he could not have done. Also one would have expected the tail to be noticed. Also I had been about since ever I lost him, from dawn to dusk, and for several days now had not seen him. Yet Tom and Cis did not achieve certainty over nothing. I was as certain as they were that they saw a hawk of some sort—or Gos. In either case it seemed worth resuming the hunt. It was a joy.
That day being pouring wet most of the time was spent in altering a hawk trap. Hawks enjoyed to sit on high, bare branches, and keepers had a habit of setting circular traps, like miniature man-traps of the old days, at the top of poles in their woods. These poles with the traps atop of them used to be erected near the cottage when the old duke preserved the ridings. They were now illegal. I bought one, and spent the day filing off its teeth. I then sewed a felt pad over each of the arms, double in the middle, and bound a thick knot of brass wire at the base of one arm. The wire knot prevented the clutch from closing fully. The padding was thick enough to hold a pencil or one’s little finger quite tight, painless but immovable.
I thought that this contrivance might be attached to a tree by a pole that could be lowered to release rooks and hoisted again and reset without much trouble. Whether this attachment was ever used with the old hawk-traps I did not know, but it seemed practical if you could find a tree with one segment reasonably free of branches.
One needed two staples, a bit of leather to make the hinge at the bottom, some rope, a pole and the trap.
Regarding these arrangements after many hours of scrubbing with a file, one could say to oneself warmly: