H Is for Hawk (32 page)

Being Merlyn was White’s dream, and it makes
The Sword in the Stone
not just a work of fiction, but a prophecy. All White must do is stay put, wait four hundred years and the Wart will appear at his door. Merlyn’s cottage, and all the things inside it, are souvenirs of the distant future. ‘I have always been afraid of things,’ White had written. ‘Of being hurt and death.’ But now he was recreating himself as someone who would become – who was already – immortalised in legend.

In the imagination, everything can be restored, everything mended, wounds healed, stories ended. White could not trap his lost hawk, but as Merlyn he does, with a ring of upturned feathers and a fishing line, and brings it in triumph back to the castle with the Wart. And thus White gives himself a new pupil to train: not a hawk, but the boy who will be king. He will educate him in the morality of power, inspire him to found the Round Table, to fight, always, for Right over Might. ‘A good man’s example always does instruct the ignorant and lessens their rage, little by little through the ages, until the spirit of the waters is content,’
⁶
says the grass snake to the king at the end of
The Book of Merlyn
. For a little boy who stood in front of a toy castle convinced he would be killed, being Merlyn is the best dream of all. He will wait, he will endure, and one day he will be able to stop the awful violence before it ever started.

27

The new world

IT IS CHRISTMAS
Eve. Outside my window is an icy tidal river. Everything not fringed with silver and limned lamp-black is white or Prussian blue. Those moving dots are wintering ducks and a loon slides past them on a low, submarine-profile cruise to the sea. Everything is heavy with snow. I’m stuffed to the gills with pancakes and maple bacon and I’m feeling quiet inside, quieter now than at any time since my father died. It is a deep and simple hush. My mother is asleep in the room next door, my brother is home with his in-laws, and Mabel is at Stuart and Mandy’s, three thousand miles away.

Mum and I are spending Christmas in America through the kindness of my friend Erin and his parents Harriet and Jim, who run a bed-and-breakfast inn on the coast of southern Maine. I met Erin years ago when I worked breeding falcons in Wales; a young surfer and falconer, he’d turned up at Carmarthen station looking wildly out of place, like a clean-shaven Cary Elwes in
The Princess Bride
. He’d been drawn to Britain by dreams of flying falcons, only to be put to work jetwashing aviaries in driving rain. But he survived the gloom, and we became friends. Proper friends. The kind people say you only make once, twice in a life. I’ve visited him many times over the years, and through him I’ve met a crowd of wonderful Mainers. They’re not much like my Cambridge friends. They’re fishermen, hunters, artisans, teachers, innkeepers, guides. They make furniture, decoys, exquisite ceramic pots. They cook, they teach, they fish for lobster, take tourists out to catch striped bass. And most of them hunt.

Hunting in Maine is not obviously riven with centuries of class and privilege. There are no vast pheasant shoots here where bankers vie for the largest bags, no elite grouse moors or exclusive salmon rivers. All the land can be hunted over by virtue of common law, and locals are very proud of this egalitarian tradition. Years ago I read an article in a 1942 edition of
Outdoor Life
that stirred wartime sentiment by appealing to it. ‘One of my grandfathers came from northern Europe for the single reason that he wanted to live in a country where he could try to catch a fish without sneaking onto some nobleman’s property where the common people were excluded,’ one hunter explained. In fascist Italy and Germany, the article went on, hunting is limited to ‘the owners of estates, their guests, and the high and mighty’. It had to back-pedal slightly, of course, for the same was true in Britain. ‘This is no slap at our courageous ally,’ it explained. ‘But we do not need her system of land management.’
¹
What’s more, hunting is far more acceptable here than it is in Britain. One of my friends in Maine is Scott McNeff, a wiry and energetic firebrand who runs an ice-cream emporium in summer and spends the winter flying his hawks. He told me that few households in the whole state aren’t touched by the November deer hunt. Even if people don’t hunt deer themselves, everyone knows someone who does, and freezers across Maine are full of home-shot venison packaged and parcelled out for friends and families. People swap hunting stories here the way people swap drinking stories at home.

Scott took us hawking yesterday with his male redtailed hawk, a first-year bird called Yoder. He’s a handsome beast: his crown and back are chestnut brown, his underparts milk-glass white, sparsely marked with a gorget of spots and dashes. He’s not as well-armed as a gos; his toes are shorter, thicker, more like fists than Mabel’s armoured pianist’s fingers. He has nothing of a goshawk’s rangy, leopard-like hunch or contagious apprehension. His eyes are dark, his face mild and open. A thickset, amiable hawk. An unflappable kind of hawk. And he has been borrowed from the wild. Yoder is a passage hawk, one who already knows how to hunt, who has in the weeks since leaving his nest had to learn a hundred different ways of encountering air and rain and wind and quarry, and learn them fast to survive. American falconers are permitted to trap and fly a bird like this over its first winter, and then release it in the spring to return to the wild and breed. Falconers here can do this because they are tested and licensed by the state. It’s a good system. I wish we had it at home.

Scott has the kind of fluid physicality that makes everything he does beautiful to watch. He changes the hawk’s jesses, checks there’s food in the pocket of his battered jacket, and we set out. The ground has a deep crust of snow. Everything is poised as if it might shake itself. There are woods here: thousands upon thousands of acres of white pine, of hemlock, spruce and oak. But that is not where we are going. We walk across what looks like a school playground. Yoder leaves Scott’s fist, flies up onto a children’s playframe. We clamber down a slope behind timber-lapped houses. The hawk follows. The air swallows sound, so that speaking into it your voice stops a foot in front of your face in a cloud of white breath.
What are we doing here
? I think dully.
This is a town
.

Skittering flakes of dislodged bark fall through thirty feet of air. A family waves from an upstairs window. We wave back. The hawk is laddering up a pine tree behind their backyard fence, hoisting itself skyward with leaps and hawkish flourishes. ‘Squirrel!’ shouts Scott, and I am knee-deep in snow, coughing, my jetlagged ears singing in the hush, attempting to follow what is happening above me. The brightness above is blank behind knots and spars of twigs and needles. The flight is the workings out of two creatures above me. Height, vantage, escape, evasion. The squirrel knows about redtails. They live in these woods. The redtail knows about squirrels, too, has hunted them in the wild before Scott trapped him earlier that fall. A thin branch bends and springs back as the squirrel leaps into the next tree, the hawk after it. We crane our necks up at the war above, playing out like a wildscreen
The Enemy Below
. The hawk twists, the squirrel makes another leap, is silhouetted black against the sky, legs outstretched, and then a blunt, black form hits it. It is the hawk. I hear the impact, see the awkward, parachuting fall through thirty feet of snowy, splintered air and they land heavily on the ground, and Scott is running in slow motion through deep snow, and when I get there the squirrel is dead, and the hawk is mantling over his prey, wings out, beak open. A thin stream of smoke climbs from his mouth. Blood has already melted a thin line through the snow and the hawk’s feet and feathers are powdered with a crumbly paste of snow and blood that resembles decorative sugar. The hawk looks up and about at his surroundings. A back yard, garages, a low fence. A barbecue heaped deep with snow. An inflatable Santa riding an inflatable Harley Davidson. Icicles hanging from Christmas eaves. Somewhere I can hear a television, and beyond that someone is singing ‘Happy Birthday’. I have never seen anything so fiercely wild and so familiar. How can it be here? How can the wild be here in this back-lot in the middle of a town, in the midst of home and community? These are the things I had flown from.

It was the wildest hunt I had ever seen. Sitting by the window staring out at the sliding river, I begin to wonder if home can be anywhere, just as the wild can be at its fiercest in a run of suburban back-lots, and a hawk might find a lookout perch on a children’s playframe more useful than one on the remotest pine. Maine has given me a family for Christmas and shown me a hawk can be part of it too. It’s shown me that you can reconcile the wild. You can bring it home with you.

It’s our last morning. Erin, Mum and I are walking along Parsons Beach, bracing ourselves against the wind. It is a bitter, salt cold day; we tread on frozen sand. Strings of seaducks fly far offshore, ragged lines over soaked slate baize. The waters under them are full of lobsters; Maine is famous for them; signs for lobster rolls hang everywhere across town. Erin’s dad had been a lobsterman once, and I’d gone out fishing with them years ago. Which is to say, I sat on the deck of their boat and watched as they hauled traps, measured, sorted and banded lobsters, rebaited the traps and set them overboard. They worked for hours while I sat there, unable to help, unable to do anything except watch. They were delighted I’d come out with them, and it was a wonderful day, but I felt guilty all the same: I was an English tourist out of her depth. Walking on the beach I remembered that boat-trip and felt uncomfortable as hell. I’d spent months out with Mabel on the hill. I’d seen the harvest come in, tractors harrowing slopes, stockmen turning sheep out to winter in the fields. And I’d not spoken to anyone. No one at all. I thought of the summer tourists here standing in packs to photograph the lobster boats coming in, or angling their cameras to catch the twisted light and shade on stacks of lobster traps on Cape Porpoise quay. Was I like that? I hadn’t meant to be a tourist with my hawk. It didn’t feel like tourism. But I sure as hell had avoided being part of the working world.

We turn back, walking into the wind now, crunching over ice-crusted rockweed and sending sanderling flocks swirling along the tideline. The off-season streets are deserted, the hotels closed, shutters down, wooden signboards swinging in the wind. A Cooper’s hawk sits on the overhead stop-light on the intersection of Main Street and Western Avenue, flat-headed and fluffed as Mabel, looking down on the empty town.

Back at the inn, feeling cold and horribly sober, I grab a coffee and pace about by the fire. My face is burning. I suppose it is from the wind. Mum is packing upstairs. Erin and his dad are in the kitchen. I can hear them laughing.
I don’t want to go back
, I think. I had fled from community. At my father’s memorial I’d remembered it existed. Now I am back in it, in the middle of a community, in the middle of a family home, and I do not want to leave. This place is fixing my broken heart. I can feel it mending, and I’m fearful of what will happen when I’m gone. I’m not sure how I will cope back in England, back in my jobless, hopeless, lonely old town.

The back door slams. Jim is heading off in the truck to his workshop.
I don’t want to leave
. I sulk. I fret. I scowl at the fire, hot with self-pity. Then I hear the door open and Erin’s tousled head appears round the frame. It wears a vastly conspiratorial expression. I sense a plan is brewing. And a minute later I’m helping him drag their huge Christmas tree out of the room and onto the snowy lawn, tip snaking through the rough trail it makes, branches skittering over and cutting through the crust that glitters in the sparse light. We prop it up in the deep snow as if it had grown there. I have no idea what is going on.

‘OK, Macca, let’s burn this!’ he says.

Puzzlement.

‘It’s traditional. It’s what we do here. In
America
.’

I don’t believe him for a second.

‘In England we dump them on the street,
traditionally
,’ I say. ‘Absolutely let’s burn it.’

‘I’ll get the firelighter!’ he yells. I can feel the madness to this, its contagious pagan glee. He runs back from the house with a squeezy plastic bottle of firelighting gel and in the snowy hush, fog collecting around us as the thaw turns ice to water that hangs in the warming air, he decorates the tree with gloopy green strings that drip and stick like glutinous tinsel.

‘Stand back!’ he commands. He strikes a match. A branch catches with a tearing scratch of flame. For a few moments this is pretty: a soft yellow light in the monochromatic gloom. But then there is an explosive, tearing waterfall of rearing flame that bursts into appalling brightness. Erin’s eyebrows go up. He steps back a good few paces. And now I am laughing so much I can hardly stand. ‘Jesus, Erin,’ I shout. It’s as if he’s set light to the whole of the world: a twenty-foot pyramid of flame lighting the lawn, the house, the river, the far side of the river, sending black shadows out from trees that a moment ago were lost in darkness, and our faces are gilded with fierce, orange fire.
What the hell have we done
? The smoke mixes with the fog so that everything, everywhere is on fire. The incandescent tree, black twigs sintering, clicking, crumbling, and smoke, and Erin and I now wearing the faces of people who are going to be in serious trouble. ‘I think we might be seeing the fire truck any moment now,’ Erin shouts, and we’re both of us children again, delighted at what we have made and fearful of disaster.

And then the fire is out. The skeleton stands in the snow, all its complexity gone. Just a thin trunk with a few charcoal branches, already damp in the steaming air. And I stare at the remains of the tree and breathe the smoke and fog from the air and Erin makes a face at me and I make one back.