The Goshawk (13 page)

We set to work. In an hour's time there was a hide in the wood, thatched over the top and up the sides with green branches. Fifteen yards away from it the bow-net lay in its open semi-circle, strewed with moss, and leaves, and small twigs, and dust rubbed between the hands.

While these things were going forward it had been necessary to see that Gos was not neglected. Any cessation in attention to him resulted in a return to savagery, and so one had to try and keep his education going at the same time. My method of transport about the countryside was the bicycle, and it would be convenient if I could teach him to come with me on the handle-bar. So he spent the morning sitting on a new perch tied across the bar — but had an accident with it when left alone, by bating at some small intruder and pulling the bicycle over. (I reflected, as I picked him up, that after a course of falconry any man would make a good mother.) Then he was carried round the ridings for half an hour, while the bicycle was wheeled with the other hand, and now, after the hide had been finished, he was made to come a distance of fifty yards on his creance, twice, in a strange milieu (no longer from the well-head, that is to say, but away from home) and in the presence of a stranger, Cis.

Walking home tired in the Sunday dusk, it became obvious that it had been a good day. While one was in the act of being busy with these small creations, the mind travelled lucidly about its humble errands, gently skirting and mantling round the little problems of ash or hazel. Pre-occupied with simple, tangible constructions, looking before and after, the Biscay of the brain was stilled to a sweet calm: and in this calm vague thoughts created themselves unconsciously — sudden, unrelated discoveries. My fingers had stopped in the middle of a knot in the bow-net, struck by an unsuspected ambiguity in the answer of the Pretty Maid. Having all through childhood a well-founded suspicion that my parents would only tell me of anything spicy with the best intentions, I had assumed that the milkmaid, in answering the gentleman who could not marry her because her face was her fortune, that Nobody Had Asked Him, was delivering a nasty snub. Suddenly I doubted this.

Nobody asked you to
marry
me.

As I put Gos to bed in the darkness, a new thought emerged. This time it was a quotation: To scorn delights and live laborious days. But it presented itself the other way about, saying: To live laborious days for their delight.

The next thing was to catch a blackbird; a feat reasonably easy in the winter time, when hedges were bare and hunger made them tamely come for crumbs, but not so easy in the profusion and wildness of late summer. I could think of no sure means except bird lime, which was illegal. For that matter, nearly everything concerned with falconry was illegal: our modern legislators, busily passing laws for urban criminals, had forgotten altogether, or never heard, that hawk-mastery existed. Half the things we did were forbidden by laws recently passed to curtail quite different activities: the other half were presumably still governed by laws passed before Elizabeth, which nobody had troubled to repeal. I believed, for instance, that under one of the latter kinds of law I was legally able to go hawking on all my neighbour's property without asking his permission, while under one of the former I was hardly allowed to hawk at all. In this state of confusion I thought it better to remain unacquainted with any law, while attempting to be as humane as possible.

I took Gos to Silston, the great poaching village of the neighbourhood, and hence the village which knew most about birds and beasts, and there we made inquiries about bird lime. The second person I asked, merely an unknown pedestrian who had passed the time of day and fallen into conversation about the beauties of Gos, was kind enough to bicycle a mile after me, bringing the advertisement of a firm which supplied this commodity. It was illegal, it seemed, to use bird lime, but not illegal to advertise or sell it. However, I was now set upon other courses.

There was a packet of size in my coal-shed, size which I had used for the walls upstairs. You mixed....

But why define these endless mixings? Heavy machine oil, size, paraffin, water: on a stove in the garden I brewed these liquids and any others I could lay hands upon. Everything dried to the consistency of marble, and to this consistency it dried in less than two minutes. The shades varied from jet black to toffee, a challenge to Michelangelo but not to the birds. At three o'clock in the afternoon, turning with a sinking heart from these loathly preparations, I found a wandering publican of my acquaintance leaning over the garden gate. It seemed a direct providence, for he had a car, and before anybody could say knife we were in Buckingham: where, within a few minutes I had bought a new wireless set, two tame pigeons in lieu of blackbirds, and all the bird lime I wanted. I procured the lime quite easily by stopping X, who was passing in another car, and reflected that it was very lucky that I had once stood X a drink in the Swan and Castle. So much for law and order.

The day degenerated into beer, argument, darts and skittles, at public houses over half the countryside. Afterwards we came home and had an argument until half after midnight. Since (I realized next morning), the publican had been arguing about the Grafton hounds while I had been arguing about the licensing laws, no definite conclusion was then reached.

In the course of this intemperate and wasted day, Gos had been taught at odd moments to tolerate being carried at low speeds on a bicycle, and I had done my best to man him to motor cars by getting the publican to drive along beside us in bottom gear, talking to us through the window. But I was relaxing my pressure upon the hawk, thinking the job nearly finished, and I was due for trouble.

How the whole thing did not finish that morning, was beyond comprehension. I was a wicked and bibulous man, and I could only suppose that these persons God allowed immoderately to flourish.

Gos had been getting above himself, a result of that full crop after his first hundred yards, and of the present fever for sparrow-hawks which was among other things inevitably resulting in his neglect, so he had been given very little supper on the Monday night. On this morning I took him up from the mews with a tiny piece of beef, and, supposing him to be sharp set, carried him straight out to the well-head with a creance of fifty yards. The idea was to concentrate on making him come
quickly
rather than far, by bringing him on this half creance every hour for a piece of beef, which should be denied unless he came at once.

I sat him down on the well-head, tied on the creance, and was whistling about the Lord my Shepherd when Mrs. Wheeler came up the farm road in a car. I left the hawk and ran over to her, to tell her about the new wireless. Gos did not object to this, for I looked back as I went. We got into conversation. After five minutes we parted, and I ran in front of the car to open the next gate for it: then turned back to the well, about a hundred yards away. I had walked quite half this distance before I realized that Gos was no longer on his rail.

The setting in motion of the car, and the sight of his master running in front of it, must have upset him. He had flown to the full length of his creance, and was now sitting in the outermost twigs of a high oak which had no branches for the first ten feet. He had managed to spin the creance in and out of the twigs, and was sitting composedly in a kind of cocoon.

I informed him that the Lord was my Shepherd, waving beef and a handkerchief. I stupidly tried to pull the creance from the well end. I ought to have loosed the well end, annoyed him so that he bated from the tree without impediment from behind, and taken him up when he came to the ground. However, I did the other thing, which came more naturally, and this caused a bate, and the cocoon became inextricable. A fact which made matters much worse was that the creance itself, of tarred twine, had turned out to be of poor quality with hardly any breaking strain. It had already been broken twice in spite of the elastic.

I fetched a ladder and solicited the aid of my nearest neighbour's son, William. William's white shirt, without a coat over it, and the strange ladder, further wove the web. Gos spent five minutes hanging head downward by his jesses, and broke one of his remaining tail feathers at the old hunger trace. The ladder would not reach to the first branch.

Even if I had been able to climb the tree, which I tried to do, I should now have had to saw off practically all its eastward branches, among which the creance was entangled, and the ensuing ruin would almost certainly have dashed the hapless hawk to pieces.

I fetched a seventeen-foot salmon rod, tied some beef to the top ring, and, standing tip-toe, was just able to present it within striking distance. No reaction: or rather, that most exasperating of all his reactions, a silly, chicken-like indecision. William was busy tying two ladders together for me to climb, in what looked a fatal way.

We must have been at it for an hour and a half before I thought of screwing a picture hook through the top ring of the rod. I managed to entangle the jesses with this and to drag him down.

He bated at me when I picked him up, and stood on my glove even more tattered than before, looking at me angrily as if it had been my fault. I said to him: ‘There you are, Gos dear, perfectly all right. What a silly little chap you are' — and, with the kindest vocal intonation but with all my heart — ‘you bloody little sod.'

There seem to have been two textures working side by side toward the wordless climax of this week. The new, insensate El Dorado of the sparrow-hawk was dictated by apparently opposite states of feeling: the conquest of Gos, now nearly over, had proved too easy and was therefore too difficult. The relaxation from a task hitherto supposed to be practically impossible of accomplishment had left me face to face with its real difficulties, and not strong enough to face them without depression.

Nobody would be an austringer by choice. Nothing could express the weariness of treating with the largest of the short-winged hawks, nothing the dejections around every corner in this, the least facile of the sports. I had gone into it blindfold, I told myself, and now not hated but drooped my wings before it, as Gos had done when he was watched three nights. It was six weeks since I had averted my eyes from the hag-ridden pupils of this lunatic, half a week since he had come on a creance quite perfectly a hundred yards. I had lived with this hawk, its slave, butcher, nursemaid and flunkey. What clothes it wore were made by me, what house it had was swept out and kept sweet by me, what food it ate was killed and eviscerated and hacked into pieces and served by me, what excursions it made were taken on my fist. For six weeks I had thought about it long into the night and risen early to execute my thoughts. I had never raised my voice to it, nor hurt it, nor subjected it to the extreme torture which it deserved. I had gone half bird myself, transferring my love and interest and livelihood into its future, giving hostages to fortune as madly as in marriage and family cares. If the hawk were to die, almost all my present me would die with it. It had treated me for two days as if I were a dangerous and brutal enemy never seen before.

I did not then know that this was a common state of affairs with goshawks, that the best of them were always haunted by moods and mania. Their training was never done, the danger of losing them in the field never absent. But to have worked with incessant benevolence, forethought and assurance: to have worked thus for six weeks in the dark: then to find that, as I supposed, all this work might never have been, that some fault in myself, and a fault which one could not remember or understand, had put the imbecile back in the asylum: it was hard then to do anything but droop the head. At some times one could have joyfully wrung his neck, have with active pleasure and fierce, deep croaks of lustful joy dragged him in half, knocked his head on a gatepost. But today it was only collapse, only loathing and incapacity.

I took up the burden again, put off the use of the bow net till a more propitious occasion, and redevoted the whole of my attention to Gos. After a hard day's carrying and working on the creance, together with a reduction of his rations to washed meat, I sat down in the evening to sum up the progress of six weeks. The day had brought the hawk back to normal and I made a list of debits and credits, as Robinson Crusoe did on his island.

He would allow me to stroke his legs, crop, breast and panell. He would travel on my fist while I bicycled, so long as I did not ride fast downhill. He was reasonably good with other traffic on the roads, and with other people: but I could not always promise that he would not bate. He would come a hundred yards on a creance, though not so quickly as he ought to do. He would not allow me to stroke his back or head.

I looked at the list and summed it up. The devil spoke softly in my ear. I could afford to take a day off tomorrow, and try the sparrow-hawks. The trap had been left long enough for them to have become accustomed to its presence.

The alarum rang its full hysteria before I woke at four o'clock. Seeing that it was dark, I concluded the alarum to be false and turned over to go to sleep again. In the middle of the turn I got up and began to fumble with my clothes. Somnambulist, a stranger to myself since numbed in all the higher centres, I obeyed the stranger that I had been yesterday, automatically. The heavy, iron-shod boots, with their leather laces: the packet of sandwiches and thermos of coffee which I had put up the night before: the bottle of beer: the dark, high-necked pullover and the dark mackintosh, for it was going to rain: the two live pigeons from the bakehouse: the trout-reel with the strong line, which was going to pull the trap: the sock into which my sparrow-hawk would be thrust head first immediately after capture: the pocketful of maize and oats. A docile Frankenstein, dumb and looming in the dark, I obeyed myself slowly and carefully: shut Brownie in the parlour, stumbled out into the night with one pigeon in my pocket and one sitting sleepily in false jesses on my finger.