The Goshawk (17 page)

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:

I have created. Indeed, one of the greatest beauties of falconry was that one was allowed to invent things in the first place, and in the second place to play at Red Indians with them, whatever one's age.

I liberated Cassandra from his vigil, feeling that until matters developed more fully he might as well take his ease at home.

My pride of creation on the previous day had been premature, for I left the finished article on the kitchen table, that Tom might admire its beauties when he got back from the agricultural show. He himself, fired by a similar passion of construction, immediately pulled it to bits, re-created it according to his own ambitions, and erected it with Cis at nine o'clock in the morning before I got there. I, going over at noon, immediately vetoed Tom's improvement in a scene of high suppressed indignation: two rival creators taunting one another as Columbus and Cortez might have done, had they encountered on the peak in Darien. Later I caught Cis alone, secretly asked him to spring the trap which Tom had set, and made a rendezvous for Sunday morning when we should re-set it according to my ideas. Tom had removed the brass wire on the supposition that its brightness would scare the hawks away. This supposition was perhaps true (though I had a suspicion that hawks, like jackdaws, enjoyed shining things) but the removal of the wire allowed the trap to close fast, and this obviously could not be permitted. On Sunday I should tar the wire and replace it. Meanwhile the trap was sprung and could break no hawk's legs.

It had been a day of high hopes. Cis and Mark both swore that they had seen Gos by the clover rick again, and I myself had watched a sparrow-hawk kill at the north-east corner of Three Parks Wood, along the already suspected hedge where I had laid the feather trap. The trap was there, unset or watched, for them to get accustomed to it. I had also watched a kestrel through the binoculars until he obligingly flew right over me. This meant that there were certainly kestrel and other species, possibly goshawk by report, to be taken, if patience and humility would serve, on this little shoot. I thought how proud I should be of myself if I could catch even a passage kestrel, wit against wit, and how he would be sure to teach me something about these fascinating creatures of the air, shy, wild, proud, cunning and fearless, who, consisting almost solely of red hearts and parrots' beaks rowed through the sky by two hard but silent wings (they had the Handley Page slot), were perhaps the most efficient productions of aerial evolution. ‘As wild as hawks' we were accustomed to say of the partridges late in the season. It was praise which only a hawk could deserve. It was almost a presumption to match a tame civilization and clumsy fingers against the species: a species which had made itself the nobility of the air since man first strove to make himself the master underneath it. One master against another older one; a worthy enterprise.

The way the sparrow-hawk killed was this. I was lying on the opposite side of the field from the suspected hedge, a good way off, when a bird unknown flashed across the line of sight down the middle of the field. It flew only an inch or two above the surface of the grass. Now I had begun to learn in the past week that if you saw a bird (particularly a hawk, crow or rook) it had already seen you. It was useless suddenly to alter your behaviour—possibly stopping in your tracks and raising your binoculars—for the bird immediately took flight. You had to continue in doing exactly what you had been doing before, allowing the pupils of your eyes a movement which you denied even to your head. In this case I did this, lying motionless in the same position while the bird passed beyond my field of vision. It turned, however, and came back again along the opposite hedge, having soared up on the turn, but now losing height all the time. I could see that it was short-winged at any rate. The French call the short-winged hawks
rameurs
because they row in their flight, a fact which could best be observed as the great trireme of a goshawk came ‘in-out'-ing through the air directly toward you on a creance of one hundred yards. The side view of this kind of flight (which the present was) was less striking. The bird appeared to float in so leisurely a manner, gently banking to her prey.

My bird did not drop. Having taken this low grass-flying circuit round her objective (low so as to be hidden from the victim's horizon: he was a humble mouse), she had risen above him when covered by the hedge, and now, planing in and out of the branches which gave shelter to her stalk, softly shutting off her engine, gently holding off stick, came in on him at stalling speed and an angle of 35°. He squealed twice and thrice, was dead in less than a second by the watch. A minute later the exquisite assassin rose leisurely over the hedge, carrying the body as a city worker carried his attaché case, and sank from view two hundred yards away.

The wireless said that it was going to be dull and warm. It poured all day, a slow, windless brutality on a par with what this brutal year had been. A chance and unknown passer-by standing outside Smith's bookshop in the drizzle on Thursday had said that he could remember no summer like it since somewhere about 1890: when they harvested in November, the sheep got the rot, and the hay floated down Buckingham market place. There had been no summer like it since I was sentient. That the wireless was mistaken in its forecast seemed to add a special grievance to the day. I said angrily to everybody I met, more than half a dozen people: ‘So this is the day they said was going to be dull and warm!' It was a personal insult.

But on the whole it was a happy day. I constructed out of stout, slim, pliable ash poles, cut green from the wood, the shell or skeleton of the molehill out of which to watch the feather trap when the mustard and grass seed had consented to grow. It weighed five or six pounds as it stood, was constructed as the coracle was constructed by sticking the two ends of the main poles into the ground in their necessary arch and then by weaving the rest about them: and, like the coracle, it could be carried as a carapace conveniently. A man desirous of a portable hide could do worse than provide himself with one of these. The ground-sheet and the growing blanket over one arm, the shell on forehead and back, his luncheon basket or other necessaries in the other hand: theoretically he could get about very well. In practice not, for a blanket of soaking mustard was difficult to fold without damage to the mustard and not light. However, the active and persevering man would be mobile; and too much mobility did more harm than good with birds.

I took the skeleton up to the suspected hedge, leaving it a couple of hundred yards away. I did not want the
resident
hawks which I believed in to associate the locality of the trap with human coming-and-going. It was the residential nature of these hawks which would make them more difficult to catch than the migratory hawks which used to be taken at Valkenswaard. To them the terrain would be known and the least alteration quickly noted. I did not hope for much. If the hurdle cave and the molehill put the airy nobility off, well I should simply have to wait for a month or two, until these engines had become absorbed into the landscape. Tom's odds of thirty-three to one against taking a hawk within three weeks seemed fair. I had little more than a week left, and the mustard would not grow.

At Tom's there was company to tea, but we arrived a little before it. I walked up to the house wondering how cross he would be because I had asked Cis to spring the trap. On the way I noticed that the whole pole had been removed. I looked nervously round the door and asked him how cross he was. Tom's face, perceptibly and rapidly changed, like the chameleon's through four separate expressions: guilt at having interfered with my trap, offended dignity at my having interfered with his, conviction that his was the better, happy forgiveness in return for oblique apology. He immediately and triumphantly stated that the trap had not been sprung by Cis and that they had caught a little owl last night. The padding and filing away of the teeth had prevented the trap from breaking his legs, though it had irked them, and Tom had killed him in the morning. (I was sorry that he had been killed, since I nursed an obscure ambition to attempt the training of an owl as a kind of night-hawk: perhaps this would be possible with a larger species. And also because I thought him the southern owl of Three Parks Wood and thus that I had known him personally.) Tom claimed that the trap, having not broken his stumpy little legs, proved its suitability, even without the brass stop, for the legs of the goshawk. I pointed out that there was a difference between a goshawk and a little owl, the one being five times as big as the other, and that Gos was so valuable that no risks were worth running. After a brief wrangle we proclaimed peace with honour; the company arrived; and the rest of the evening was a symposium of this inimitable host's quite inimitable stories about arson, murder and fire in the surrounding villages for the last forty years. Mrs. Osborne sat in one corner telling Tom not to shout, the rest of us egged him on, and he, carried away by the fury of his discourse, overset his chair and whirled an imaginary fox above his head, in the effort to convey the smallest particle of the excitement which had prevailed when Frank Ayres of Chackmore took a living fox from the trap with his bare hands in nineteen hundred.

If God, or any other observer, momentarily regretted the obliteration of our race in the near future, it would be on account of a few families.

A blackbird or thrush would be better bait for the lesser hawks than one of the tame pigeons. A black-bird constantly used to visit the old bow-net by the hurdle hide in the wood. There was still the faint possibility that Gos might tour the wood, say once a day, in the course of a circuit so wide as to account for my no longer coming across him: that it was he indeed who killed the last pigeon. These being the remaining facts, I decided to watch the bow-net on the morrow. In it there should be grain, with the primary object of catching a blackbird, and a pigeon, with the secondary object of catching Gos, or a sparrow-hawk if they happened by. If I could catch a blackbird, he would do for the bait for the feather trap on Tuesday, and he would also be a test of the efficiency of the bow-net and practice in using it.

On this day I made an extra coracle till dinner. This, a smaller half-section to the skeleton which had been carried up on the day before, was designed to make quite certain of hiding the feet: which I had originally intended to conceal in a gorse bush. I covered it with felt which had been left over from the padding under some carpets, and carried it up in the afternoon.