H Is for Hawk (13 page)

I opened the curtains the next morning. The brightness of the room made me clearer, which concerned her for a while. But when a broad stripe of sunlight fell across her back she raised her feathers to greet it. Now, standing in a shallow bath next to her perch, she nibbles her toes, takes precise and tiny bites of water. She jumps back onto her perch and begins to preen herself, contorting her body into the stylised shapes of Japanese paintings of courtly goshawks. She runs her beak through one feather after another in quick succession: the sound is of paper being scored, or a pack of cards being shuffled. Then she stretches one broad wing behind her, drags it slowly back over her sunlit tail, and rouses, squeaking happily through her nose. I watch all this with a ravenous, gulping-down-champagne sense of joy.
Look how happy she is
, I think. This room is not a dungeon and I am not a torturer. I am a beneficent figure, one who crouches and stoops in anxious genuflection, bearing delicious treats of steak in my hand.

It is hubris. Less than an hour later I am certain that my hawk hates me and I am the worst falconer in the history of the world. No matter that Mabel is far tamer than any of the boys or books had told me she would be.
I’ve comprehensively failed her. The hawk is ruined
. I know this is true because she doesn’t want to be hooded. Until now she has accepted the hood with equanimity. Earlier today I sensed a little thrum of disquiet in her heart and now it has exploded into outright rebellion. I bring the hood up to her head and she dodges it. Snakes her head. Contracts it into her neck. Ducks and runs.

I know why this is happening. To begin with the hood was a welcome refuge, but now she’s decided I’m harmless it is merely something that stops her seeing, and she wants to see. Now, unhappy, unsettled, lifting one foot then the other, the hawk looks about the room for somewhere to go. Her mood is contagious; my heart flutters tightly, heavily in my chest. I have lost the ability to disappear. I try to remove myself by listening to the cricket on the radio but can’t understand what the commentator is saying. I can only turn my attention from my unhappy hawk by thinking about the hood I’m holding. It is all she is thinking of too.

I remember hauling this hood out of my bag while looking for a pen before a university seminar a few months ago. ‘What’s that?’ asked a colleague.

‘A falcon hood,’ I said, not looking up.

‘Have you brought it in to show it to people?’

‘No. It was just in my bag.’

‘But can I look at it?’

‘Absolutely, go ahead.’

She picked it up, fascinated. ‘What an amazing thing,’ she said, frowning under her straight-cut fringe. ‘It goes over the hawk’s head to keep it quiet, right?’ And she looked inside, where the moulded leather was stitched with lines of hair-fine thread, and then turned it over in her hands, examining the bevelled opening for the hawk’s beak and the plaited Turk’s-head knot you hold it by, and the two long braces at the back that pull the hood open and closed. She set it back on the table reverently. ‘It’s so beautifully made,’ she said. ‘It’s like a Prada shoe.’

Indeed. This hood is among the best of its kind. It was made by an American falconer called Doug Pineo and it weighs almost nothing. A few grams. That is all. Something about its perfect lightness set against the heaviness of my heart makes me giddy. I shut my eyes and my head is full of hoods. Modern American hoods like this one. Loose-braced Bahraini hoods of soft goatskin for passage sakers and peregrines. Syrian hoods. Turkmen hoods. Afghan hoods. Tiny Indian hoods in snakeskin for shikras and sparrowhawks. Huge eagle hoods from Central Asia. Sixteenth-century French hoods cut from white kidskin embroidered with golden thread and painted with coats of arms. They’re not a European invention. Frankish knights learned how to use hoods from Arab falconers during the Crusades, and a shared love of falconry made hawks political pawns in those wars. When a white gyrfalcon owned by King Philip I of Spain broke its leash during the Siege of Acre and flew up to the city walls, the king sent an envoy into the city to request its return. Saladin refused, and Philip sent another envoy, accompanied by trumpets, ensigns and heralds, offering a thousand gold crowns for the falcon. Was it returned? I can’t recall. Did it matter?
No
, I think savagely.
They’re all dead. Long dead
. I think of Saladin taking the king’s falcon onto his own hand and covering its eyes with leather.
I own this. It is mine.
I think of fetish hoods. I think of distant wars. I think of Abu Ghraib. Sand in the mouth. Coercion. History and hawks and hoods and the implications of taking something’s sight away to calm it.
It’s in your own best interest
. Rising nausea. There’s a sensation of ground being lost, of wet sand washing from under my feet. I don’t want to think of the photographs of the tortured man with the hood on his head and the wires to his hands and the invisible enemy who holds the camera, but it is all I can see and the word
hood
like a hot stone in my mouth.
Burqa
, the word in Arabic. Hood.

I start speaking to the hawk – I think to the hawk – in a voice as low and reassuring as I can make it. ‘When you travel in the car, Mabel,’ I say, ‘there’ll be lots of frightening things out there and we can’t have you crashing about while I drive. It is just to keep you feeling safe.’ And then, ‘It is necessary.’ I hear myself say it.
It is necessary
. That is what I am telling myself. But I don’t like it. Nor does she. Patiently I offer it again. ‘Look,’ I say carefully. ‘Just a hood.’ I move it slowly up to her feathered chin. She bates. I wait until she settles and move it up to her chin again.
Bate
. And again.
Bate. Bate. Bate.
I want to be gentle. I
am
being gentle, but my gentleness is a veneer on raging despair. I don’t want to hood her. She knows it. On the radio the cricket commentator explains in gleeful detail why a batsman’s defensive stroke has failed. ‘Shut up, Aggers,’ I snap, and try once again. ‘Come on, Mabel,’ I say beseechingly, and in another minute the hood is on, she is back on her perch, and I am slumped on the sofa. The world is burning and I don’t want to touch it.
This is a disaster. A disaster. I can’t do this. Not any of it. I am a terrible falconer
. I burst into tears. The hawk dissolves. I curl up, bury my face in a cushion and cry myself to sleep.

Forty minutes later Stuart is assessing the hawk with narrowed, practised eyes. ‘Small, isn’t she?’ he says, dragging four fingers thoughtfully down one stubbled cheek. ‘But she’s a good-looking gos. Long body. Long tail. Bird hawk.’

By this he means my goshawk might be better suited to fly at pheasants and partridges than rabbits or hares.

‘Yes.’

‘How’re you doing with her?’ asks Mandy. She’s sitting on my sofa rolling a cigarette, looking amazing, like a rural punk princess from an unlikely Thomas Hardy novel. I tell her that the hawk is surprisingly tame and everything’s going well. But it is a dreadful lie. When they’d knocked on the door and roused me from sleep I knew I had to maintain some desperate fiction of competence. And so far I’d managed this, though there’d been a nasty moment when Mandy looked at me with concern in her eyes and I realised my own were red and raw.
It’s OK
, I told myself.
She’ll think I’ve been crying about Dad
. I pick up the hawk and stand there like someone with a present at a party and no clear idea to whom I should hand it. ‘Lie down, Jess,’ says Stuart. The black and white English pointer they’ve brought flops onto the rug and lets out a sigh. I unhood Mabel. She stands on tiptoe, the tip of her beak pressed to her spangled and silvery chest, looking down at this new phenomenon that is a dog. The dog looks at her. So do we. There is a curious silence. I mistake it for anger. For disappointment. For anything but what it is: astonishment. A look of wonder passes over Stuart’s face. ‘Well,’ he says, eventually. ‘You’ve got gold, there. I thought she’d freak out completely. She’s very well manned.’

‘Really?’

‘She’s so calm, Helen!’ says Mandy.

It takes me a while to even half-believe them, but it helps that I manage to hood Mabel without too much fuss – and after two cups of tea and an hour in their company the world is bright again. ‘Don’t drag your feet,’ Stuart says as they leave. ‘Get her out of the house. Take her outside. Man her in the streets.’ I know he is right. It’s time for the next stage of training.

Carriage
is what falconers call walking with a hawk to tame it, and all my books insisted it was the key to a well-trained gos. ‘The key to her management is to carry, carry, carry,’
³
wrote Gilbert Blaine. It was ‘the grand secret of discipline’
⁴
to Edward Michell. Back in the seventeenth century Edward Bert had explained that when you walk with a hawk ‘her eye doth still behold change of objects’, which is why carriage works – and why you can’t tame a hawk by keeping her indoors. Such a hawk ‘will endure nothing, because shee hath not beene made acquainted with any thing’,
⁵
he says.
Oh, Edmund Bert
, I think.
I wish it was still the seventeenth century. There’d have been fewer things out there to frighten my hawk
.

But I knew that wasn’t true. There’d have been carts and horses and crowds and dogs and they’d have been just as frightening for a half-manned goshawk as buses and mopeds and students on bikes. The difference was that in 1615 no one would have paid me the slightest attention. Hawks on the streets of Cambridge would have been as unremarkable a sight as dogs on leads today. Walking with my hawk will be an open invitation for everyone to come up and stare, and enquire, and quiz me about the hawk, and what she is, and who I am, and why. And beneath my disinclination to engage in conversation there is a much simpler terror: people. Just people. I don’t want to see people at all. After the door is closed I look at it for a long while, rubbing my cheek where the cushion had left a deep, indented scar.

Later that afternoon I take Mabel into the walled garden of my college house. Above us is a deep field of fast-moving cumulus. Branches lift in the breeze; leaves shift with a collapsing, papery flicker. The air is thick with sun and dust and dandelion seeds. There’s too much light, too much contrast. Too much noise and movement. I flinch at the hurry of it all. But the hawk? The hawk is unperturbed. She tips her head sideways to look up at the moving clouds – in daylight her irises are flat and shiny and slightly blurred, with pupils that dilate and contract like a camera lens as she focuses – zip-zip-zip – up to track a passing Cessna – and then she turns her head upside down to watch a fly, and then tracks another fly, and pulls abstractedly at the meat I hold in the glove, and watches other things way, way beyond my poor human vision.

The world she lives in is not mine. Life is faster for her; time runs slower. Her eyes can follow the wingbeats of a bee as easily as ours follow the wingbeats of a bird.
What is she seeing?
I wonder, and my brain does backflips trying to imagine it, because I can’t. I have three different receptor-sensitivities in my eyes: red, green and blue. Hawks, like other birds, have four. This hawk can see colours I cannot, right into the ultraviolet spectrum. She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth. The light falling into her deep black pupils is registered with such frightening precision that she can see with fierce clarity things I can’t possibly resolve from the generalised blur. The claws on the toes of the house martins overhead. The veins on the wings of the white butterfly hunting its wavering course over the mustards at the end of the garden. I’m standing there, my sorry human eyes overwhelmed by light and detail, while the hawk watches everything with the greedy intensity of a child filling in a colouring book, scribbling joyously, blocking in colour, making the pages its own. And all I can think is,
I want to go back inside
.

11

Leaving home

KEYS IN POCKET,
hawk on fist, and off we go. Leaving the house that evening is frightening. Somewhere in my mind ropes uncoil and fall. It feels like an unmooring, as if I were an airship ascending on its maiden flight into darkness. Stepping over the low railings into the park I head for the thick black avenue of limes and the lamplit leaves beneath. Everything seems hot and clean and dangerous and my senses are screwed to their utmost, as if someone had told me the park was full of hungry lions. Night air moves in the spaces between the trees. Moths make dusty circles about the lamps. I look down and see each pale blade of grass casts two separate shadows from the two nearest lamps, and so do I, and in the distance comes the collapsing echo of a moving train and somewhere closer a dog barks twice and there’s broken glass by the path and next to it a feather from the breast of a woodpigeon judging by its size and curl. It lies upon the grass as if held just above it, gleaming softly in the darkness.

‘Bloody hell, Mabel,’ I whisper. ‘Who spiked my tea with acid?’ Night has never looked like this before. I walk deeper into this lamplit world, wondering at my heightened perception and reassured by how unconcerned the hawk is. She does not look up. She couldn’t care less about her surroundings. She is hunched busily over the rabbit leg in my glove. It is a
tiring
– a piece of sinewy, bony meat to keep her occupied as we walk, drawing her attention from the things around her. She pulls and picks scraps from it with the rapt concentration of a diner disassembling a lobster. Watching her I begin to relax. And straight away the emptied world is full of people.

But they are not people. They are things to shun, to fear, to turn from, shielding my hawk. They come towards us like tumbling rocks in a video game, threatening destruction with the merest glancing blow. My heart beats fast. Escape and evasion. I am here to show the hawk people, but from a safe distance merely, and those three men in pastel shirts are heading right towards us. I dodge behind a tree trunk and let them pass. As their backs enter Mabel’s line of sight she sucks her feathers in so tightly she seems vacuum-packed in plastic. When they are gone she shakes her head nervously, cheeps once through her nose and starts eating again.