The Goshawk (15 page)

The daylight began to fail and I ceased to disturb him. There was another plan, which depended upon marking him to roost in a particular tree. If I could succeed in doing this, I knew that I might go out again at midnight, with rope, ladder, hooked salmon rod, and an electric torch. I should then have an even chance of taking him up, sleepy, dazzled and forgetful of his recent circumstances. Before, I had reckoned the chances as many thousands to one.

I got William, and Graham Wheeler, who had appeared meanwhile, to go away upon some pretext or other. It was important that the one person who enjoyed some measure of Gos's confidence should be left alone with him while he went to sleep. I did not explain this to the boys.

I stood under the tree, whistling, moving about, accustoming him to the bustle which would later attend my ascent by ladder and rope.

The accursed rottenness of that new twine, my imbecile stupidity in going on using it when I had already been twice warned by breaks, and now the fatal enthusiasm of the young. Graham wanted to be in it, wanted not to miss the fun. He made a pretext for coming back. I cried to him to keep away, but it was too late. A silent, an invisible shadow in the deep twilight, it had sloped away even before I cried. Gos, slanting off the tree at the moment of nightfall, was now definitely untraceable.

My last fifty-fifty chance, my thought and life for six weeks, my lunatic from the Rhine: I searched for him with an electric torch for two more hours, but he was gone.

THERE were two days of dejection, of distracted and ineffectual plans, skirring the country round. In them there was little sleep and much walking, while Gos, an enormous and distant kite, sailed in a five-mile radius among a cloud of furious rooks. I saw him sometimes closer than that: the free slave rejoicing. Like the parents of Peter Pan, I left his mews door open, and food tied to his perches: but the pigs got in and ate that. I had an extraordinary feeling as I watched him on his majestic and leisurely circles, a feeling which I had never had before with a wild creature, for I knew what he was thinking. I could distinguish his circumstances a mile away, and forecast his reactions. He looked very happy.

It meant beginning all again, and at a bad season of the year. Hawks were taken from the nest as eyases, to supply the small market which remained for them. They hatched somewhere about June and I could not get an eyas until next year. There was one other way of obtaining a hawk, and that was to get a passage hawk captured on the wing in autumn. They were rare. In the old days when the great falconer's toast could still be drunk (Here's to them that shoot and miss) there had been a village in Holland which lived entirely by its trade in hawks and falcons. It lay at the edge of a heath situated directly on one of the great migratory routes of birds; the heath took its name from the falcons which followed the birds: and this name was given also to the village. Valkenswaard: Falconsheath: you had to speak it aloud to hear its music. There the hereditary families of falconers lay out in their huts to catch the lovely wild birds, with incredible ingenuity and patience, and there a great fair was held, to which the austringers and falconers of principalities and powers resorted for the purchase of adult hawks: often at great prices in the public auction. All was gone. Mollen, the last representative of a noble and ancient trade, had given up catching passage hawks ten years ago: the heath had been broken up, the link broken. The duke's men, the prince's men, the king's men who congregated at the great fair — hawk masters with lean and worried looks who, like the Latham described by David Garnett, would be ready to ‘gallop off with an expression of torment on their faces' — they and the hawk-catchers with their centuries of experience in patience and cunning and benevolence (nobody could be a master of hawks without benevolence) and the very
raison d'être
of that village name near Eindhoven: all, like my own Gos, were now gone.

It happened like this in the world. Old things lost their grip and dropped away; not always because they were bad things, but sometimes because the new things were more bad, and stronger.

Meanwhile there remained my lonely problem. No austringer worth his salt would wish to buy a hawk trained by anybody else: eyases were out of season: the passage hawk was a rarity, probably an expensive one beyond my means, and I might get no answers to my inquiries for these creatures in England, Scotland, Holland and Germany. There seemed to be only two things which I could do. One was by some means to catch Gos again, the other was to catch one of the two supposed sparrow-hawks in Three Parks Wood.

I leave out the shifts and expedients of two miserable days, and tell about those things which seemed to concern the future. If Gos did not previously get himself caught in a tree by his jesses, and so hang himself to death after forty-eight hours of dear felicity, I would attempt to establish the route of his daily round. I supposed, like a kestrel, he would have one. If so, I would make a trap for him that consisted only of a dozen feathers and a piece of fishing line— no more twine. I had also begun to make a portable hide by buying an army blanket which, having soaked it, I had planted with grass seed and mustard. If this grew in a satisfactory way, I should be able to lie down under a blanket of grass before my trap. It might work.

The other thing was the question of the sparrow-hawks. I had been up every day to visit the live decoy, to ease his jesses, and to change his food and water. Yesterday I had given him a new high perch from which he would find it difficult to entangle his leash. Today I had found him killed. It had been necessary to look closely at the scene of the tragedy, in order to find out what had killed him. In the first place his leash was not at all entangled, so that it did not seem likely that he had become hitched up at ground level and there killed by a fox. Nor had he been barbarously eaten. Something had plumed his breast carefully and neatly picked the flesh off one leg. He had been eviscerated. All this pointed toward a sort of hawk. There were, on the other hand, disturbing features. The whole head had been eaten, and it looked as if part of the viscera had been. This did not at the time seem to me characteristic of a hawk: I thought that the head being so wholly consumed pointed to a fox or rodent (though the plucking of the breast cancelled this) and the eating of the bowels seemed like a carrion crow. The latter, indeed, especially with the head eaten also — though hawks liked brains — seemed the most probable guess. Whatever the truth, it was worth hoping that it might have been one of the hawks. This being the case, I should go up tomorrow at three in the morning to wait all day with a new pigeon. (I had bought two more, and would be able to spare the friend who sat upon my fist.)

But all the same, nothing would ever be as fine as Gos. The great and good Mr. Gilbert Blaine, whose book I cherished, had confessed to me in a letter that he did not love goshawks. Their crazy and suspicious temperament had alienated him from them, as it had most falconers. Perhaps for this reason, I had loved Gos. I always loved the unteachable, the untouchable, the underdog. And it had been difficult. For every minute of patience in quarrel my understanding of him and queer affection for his brave and somehow pathetic mania had grown insensibly. I felt lonely without him and caught myself at moments wondering what I ought to be doing now. After all, it had been quite right of him to resist to the last: to recognize, long after a falcon would have given in (you could train two or three falcons in the time of one goshawk), that I was an unnatural force. Why should he, a wild princeling of Teutonic origin, submit to an enforced captivity? He had hated and distrusted me, the intransigent small robber baron. He had had guts to stand up against love so long. I hoped he would snap his jesses safely, the ungovernable barbarian, and live a very long, happy life in the wild world: unless I could catch him again as a partner whom I should never dare to treat as captive. He deserved to be free, but I wanted him still. Love asketh but himself to please, To bind another to his delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a hell in heaven's despite.

The passage hawk was said to be what the racehorse was to the hack. Wild, well-kept, sleek, noble: he was the opposite of the dowdy eyas who, having been taken from the nest, had depended on the clumsy mothering of a human being for his diet and toilet. No broken feathers there, no straggling plumage and lumpish, ill-kempt education. He had been educated by nature into perfect poise and sensibility: he, by curved beak and sudden gripe, had learned to be a natural gentleman, an epicure, a confident noble, as we by means of civilization had ceased to learn to be. Certain, inexpressibly clever without mean suspicion, buoyant, whole in mind and body, this was the creature against whose personality I had now to pit my human wits.

Poor Caliban rose from his bed obediently at three o'clock, and sat with his head in his hands on the edge of it. Everything in the little room was white, except the rich iron-rust of the pile carpet and the golden eiderdown and the brown shell pattern of the curtains. Even the dog was red. She lay under the bed as a special concession, cosy, sleepier than her master and under no compulsion to rise so early. She would only be a nuisance and a danger in the hide. The candle made a weak brightness in the room.

He rose at three, but it took the slow, early fingers an hour to dress themselves and to collect their gear. It was raining with cold persistence outside, as the tortoise fingers toiled over the great boots and heavy gaiters. To tie the false jesses on a stupid cock-pigeon took time and time.

But the long walk up to the wood gained by its deliberation. Far down in his silurian mind he was conscious of circumspection, closing the gates silently when he was within half a mile, blessing the dim and blurring rain which warred on the man's side against the violent moonlight of the season. Already a growing wind masked his small noises, blowing away from the wood in his direction. He walked close to the hedge.

They were there at last. When the pigeon was leashed to the centre and the trap in working order, he lay down on a ground-sheet in his hurdle cave, conscious that no bird or beast had been disturbed by his manœuvres. For an hour he went to sleep.

There was an invariable resident population in this small quarter of the wood, and they woke that day in this rotation: rook, blackbird, robin, pigeon, jay. A small and unexciting cast, this slow drama with its prodigious
entr'actes
and Aeschylean chorus was all the interest which I was to have for fourteen hours, framed on a stage a few yards square between the boughs. The west wind, which all day grew and grew, till it had blown away the rain and become a hurricane, made sea-music in the ash-poles to accompany the play. The same wind kept the hawks from working, and I only heard them twice. Even then I may have been mistaken.

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.

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.