H Is for Hawk

by Helen Macdonald

  Independence – a state18 of being self-contained – is the only generosity, I thought, the only charity we can claim of a living creature. We must have nothing to do with another’s bones; that is our only right – to have nothing to do with them. The bone must be the axis of a globe of intrusion-proof glass. One could not say, watching a hawk: ‘I ought perhaps to do this for him.’ Therefore, not only is he safe from me, but I am safe from him.

  While still a schoolmaster he bought two Siamese cats – a breed renowned for its independence – and tried to ‘train them to place no reliance or affection upon anybody but themselves’. It was what he had been trying to do himself for years. ‘In vain,’ he concluded, with disgust. ‘Far from wandering free and independent . . . they sleep all day in the sitting room, in the intervals of mewing at me for more food.’19 The cats were a failure. The grass snakes he kept in his rooms were not. He kept them because ‘it was impossible to impose upon them, or steal their affections’.20 He loved them because they were misunderstood, maligned, and ‘inevitably themselves’: they were versions of the self he aspired to be, just like the characters he called to life in his books: Merlyn the perfect teacher; the Wart, the orphan who was born to be king, and Sir Lancelot the ill-made knight, whose character White made his own.

  Lancelot was a sadist who refrained from hurting people through his sense of honour – his Word. His Word was his promise to be gentle, and it was one of the things that made him the Best Knight in the World. ‘All through his life,’21 White wrote of Lancelot, ‘even when he was a great man with the world at his feet – he was to feel this gap: something at the bottom of his heart of which he was aware, and ashamed, but which he did not understand.’ White always took great pains to be gentle precisely because he wanted to be cruel. It was why he never beat his pupils at Stowe.

  And though abjuring cruelty was White’s Word, animals played a curious role in keeping it. Riding out with the Old Surrey and Burstow Hunt, White recorded the first time he saw a kill with distanced fascination. The fox was dug out of a drain where it had taken refuge and thrown to the hounds. They tore it to pieces while a circle of human onlookers ‘screeched them on’. The humans, White thought, were disgusting, their cries ‘tense, self-conscious, and hysterically animal’. But the hounds were not. ‘The savagery of the hounds,’ he wrote, ‘was deep-rooted and terrible, but rang true, so that it was not horrible like that of the human.’22

  In this bloody scene, only one man escaped White’s revulsion: the huntsman, a red-faced, grave and gentlemanly figure who stood by the hounds and blew the mort on his hunting horn, the formal act of parting to commemorate the death of the fox. By some strange alchemy – his closeness to the pack, his expert command of them – the huntsman was not horrible. For White it was a moral magic trick, a way out of his conundrum. By skilfully training a hunting animal, by closely associating with it, by identifying with it, you might be allowed to experience all your vital, sincere desires, even your most bloodthirsty ones, in total innocence. You could be true to yourself.

  When White dreamed of the hawk his false self was cracking under strain. He felt himself ‘boiling with a strange unrest’23; was increasingly out to shock and appal. Colleagues remember him turning up to parties, drunkenly announcing, ‘This party has no racial future. Parties should be like bird sanctuaries, people should come to them to mate.’24 He’d decided he hated people. He preferred animals. He was still drinking too much. He’d already turned on his former loves of foxhunting and flying. They were adulterated with death, and snobbery, and the desire to excel, and they were founded on poor motives: the fear of falling and the fear of failing. Gentility was a game he had played, but the reasons for playing it had been wrong. He was putting it aside. ‘I was like that unfortunate man in Thurber who wanted a packing case in which he could conceal himself,’25 he wrote, ‘and the solution seemed to lie in splendid isolation.’ He went fishing alone in Belmullet on the west coast of Ireland during the spring vacation. It made him more than ever certain of his course. From Belmullet he resigned his post at Stowe. ‘It needed courage,’ he told Potts, ‘because my analyst has only got me about one quarter of the way. I don’t know what my future is going to be, if I have a future.’ And then, ‘The barmaid is a complete write-off.’26

  And there was a new terror. It was war. Everyone felt it drawing closer; an almost tangible thing, acrid as sweat after nerves. ‘We all stand in the shadow of a great fear,’27 the Oxford historian Denis Brogan had written two months earlier. ‘And if the angel of death is not yet abroad in the land, we can hear the beating of his wings – and see them too, filling our old familiar sky.’ White saw it too, and wrote that the war was the fault of the ‘masters of men, everywhere, who subconsciously thrust others into suffering in order to advance their own powers’.28

  His fear of war meshed darkly with all his other fears. He’d long had nightmares of bombs and poison gas, of tunnels and flight and escape routes under the sea. The previous year he’d published Gone to Ground, a kind of mid-century Decameron in which foxhunters hiding in an underground bunker told each other stories as gas-bombs and incendiaries fell from the sky to obliterate the whole nervous, broken thing that was Civilisation. Civilisation was over. It was pointless. Modernity was bunk, and danger, and politics, and posturing, and it was going to lead to the end of everything. He needed to run. Perhaps he could escape to the past. It would be safe there. He started reading a book on falconry by Captain Gilbert Blaine.

  It was there that White came across a story of a lost goshawk. ‘From being on the day on which she was lost as domesticated as a household parrot,’29 Blaine recorded, ‘she had reverted in a week to a feral state, and became thereafter a myth and legend in the neighbourhood.’ For White the sentence was an epiphany. The hawk was a myth. A legend. ‘There was a sentence which suddenly struck fire from the mind,’ he wrote.

  The sentence was: ‘She reverted to a feral state.’30 A longing came to my mind, then, that I should be able to do this also. The word ‘feral’ had a kind of magical potency which allied itself with two other words, ‘ferocious’ and ‘free’. ‘Fairy’ ‘Fey’, ‘aeriel’ and other discreditable alliances ranged themselves behind the great chord of ‘ferox’. To revert to a feral state! I took a farm-labourer’s cottage at five shillings a week, and wrote to Germany for a goshawk.

  Feral. He wanted to be free. He wanted to be ferocious. He wanted to be fey, a fairy, ferox. All those elements of himself he’d pushed away, his sexuality, his desire for cruelty, for mastery: all these were suddenly there in the figure of the hawk. White had found himself in the hawk that Blaine had lost. He clutched it tightly. It might hurt him, but he wouldn’t let go. He would train it. Yes. He would teach the hawk, and he would teach himself, and he would write a book about it and teach his readers this doomed and ancient art. It was as if he were holding aloft the flag of some long-defeated country to which he staked his allegiance. He’d train his hawk in the ruins of his former life. And then when the war came, as it surely would, and everything around him crumbled into ruin and anarchy, White would fly his goshawk, eat the pheasants it caught, a survivor, a yeoman living off the land, far from the bitter, sexual confusion of the metropolis or the small wars of the schoolroom.

  5

  Holding tight

  WHEN YOU ARE broken, you run. But you don’t always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards. My reasons weren’t White’s, but I was running just the same. It was a morning in early August, and I was four hundred miles from home. What I was doing felt like a drugs deal. It certainly looked like one. For minutes on end I’d paced up and down a Scottish quayside with a can of caffeinated soda in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and an envelope stuffed with £800 in twenty-pound notes in my back pocket. Over there in the car sat Christina, spectacularly impassive in a pair of aviator shades. She’d come along to keep me company, and I hoped she wasn’t bored. She was probably bored. Perhaps she was asleep. I walked
back to the car. It was my father’s. I was driving it now, but the boot was full of things I couldn’t bring myself to remove: 35mm film canisters; a crushed packet of aspirin; a newspaper with a half-finished crossword in my father’s hand; a pair of winter gloves. I leaned against the bonnet, rubbed my eyes and looked out at the harbour, willing the ferry into view. A clear pool of turquoise was spreading out there over the Irish Sea; small crosses that were gulls traversed it. It seemed strange that it was day at all; both of us were wiped out from yesterday’s long drive, and faintly freaked out by the hotel we’d stayed at the night before. 21st Century Hotel! it said on a laminated paper sign by the door. When we opened it the first thing we saw was a plastic bulldog sitting on a desk, grimacing at us with the malevolent, merry belligerence of a thing from a nightmare.

  In the hotel room we found a broken computer, a sink that wasn’t plumbed in, and a fully functioning cooker we’d been instructed not to use under any circumstances. ‘Health and Safety,’ the hotelier had explained, rolling his eyes. There were, unexpectedly, two televisions, acres of brown suedette stapled to the walls, and a bathroom with a six-foot sunken bath into which Christina subsided, marvelling at the tea-tinted peat water. I collapsed into a chair, the journey running in my mind like a road-movie directed by a drug-addled auteur. Giant Irn-Bru trucks full of orange, bubblegum-flavoured fizzy Scottish soda. A raven standing in a puddle by the side of the road, wet-trousered and chisel-beaked. Motorway service station A. Motorway service station B. A sandwich. A large cup of undrinkable coffee. Endless miles. More skies. A near-accident caused by inattention on a hillside somewhere. Motorway service stations C and D. I massaged my aching right calf, blinked away the after-images, and got to making jesses.

  I should have made them before, but I couldn’t. Only now did the hawk seem real enough to make them necessary. Jesses are the soft leather straps that fit through the leather anklets on a trained hawk’s legs. Singular, jess. It’s a French word from the fourteenth century, back when falconry was the favourite game of the ruling elite. A little scrap of social history in the name for a strip of leather. As a child I’d cleaved to falconry’s disconcertingly complex vocabulary. In my old books every part of a hawk was named: wings were sails, claws pounces, tail a train. Male hawks are a third smaller than the female so they are called tiercels, from the Latin tertius, for third. Young birds are eyasses, older birds passagers, adult-trapped birds haggards. Half-trained hawks fly on a long line called a creance. Hawks don’t wipe their beaks, they feak. When they defecate they mute. When they shake themselves they rouse. On and on it goes in a dizzying panoply of terms of precision. The terms were precise for a reason. Knowing your falconry terminology attested to your place in society. Just as in the 1930s T. H. White worried about whether a hunting crop should be properly called a hunting whip, or a riding crop, or a riding whip, or just a crop, or a whip, so in the sixteenth century the Jesuit spy Robert Southwell was terrified he’d be found out because he kept forgetting his falconry terms. But the words weren’t about social fear when I was small. They were magic words, arcane and lost. I wanted to master this world that no one knew, to be an expert in its perfect, secret language.

  You can buy it all on the internet now: jesses, hoods, bells, gloves, everything. But when I began falconry, most of us made our own equipment. We’d buy swivels from deep-sea-fishing shops, leashes from ships’ chandlers, beg offcuts from leather tanneries and shoe factories to make our own jesses and hoods. We adapted, we adopted, we usually didn’t improve. Certainly I didn’t. I spent countless hours waxing cotton thread, punching holes in my hands instead of leather in error, frowning, wiping blood away, trying again and again to cut and make and sew things that looked like the photographs in books, waiting for the glorious day when I might have a hawk of my own.

  I have a suspicion that all those hours making jesses and leashes weren’t just preparation games. In a scrapbook of my childhood drawings is a small pencil sketch of a kestrel sitting on a glove. The glove’s just an outline, and not a good one – I was six when I drew it. The hawk has a dark eye, a long tail, and a tiny fluffy spray of feathers under its hooked beak. It is a happy kestrel, though a ghostly one; like the glove, it is strangely transparent. But one part of it has been carefully worked: its legs and taloned toes, which are larger than they ought to be, float above the glove because I had no idea how to draw toes that gripped. All the scales and talons on all the toes are delineated with enormous care, and so are the jesses around the falcon’s legs. A wide black line that is the leash extends from them to a big black dot on the glove, a dot I’ve gone over again and again with the pencil until the paper is shined and depressed. It is an anchor point. Here, says the picture, is a kestrel on my hand. It is not going away. It cannot leave.

  It’s a sad picture. It reminds me of a paper by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, the one about a child obsessed with string; a boy who tied together chairs and tables, tied cushions to the fireplace, even, worryingly, tied string around his sister’s neck. Winnicott saw this behaviour as a way of dealing with fears of abandonment by the boy’s mother, who’d suffered bouts of depression. For the boy, the string was a kind of wordless communication, a symbolic means of joining. It was a denial of separation. Holding tight. Perhaps those jesses might have been unspoken attempts to hold on to something that had already flown away. I spent the first few weeks of my life in an incubator, full of tubes, under electric light, skin patched and raw, eyes clenched shut. I was the lucky one. I was tiny, but survived. I had a twin brother. He didn’t. He died soon after he was born. I know almost nothing about what happened, only this: it was a tragedy that wasn’t ever to be spoken of. It was a time when that’s what hospitals told grieving parents to do. Move on. Forget about it. Look, you have a child! Get on with your lives. When I found out about my twin many years later, the news was surprising. But not so surprising. I’d always felt a part of me was missing; an old, simple absence. Could my obsession with birds, with falconry in particular, have been born of that first loss? Was that ghostly kestrel a grasped-at apprehension of my twin, its carefully drawn jesses a way of holding tight to something I didn’t know I’d lost, but knew had gone? I suppose it is possible.

  But now my father had died. Hold tight. I hadn’t ever imagined that making jesses could be a symbolic act. But as I sat there, cutting hide into long strips, soaking them in warm water, stretching them, greasing them with leather dressing, turning them this way and that in this strange room of broken objects, I knew they were more than just pieces of leather. These were the cords that would hold me to the hawk, just as they would hold the hawk to me. I picked up the craft knife and tapered the end of one jess to a point with a long, smooth cut. There. I was conjuring presences, doing this. Suddenly the hawk was very real. And so, in a burst of remembrance so fierce he could have been there in the room, was my father. Grey hair, glasses, blue cotton shirt, a tie slightly askew, a cup of coffee in one hand and a look of amusement on his face. He used to make me cross by calling falconry equipment by the wrong names. He’d call hoods hats. Creances, bits of string. He did it on purpose. I’d get cross and correct him, thinking he was teasing me.

  And now I saw that Dad had known exactly what these things were called, but in the world of the photojournalist, the more expert you were, the less likely you were to call anything by its proper name. For him, photographs were snaps. Cameras simply kit. It wasn’t ever teasing. He was paying me a compliment. Bloody fourteenth-century French vocabulary. Shit. Shit shit shit. It wasn’t his way at all. My throat hurt. My eyes hurt too, and my heart. I cut the end of the other jess. Shaking fingers. Then I placed the two jesses side by side on the glass tabletop. They matched. Tomorrow, I thought, I’m meeting a man I don’t know off the Belfast ferry and I’m going to hand him this envelope full of paper in exchange for a box containing a goshawk. It seemed the unlikeliest thing imaginable.

  The goshawk I was about to collect had been bred in an aviary near Be
lfast. Breeding goshawks isn’t for the faint-hearted. I’ve had friends who’ve tried it and shaken their heads after only one season, scratching their newly greyed hair in a sort of post-traumatic stupor. ‘Never again’, they say. ‘Ever. Most stressful thing I’ve ever done.’ Try it, and you discover there’s a very fine line between goshawk sexual excitement and terrible, mortal violence. You have to watch your hawks constantly, monitor their behaviour, ready yourself for intervention. It’s no good just putting a couple of goshawks in an aviary and leaving them to it. More often than not the female will kill her mate. So instead you house them in separate but adjoining solid-walled aviaries, with a barred hatch between the two through which the pair can see each other. As winter turns to spring they conduct their courtship, like Pyramus and Thisbe, through the gap in the wall, calling, displaying, dropping their powder-blue wings and fluffing their white undertail coverts that look for all the world like a pair of capacious marabou bloomers, and only when the female seems ready – a piece of fine judgement that does not admit error – do you let the male into the breeding chamber. If all goes well, they mate, lay eggs, and a new generation of home-bred goshawks, downy white chicks with bleary eyes and tiny talons, enters the world. I’d never met the breeder of my new hawk, but I knew already he was a man of steel nerves and superhuman patience.

  White’s hawk was taken from the wild. No one bred goshawks in captivity in the 1930s: there was no need to try. There were a hundred thousand wild gosses out there in European forests, and no import restrictions to speak of. Like nearly all falconers’ goshawks back then, White’s had come from a nest in Germany. ‘A bundle of precipitous sticks and some white droppings’ was how he imagined his hawk’s birthplace: he’d never seen a goshawk nest. But you can see one, and there’s no need to strike out into the forest to do so. There’s live feed of goshawk nests, now, on the internet. One click, and you’re given an up-close and personal view of the family life of this most secretive of hawks. There, in a four-inch box in low-resolution glitter, is a square of English woodland. The hissing you hear from your computer speakers is a digitised amalgam of leaves, wind and chaffinch song. You see the nest itself, a bulky concatenation of sticks pushed hard up against conifer bark and lined with sprays of green leaves. On the webcam the male goshawk appears on the nest. It’s so sudden, and he’s so brightly shiny white and silver-grey, that it’s like watching a jumping salmon. There’s something about the combination of his rapidity and the lag of the compressed image that plays tricks with your perception: you carry an impression of the bird as you watch it, and the living bird’s movements palimpsest over the impression the bird has made until he fairly glows with substance. Goshawk substance. And he bows his head and calls. Chew-chew-chew-chew-chew-chew. Black mouth, soft smoke in the cold April morning. And then the female arrives. She’s huge. She lands on the edge of the nest and it shakes. Her gnarly feet make the male’s look tiny. She is like an ocean liner. A Cunard goshawk. And on each leg, as she turns, you can see the leather anklets she wears. This bird was bred in captivity somewhere, in an aviary just like the one in Northern Ireland that bred mine. She was flown by a nameless falconer, was lost, and now here she is, settling on four pale eggs, being watched on computer screens as the very type of the wild.