H Is for Hawk

by Helen Macdonald

  I was frightened of Baker and what he meant. I was not as frightened of White. Despite his disaster with Gos, despite his desire for cruelties and his dreadful politics, White fought hard against death. He loved the small things of the world, and knowing war was coming, he lived in hope of miracles. In Baker’s book I saw no hope at all. For him the world was dying, and his hawks were icons of extinction: ours, theirs and his own. There was no struggle in him. He shared the falcons’ fate; had no choice but to follow them. He was lured towards them just as the gulls and plovers in his book rose helplessly towards the peregrine’s killing strike, just as the compass-beaks of all the small birds hiding in hedges pointed in fear towards the magnet that was the falcon in the air. There were no place names, no people in his book. They’d fallen away. I understood this better now, for I knew the pull of the hawk, and I knew how the world could disappear in the light it cast. But his hawks were made of death. Troubled, I hoped my hawk was life. I hoped it very much.

  I’d never believed in Baker’s falcons, because I’d met real ones before I’d ever read his book: cheerful, friendly falconer’s birds that preened on suburban lawns. But most of my bird-loving friends read Baker’s book before they ever saw a live one, and now they can’t see real peregrines without them conjuring distance, extinction and death. Wild things are made from human histories. When I was a child I hated what White had thought of his goshawk. But Gos’s hawkish ghost moved behind the patterned, living feathers of my own. And there were still darker ghosts behind him.

  A few years ago I visited a friend who was at that time the president of the British Falconers’ Club. We chatted over tea and biscuits. We talked about the history of falconry for a while, and the history of the Club, and then he said, ‘Come and look at this.’ And he pulled open a cupboard, and there, right at the back, half-obscured by the usual household bits and bobs, I saw it.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘Gordon, is that it?’

  He looked at me and nodded. ‘I hate it,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear to have it in the house.’

  I crouched down and pulled it out. It was a bronze falcon standing on a vertical plinth, heavy, stylised, and slightly worn around its wings.

  ‘Shit, Gordon. This freaks me out,’ I said.

  ‘Me too,’ he replied.

  The statuette was very valuable, and very beautifully made, but it was a thing that both of us wished had never been made at all.

  In 1937 Gilbert Blaine and Jack Mavrogordato were invited to the International Hunting Exhibition in Germany. They travelled to Berlin with a display of British falconry: stuffed falcons on perches, falconry equipment, photographs, books and paintings. I suspect their last-minute attendance was partly diplomatic cover: travelling with them was Britain’s pro-appeasement Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, who’d been invited to the event for secret talks with Hitler.

  There were no more than fifty falconers in the whole of Germany, but the symbolism of falconry was flourishing in the Reich. On the cover of the exhibition catalogue a stylised, naked Übermensch held a golden hawk upon his fist. The national falconer’s association, the Deutscher Falkenorden, had been given state patronage, and a vast half-timbered State Falconry Centre, the Reichsfalkenhof, had recently been built in the forest at Riddagshausen. In Berlin Blaine and Mavrogordato walked through halls whose walls were hung thickly with thousands of antlers and draped in red banners sewn with swastikas. They admired the German hawks, falcons and eagles sitting on perches in the halls, but they were less impressed by the open-air falconry demonstrations. They watched a saker falcon catch a tethered pigeon, and an eagle thrown at a rabbit so tame it sat nibbling grass until the eagle landed.

  Only two countries had falconry exhibits in the Berlin exhibition. Germany won first prize for theirs, and the British Falconers’ Club came second. That bronze falcon I’d pulled from Gordon’s cupboard was their award. It had been sent to the club after the exhibition by Hermann Göring. Göring: Hitler’s right-hand man, commander-in chief of the Luftwaffe, the Jägermeister of the Reich, the man who’d set the Reichstag on fire. Falconry delighted him. It wasn’t only that he considered it the Romantic sport of ancient Teutonic kings. Hawks themselves were a natural elite, the perfect naturalisation of Nazi ideology: living paragons of power and blood and violence that preyed guiltlessly on things weaker than themselves. Göring’s portrait of his favourite hawk, a white gyrfalcon standing on a cliff, is utterly true to the conventions of Nazi portraiture: bathed in morning sunlight, its wings half open, the falcon stares coldly into the distance. And Göring had a trained goshawk, too: I had seen it stuffed and mounted on a branch in an American archive years before. It was a big goshawk in adult plumage, still wearing jesses and bells, its dry toes locked around a dusty branch. It was beautifully mounted. Someone had taken very good care to make it look alive. I stared into its glass eyes, chilled to the bone, and wondered if it was related to Gos. There was every chance that it was a cousin of White’s hawk, for the man who’d painted Göring’s gyrfalcon, the man who headed the Deutscher Falkenorden, who had arranged falconry’s state patronage and designed the Reichsfalkenhof, was Renz Waller. And he was the man who’d sent White Gos; the man to whom White had written pleading for another hawk. And who wrote back to him a few weeks later saying he would certainly try to ‘get for you a other passager Gos’.1

  A new hawk! Full of excitement, White uncapped his pen and wrote Plan for a Passage Gos on the inside cover of his new copy of Bert’s Treatise. He mapped out detailed training plans, and they rang with new authority. ‘Watch her that night, keeping her constantly in motion,’ he wrote. ‘Have an assistant to take turns at this.’2 But the new hawk was not to be. The day before it was due to arrive White was rushed to hospital with appendicitis – as if his body was rebelling against the prospect of another weary battle. The thought of the surgeon’s knife was a terror to him. ‘It made me feel cleaner in some obscure way,’3 he wrote to John Moore after the operation. ‘I think I am brave and master of my soul after all.’ He had survived the crisis, and returned to his cottage. For a while he courted the night nurse, Stella, who had tended him at the hospital – but he thought her a wholly alien creature, and when he saw she might truly want him, he spurned her cruelly.

  The winter was long and dark. There was something mythical about its slow progression from snow to thaw, to snow again, to mud and misery and sickness, as if in living through it, he was passing through many ages. Hope returned with spring. He filled the house with orphans: squab pigeons and doves, a tawny owl called Archimedes and a pair of baby badgers. Then in April White drove to Croydon to pick up a new hawk. He called her Cully. She was in a dreadful state. On being trapped half her tail feathers had broken off, along with most of the primaries on her left wing. White frowned over diagrams in falconry books, cut buzzard feathers to size, and glued and sewed these replacements into the trimmed quills of her wings and tail. Imping, they called it: he knew it was one of the falconers’ Great Arts. But it was a bad job, the fixing, and all the bating in her eight weeks of training left her tail-less, part-winged, barely able to fly.

  But fly she did. The hawk flew free. Heart in mouth, he flew her free. Finally he would hunt with a hawk he had trained himself. His dazzling dreams of self-sufficiency, his dreams of innocent cruelty: both were within his reach. But it was getting late in the season, and he knew that Cully should be put down to moult. Hawks shed and replace all their feathers once every year, and during this time they are not flown, but loosed in a spacious enclosure and fed ad libitum. But he needed this one success. And one evening out on the Ridings, after days of fruitless stalking, he loosed his tattered hawk at a rabbit on Tofield’s Riding and after a hapless, ragged flight – at one point running after the rabbit, rather than flying – Cully grabbed it by the head. White rushed to the scene, took his hunting knife and pinned the rabbit’s skull to the ground. Desires that had never flowered in his courting of the nurse were unleashed in a wave of darkness. �
�Think of Lust,’ he wrote, of killing the rabbit. ‘Real blood-lust is like that.’4

  22

  Apple Day

  OH GOD. WHAT am I doing here? I’m sitting on a white plastic picnic chair under the shade of a marquee roof. Ten feet behind me Mabel resembles a shadow cast on water; her wings are crossed as tight as swords and her eyes bloom huge with horror. I know how she feels. Too many people, I think, fidgeting on my seat. Too many people.

  ‘So, Helen,’ Stuart had said. ‘The landowner’s asked us to bring some hawks along for Apple Day at the farm.’

  ‘Apple Day?’

  Stuart told me that it was a tiny country fair, a celebration of rural history, farming and local food. ‘We’re not flying, just weathering the hawks in a marquee so members of the public can see them. I’ll take my tiercel. Greg’s bringing his barbary. Alan’s coming up with some eagles. Can you bring Mabel?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘No problem.’ I could do this. I’d worked in a falconry centre, for God’s sake. All I did for months was show people hawks. But as the day drew closer I started to fret. How will Mabel cope? Two months ago she was a bomb-proof, crowd-proof goshawk. But goshawks aren’t like other hawks: they need constant carriage to stay tame. Now we’re living in the empty suburbs we’ve not seen people for weeks. She’s forgotten how not to be scared of people. And so have I. My teeth are clenched so tight in the face of the crowds I feel pain blossoming up my jaw.

  After twenty minutes Mabel raises one foot. It looks ridiculous. She is not relaxed enough to fluff out her feathers; she still resembles a wet and particoloured seal. But she makes this small concession to calmness, and she stands there like a man driving with one hand resting on the gearstick. She looks pathetically small next to the birds beside her. To her left is a golden eagle, a hulking great thing with chest-feathers like armoured scales and taloned feet the size of human hands. To her right is a male martial eagle, an antelope-killing black and white monster with piercing white eyes. It is enormous, bigger than most of the dogs walking past the mesh fence in front of the marquee, and it watches them them go by with its black chrysanthemum-petalled crest raised in idle speculation of murder.

  Stuart has brought his tiercel peregrine. Greg has brought his barbary falcon, a tiny jewelled dusty-blue and copper falcon with thin golden toes. While it preens he sits cross-legged, chatting with members of the public, his red cashmere jumper holed wildly at the elbow. Alan the eagle-man is drinking tea from a plastic cup, resting an arm on the tall perch of a saker falcon, which looks up at him with a mild and playful eye.

  I can’t sit still. I go for a walk round the fair. It is not very big, but it is full of surprising things. Smoke from an oil-drum barbecue curling through drying chestnut leaves. Beneath the tree an ancient wooden cider press pouring apple juice into cups. The crushed apples fall into mounds of oxidising pulp beside it and the man working the mechanism is shouting something to the craggy plantsman on the next stand with stripling trees for sale. I find a cake stand, a face-painting stand, a stand of vivaria full of snakes, spiders and stick insects the size of your hand. A stall of orange pumpkins by an ice-cream van. A boy kneeling by a hutch staring at a rabbit under a paper sign that says MY NAME IS FLOPSEY. ‘Hello, Flopsey,’ he says, bringing his hand up to the wire. I walk into a white marquee, and inside, in dim green shade, find trestle-tables displaying hundreds of apple varieties. Some are the size of a hen’s egg; some are giant, sprawling cookers you’d need two hands to hold. Each variety sits in a labelled wooden compartment. I walk slowly along the apples, glorying in their little differences. Soft orange, streaked with tiger-spots of pink. Charles Ross. Berkshire pre 1890. Dual use. A little one with bark-like blush markings over a pale green ground. Coronation. Sussex 1902. Dessert. Miniature green boulders, the side in shadow deep rose. Chivers Delight. Cambridgeshire 1920. Dessert. Huge apple, deep yellow with hyperspace-spotting of rich red. Peasgood’s Nonsuch. Lincolnshire 1853. Dual use.

  The apples cheer me. The stalls have too. I decide the fair is a wonderful thing. I wander back to my chair, and as Mabel relaxes, so do I. I wolf down a burger, gossip with my falconer friends. Stories are told, jokes are made, old grievances aired, the qualities and abilities and flights of various hawks discussed in minute detail. It strikes me suddenly how much British falconry has changed since the days of Blaine and White. Back then it was the secretive, aristocratic sport of officers and gentlemen. In Germany, falconry had fed into the terrible dreams of an invented Aryan past. Yet here we are now in all our variousness. A carpenter ex-biker, a zookeeper ex-soldier, two other zookeepers, an electrician and an erstwhile historian. Four men, two women, two eagles, three falcons and a goshawk. I swig from a bottle of cider and this company is suddenly all I’d ever wished for.

  ‘Excuse me? Is that a goshawk?’

  He’s in his forties, with glasses. A thickset, cheerful man holding a wriggling toddler. ‘Hang on, Tom,’ he says. ‘We’re going to get an ice-cream. I just want to talk to this lady for a second.’

  I grin. I know how it feels to hold onto a creature who wants to be somewhere else. And then my heart falters, just a little.

  No father, no partner, no child, no job, no home.

  Get over yourself, Helen, I hiss inwardly.

  ‘It’s yours?’ he says. ‘Wow.’

  I tell him about the goshawk. He listens. Then his face turns serious and sad.

  ‘You are so lucky,’ he says. ‘I’ve always wanted to do falconry. All my life. I’ve got books and everything. But I’ve never had the time.’ There’s a pause. ‘Maybe one day.’ He hugs Tom a little closer. ‘Come on then, you,’ he says, and they walk away to the ice-cream van.

  White air and aching bones. Another migraine. I swallow a dose of codeine and paracetamol. My head still hurts. There’s a brumous, pewter light outside, as if someone had stuck tracing paper against the glass. I go back to bed. Must fly goshawk, I think when I wake. Must fly goshawk. But I’m finding it so hard to move that secretly I’m hoping the hawk’s weight is wrong, or the weather is. I have no excuse to stay in bed this time: both hawk and weather are fine.

  We drive into a strange, windless, sunny afternoon that makes everything resemble hollow metal models painted with enamel. Clouds, swags of leaves, houses. All in the same plane, like a stage-set, and riveted together. The air smells of woodsmoke. I am inexpressibly tired. I park the car on the grassy verge near the field, change Mabel’s jesses, unhood her, and she snaps into yarak in an instant. She knows where she is. And here we are. And there are the rabbits. She leaves the fist. As soon as she does the pain in my head recedes and my exhaustion fades. Her flight is getting much more stylish. I am still astonished by how fast she is. When I watch her scaly, foreshortened, hunched flight away from me towards a distant target, I swear that the world around her slows. She seems to be moving at precisely the right speed, and everything around her – rabbits running, leaves falling, a pigeon flying overhead, all these things slow down as if they’re moving through liquid.

  I am becoming fascinated by her quality of attention. I’m starting to believe in what Barry Lopez has called ‘the conversation of death’, something he saw in the exchange of glances between caribou and hunting wolves, a wordless negotiation that ends up with them working out whether they will become hunter and hunted, or passers-by. I am wondering whether my goshawk does this. Mabel back on the fist, I walk towards three rabbits. They are sitting on the grass, right there, no more than ten yards away. Closer. Five yards! Mabel is in raging yarak, but is ignoring them. She’s staring with interest at the other end of the field. Something out there, a good six or seven seconds’ flight away. ‘Mabel!’ I murmur. ‘Look!’ And I try to angle my hand so her head turns towards the rabbits underneath her nose. One of them hops about. It is just there. She still ignores it. I don’t understand. She cranes her neck to the other end of the field, again. And then my fist is empty. She’s gone, flying to the far side of the field, very low, ve
ry fast, dancing about the tops of the short nettles, missing one rabbit, making split-second calculations and attention-switches, then crashing down on another. These are the rabbits she has been conversing with.

  I run towards the spot. I can’t see her anywhere. Where is she? There are nettles everywhere, but it’s only regrowth, a mere three inches high. Where is my hawk? I hold my breath. Silence. And then I hear muffled, muffled bells. And finally I spot her head, snaking up out of the nettles. What the– She looks like she’s broken, crushed, as if gravity had suddenly increased tenfold; her wings fanned, feathers bent upwards along their vanes from the pressure. Ah: I see now. Her wings are spread to brace herself against the ground, because she has hold of the rabbit, and the rabbit is down the hole, and she’s holding on and bracing with all her might to stop herself being pulled underground. Her beak is open with the effort. I reach down the hole, feel my way along her impossibly long shins and encounter a rabbit foot. She has it, but only just. I grab the leg, and try to work out how to extract the rabbit from the hole. I pull a little, and the rabbit kicks. Goshawk squeaks. I change the angle, and slowly, like an evil, rural conjuror, pull the rabbit out of the hole, and toss it onto the grass. Mabel stamps and dances, changes her hold from hind leg to head, and the rabbit is still. She is in such a rage that she stamps up and down on the rabbit for ages, once it’s dead, and then starts plucking it. She plucks for minutes and soon we are surrounded by a deep circle of soft grey fur.