Blood Ties

by Crane, Ben;

  *

  At the hawking grounds we quickly flush several francolin, but the goshawks are unlucky and fail. The last francolin flies across a huge distance and, following it, we cross a tarmac road. As we do so, Haider points to the sky. Above our heads, a wild peregrine, a shaheen, is halfway down a long, twisting, vertical stoop. It is accelerating at immense speed. Below it, a pigeon rolls, jerks, then drops. Together they disappear behind the far tree line, presumably a successful strike, as we do not see the shaheen or pigeon again.

  Punhal walks over with his sparrowhawk to the spot where the francolin landed. Usually a hawk is flown from the fist, allowed to pursue the quarry under its own impetus. Sparrowhawks will naturally try to kill small birds, lizards and mice. It is very common for a sparrowhawk to lunge repeatedly at these creatures as a partridge flushes, this lost split-second handing advantage to the francolin, the flight a failure.

  Being small and slight, sparrowhawks have high metabolic rates, are wound up tightly and ready to explode. In short bursts of intense speed, they cover one hundred yards in a matter of seconds. Continued bating and lunging wastes valued energy. In preparation, Punhal places his hand on the sparrowhawk’s shoulders. The little hawk rolls over, almost like a dog having its stomach scratched. Punhal gently folds her into a patch of cloth. Instead of flying from the fist, he is going to throw the sparrowhawk like a dart. Casting and throwing is a longstanding technique, developed when landscapes were unspoilt and appears in descriptions contained in some of the oldest falconry books in the English language. Using this technique, Punhal has total control. He is able to select the correct quarry, prevent bating and conserve the much-needed energy for flights at francolin. Punhal is the only falconer I have ever seen attempt it. For such a highly agitated and complex bird, his sparrowhawk gives no indication of being upset or alarmed.

  As I follow Punhal through the scrub looking for francolin, his small hawk twists her head around and stares straight at me. She is a calm, bug-eyed baby bird wrapped in swaddling cloth, it is an utterly surreal spectacle. Skittish birds zip back and forth from under the cover, Punhal resists, and we avoid many wasted flights at the wrong quarry.

  We eventually scare the francolin, but it takes flight too far ahead, the distance well beyond Punhal’s hawk. Once again we watch where it lands. Reaching the area, the falconers track its footprints in the dust, finally surrounding a small bush. With the francolin locked down, there is no need for throwing. Punhal gently unfolds the sparrowhawk. She rolls back over and clambers up his fist, standing ready on the glove. We swish at the bush, a flash of black, a cry goes up. The sparrowhawk sprints violently, striking the francolin hard across the back, and they land in a ditch. Punhal runs over, pushes his knife between the toes of the hawk, cutting open the francolin’s chest. He invites me in closer. As I watch the sparrowhawk feeding she pauses and looks up from her kill. The sun now low, floods the land in blood-red and liver tones. Our day is over. My time is over. We reach the compound and load the jeep. I shake hands with Chanesar, Punhal, Ghulam and Haider. I see the shadows of several women, hidden and moving behind a sheet at the far end of the compound. The children run about around my legs. We take farewell photographs of each other. I am presented with assortments of cloth, a patterned blanket and a rare ceremonial leash. I thank everyone and say goodbye.

  Salman drives out into the dark and approaching larger human populations, numerous roadblocks begin to appear. Armed men take bribes before letting us pass. From the impenetrable blackness, an unmarked white car passes, pulls in front, brakes hard to slow us down. The men in the back stare through the window, then the car accelerates away into the night. Salman motions to a compartment in the dashboard; inside it is a loaded gun. He smiles, winks and says, ‘Any problems, Mr Crane, start shooting.’ I am not sure if he is joking. As we continue on, for warmth, but also as a disguise, I wrap myself in the patterned blanket, leaving only a slit for my eyes.

  Twenty minutes later, on the outskirts of a small town, the same white car is stationary at the roadside. Several armed men lounge around the bonnet, smoking and talking. After waving us to pull over, they empty the jeep, unpacking our bags and belongings. The telemetry is found and removed, they spread unfamiliar technology across the dust. A few terse words are exchanged and a hefty bribe placates the police. Within half an hour we are off the road and have found somewhere safe to stay. We will leave very early the next morning.

  Long after dawn on the edge of Karachi we stop at a McDonald’s for breakfast. It is a sad, disappointing return to ‘civilization’, marred by predictability, greed and intimidation. Not to mention slippery, synthetic-tasting chicken.

  The Bell-Maker

  The first call to prayer is droning out as we wander down a narrow side street in the city of Lahore. Sitting beyond an open door, smoking in his workshop, is a thin man of no more than forty. He is the bell-maker Mohsin Ali. Salman tells me his is a seventh generation of craftsmen; roughly calculating it in my head, this means his family have been making a variety of bells for nearly 300 years.

  Mohsin spreads his tools out across the floor: a hammer, tin snips, a sheet of metal, round punches (large to small), a brass doming block, a flat file, flux, solder, tongs, a box of matches and a bucket of water.

  Picking a flat sheet of brass, he cuts four circles of metal, each the size of a fifty-pence piece. They are heated with oxyacetylene, then plunged into water, and in the transition from extreme heat to sudden cold, the structure of the metal rearranges and it can now be hammered and stretched without splitting or tearing.

  Taking one of the cut discs, Mohsin slips the flat metal over the top of the largest curved space in the doming block. With a punch and hammer, he taps and shapes the disc into the concave space of the block. When finished, the metal looks like an upturned contact lens. Selecting a smaller indentation on the block, Mohsin repeats the tapping and shaping. The smaller the indentation the more acute the curve of the metal becomes. The brass disc is less a contact lens now, more a large acorn cup. He repeats this process with the three remaining discs, then sets them in a row. Checking by eye, he looks for any discrepancy in height. The smallest and neatest is used as a template, the others filed to match.

  Moving the domes on to a hand-sized rhino-horned anvil, Mohsin delicately taps the edge, creating a squashed band around the top lip of each cup. The four halves finished, he punches a hole in two of the domes then cuts two hexagonal pieces of metal of about the size of a dried chickpea from a rod of steel. He drops these dappers into the two punched half-domes. The un-punched other halves are coated in flux, then squeezed together with the punched halves, sealing the dapper inside.

  Mohsin then cuts a strip of brass and bends it into a C shape. On the opposite side to the punched holes, two dabs of flux are smeared on the outer end of the bell. The small strip of C-shaped metal stuck to the flux becomes a cuff to attach the bell to the hawk’s leg.

  Finally, a long strip of metal is wrapped over the cuff and folded around the bell. The ends are twisted tight to hold the bell together. Mohsin places the bell on a heat-resistant tile and the oxyacetylene is lit and gently moved across it. The metal surface changes from gold to a deep orange; flux bubbles and steam blows out from the punched aperture at the base of the bell. Without this, the bell would explode under the pressure of steam burning away inside it. The bell now glowing red, Mohsin dabs silver jeweller’s solder across the join and it disappears like quicksilver. I smile. An 8,000-mile round trip for this single piece of information.

  I have been using the wrong solder.

  Mohsin lets the bell cool naturally. The soft metal strip holding the bell together is removed and a hollow, dull, clonking noise emanates from inside. Mohsin picks up the bell and, pulling a hacksaw blade across the punched hole, creates a thin slit across the bottom of the bell. Instantaneously, it comes alive with a mid-level pitch of great beauty.

  The whole process has taken an hour. With both bells complete
, Mohsin gives them to me for free. They are scuffed and pitted, coated in a dull orange patina. They look like they have been forged and rolled straight out of the earth, a beautiful set of pock-marked pebbles taken from a beach. Handcrafted, totally unique, tone perfect, these bells have both individuality yet encapsulate a story of historical significance.

  A set of uniformly machined falconry bells will cost twenty to thirty pounds in the West. The handmade bells of Mohsin Ali sell for less than three. A day later I flew home, taking hundreds of bells back to England, selling them for eight and ten pounds a pair to as many falconers as would have them. All the profits were wired directly to Salman in Karachi.

  A few months later a stranger arrived at my door in a black Audi. He asked questions and took photographs. The frequency and level of payments had aroused the interest of MI6; the tacit suspicion was that I was funding a terrorist organization. No doubt my name and address are still on file – a fact I am hugely proud of.

  2

  Further Travel

  Although the images remain vivid, it has been eight or nine years since my trip to Pakistan. It is late summer at the cottage and the evening sun creates a muggy, warm, slightly sticky but comfortable atmosphere. The wild rehabilitation sparrowhawks in my possession are currently settled in their respective aviaries for the evening. I have done all I can to help them. In a few days they will be released.

  Half a mile away from the cottage is a neglected tract of old common ground abundant with wild grasses and flowers. With nothing left to do today, I take the dogs for a walk and, reaching the field, I swish out to the centre and lie down, partially hidden in the itchy cave of grass. For ten monumentally annoying minutes the dogs jump on me, roll about, fight, fidget, then sigh, succumb to the heat and finally settle. Gently dozing, I close my eyes and listen. Initially, the noise is the simple somnolent hiss of wind through grass. Slowly, the sounds of different and distant birds tune in. The searing squeal of swift and swallow, the ocarina blowing of wood pigeons, the squeaking-wheel pwee of an oystercatcher on its way to the reservoir. I hear skylarks, pipits, a cock blackbird and the eek-eek cry of kingfisher scooting along the brook. I count a dozen different birdsongs, all in whirring clicks, beeps, squelching chatter and high held, sharp screams. After an hour or so the noise fades then ceases abruptly. I open my eyes, stare into the sky and wait. The peregrine arrives. When I see her, she’s coming in low, low enough for me to see her in intimate detail. Her wings are pale, long, pointed and move in shallow, pulsing beats. Bars of muted grey streak across a cream chest. A bandit mask of slate blue drips down around infinitely dark eyes. She spots the dogs, twists up and skirts wide, a spiralling circle mounting fast, rising higher, smaller, a dot, then gone.

  Although brief, it is always enough. The fastest living creature on the planet has just passed across my tiny sphere of consciousness, blessed me with her presence.

  This particular field has witnessed more than peregrine falcons. It has significance and holds many memories. From delicate merlins to heavy-set, hard-hitting goshawks and slight, bullet-speeding sparrowhawks, all have been trained by me in this field. It was in this field, three years before Pakistan, in the summer of 2004, that I trained and flew my very first hawk, a Harris hawk called Cody.

  Imported from America to the United Kingdom in the 1960s, Harris hawks became popular very quickly. Unlike goshawks and sparrowhawks, they are gregarious, easy to train, easy to breed, not particularly demanding, require low-level skills and a moderate sense of detail in the falconer. This ease of training makes them the perfect hawk for a beginner.

  In the woodland near this field Cody and I had a lot of adventures, successfully catching rabbits and, occasionally, pheasants. Surrounded by shoulder-high bramble, deep within thistle and dead nettle, he would pivot up and perch on the branches above my head, scanning the ground for movement. As I pushed and bashed through the intimacy of heavy cover, he hopped from tree to tree, waiting for quarry to flush. On a dark December morning, rising off the damp ground with a jerking, flicking wingbeat, he caught a woodcock on the rise. In my hand she was soft, a beautiful bronze and copper feathering against leaf litter, with a long, strange, soft, grey beak: a keratin-coated straw perfect for sifting molluscs. I let him eat half, then flash-fried the remainder when I got home. It was the first woodcock I had ever tasted. It was an incredible meal.

  In the very same wood I once narrowly missed stepping on a newly born fawn. Still mucus-wet, perfectly still, it was curled cat-like in the centre of a flattened patch of grass. No bigger than a young hare, the fawn would have made an easy kill. Instead, I called Cody down, secured him to the glove and walked away. As we turned on the outer edge of the nearby fields, his mother briefly marked the skyline before slipping back inside to join her baby.

  In heavy winds, on the steep slopes of snow-covered hills, I let him rise off the glove, twist up into the air and soar high above my head. Trained to remain in position, he would stoop like a falcon when rabbits were provoked to run free from heather or bolt from buries. He was an extraordinary hawk in more ways than one. So enamoured by his ability and behaviour, he inspired me to travel and opened up a world more nuanced and far reaching than the simple satisfaction of localized hunting experiences.

  Harris hawks

  In the wild the geographic range of the Harris hawk is large, extending from the tip of South America up through Mexico, Texas and on to California. Across thousands of miles of varied terrain, Harris hawks are ubiquitous, successful, apex predators. To look at, they are fairly plain: generally about the size of a European buzzard, coloured a dull rust brown in maturity, with a broad flat head and cream markings on the tips of their tails. Their legs are strong and long, a catwalk model’s length of leg, longer than in many other hawks. Their wings and tails are broad and tough, withstanding extreme variations of heat and cold. They have a natural aptitude to spiral up on thermals, scoping out suitable prey over vast distances.

  In the enclosed spaces of cacti and desert scrub Harris hawks are capable of short, slow, stabbing flights at their chosen quarry. Intelligent and opportunistic, they will kill small mammals, take chicks from nests, scoop up snakes and scavenge carcasses. What they lack in speed, guile and aesthetics, they make up for with cunning. Harris hawks are one of only a handful of hawks that either live or hunt in extended groups. For a hawk to hunt with extended family members co-operatively, in pairs or as a shared collective pack, presupposes some form of communication, a reflexive intelligence – even a form of cognition. It was my inquisitiveness about Cody’s evolved history and his biology and my desire to witness Harris hawks in their indigenous landscape that took me to Texas in 2005. This in turn triggered my trip to Pakistan, and then an obsessively intense period of travel that was to last four or five years.

  *

  Texas

  On the furthest southern border of Texas, a stone’s throw from Mexico, temperatures in the summer rise to 40°C by late afternoon. It feels drowsy, still; the heat is gruelling, the atmosphere silent. It is so hot most Harris hawks are under heavy shade and, so far, I have failed to find any. Those braving the heat look like mere specks of grit, hundreds of feet up in the sky.

  On the roads, bubbles of tar ooze black and tacky soft. Cars have killed wildlife; the smashed flesh of snakes, javelina (wild pigs) and armadillo feed vultures, caracara and the maggots of a thousand flies. Turning off the main roads and traversing the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, driving on disused dirt tracks, the land is flat, arid and complex. Huge mesquite trees and cacti are dense, much bigger than expected. Individual cacti pads are as wide as a tennis racket. Fifty or sixty cacti rackets collect together in a single lime-green plant the size and shape of a deflated hot-air balloon. Across their turgid surface ants and insects dodge between delicate flowers coloured sun-yellow and cadmium-red with ivory spines several inches long. Trapped under the cacti, or tumbling over the dirt, knotted balls of weed blow about in a breeze rolling in from the ocean.
A roadrunner, a pheasant-sized brown bird, streamlined, slips and slides between thin blades of dry grass then sprints parallel to the car for thirty yards. A flock of wild turkeys launches from the side of the road, rolls across the bonnet; some bounce off the window, nearly cracking the glass.

  By late afternoon, as the sun loses intensity, I find my first family unit of wild Harris hawks. Three juveniles are perched together on a telegraph pole. I stop the car almost underneath them. Their attention elsewhere, they remain on the pole, looking out over the cacti. Floating in low, slow circles, I watch two large females swirl over the ground. The lowering sun casts liquid shadows across the earth and the shifting silhouettes of airborne hawks spook a small rabbit. It panics and scoots across an open area of sand. One of the juvenile Harris hawks drops off his perch, jags down between the cactus and pins the rabbit under the front porch of a derelict house. In quick succession the rest of the unit follow in on the kill-taker, scrabble in the dust, flaring wings and feeding. I watch contentedly, then start the truck and head back to the motel.

  Just before dusk I take a walk, turn right out of the motel towards the Mexican border. In the distance, neon signs and billboards wobble in the spectral early-evening heat. There are no pedestrian paths; everyone is forced to drive. Unable to cope with the mounting fumes, and afraid of being stopped by the police or hit by a car, I step off the road. On the ground, presumably cast from a car and wrapped in cellophane, I find a bag of rock cocaine the size of a baby’s fist. I pick it up, toy with it, then drop it into the grass. Inside a chain-link fence is a dead and disused oil well. The ground is littered with discarded tools, food wrappers, empty drums, rusted metal and iron sheeting. I start lifting rocks for fun and find translucent yellow scorpions. A fat black spider rears up with lifted fangs, protecting eggs in a soft white ball of web. Clattering a sheet of metal on rocks, I startle a covey of scaled quail, and the noise sends them on flickering wings, bickering up over the low brush. In a sinkhole a spread of delicate flowers scatters like confetti, rolling across the sandy soil like puffs of purple orchids. Even in this industrial landscape, these pockets of wildness are waiting at the edges, patiently waiting to return properly.