Blood Ties

by Crane, Ben;

  The Hiebelers

  The drive from Vienna airport has been long. It has also been more or less silent. An assistant of the Hiebelers, a man named Pan with a long ponytail and a thick beard, drives and speaks English about as well as I speak German. We gesture and smile but eventually find ourselves at a stalemate.

  As we approach the lower Kamp valley the sides build in steep, angular granite, thick with deciduous woodland. The road thins and twist back on itself, following the contours of the river to my right. In the slick winter wet we seem to be skimming the surface of a large black snake. High up in the distance the sodium-orange glow of spotlights flicker through gaps in the trees. Stationed on the top of a mountainside a mile away, outlined by the orange lights, a gothic chateau hoves into view. Long, pale and majestic, several turrets jut up at either end. There are multiple balconies, arched windows and balustrades, all casting long shadows along the outside walls. I think of Dracula’s castle, or perhaps the hideout of a James Bond villain.

  At the top of the hill Pan pulls in through two wooden doors and comes to rest in a cobbled courtyard. Long past midnight I am led through a maze of passageways, up a staircase and on through cave-like corridors to my room. As I move to unpack, fake safety candles flicker with a weak yellow light. On the far wall I notice an opaque mural, a thin, broken, flaking image of a horse and a man. It could pass for a partial depiction of a hunting scene. I hop into bed and stretch out. Disturbed by my arrival, and through the darkness, the calling and chupping of a dozen golden eagles filters through an open window. There is something faintly ridiculous about the whole situation. It is like the start of a Hammer horror film.

  For most of the following morning, I wander alone around the grounds of castle Rosenberg. It is even more impressive during the day. Walking across the cobbled courtyard, a small arched doorway leads to a huge rectangular lawn surrounded by neatly trimmed boxwood hedges and gravel paths. Behind and above me is a long passage with thirty curved open-air arches, like the base support of an aqueduct. I walk across the lawn and peer over the wall; the smooth outer side drops down a hundred feet or more before touching bumpy rock. The woodland below stretches out as far as my eyes can see.

  Back inside the castle walls, in the far-left corner is a crèche. Four fledging eagle chicks are sitting on the edge of a man-made nest. One pushes her leg out, has a stretch and yawns. At around thirty-five days old, they are already the size of a cocker spaniel. Another five or six adult eagles are dotted around the grounds on block perches, or on high perches strung between trees. In an outer atrium two vultures spread their wings six, eight, ten feet wide, and yaffle at me through the mesh screen of their aviary.

  *

  Josef and Monika arrive and greet me. Josef is short, compact and powerfully built, a true patriarch. Monica, matriarchal, is no less an impressive physical presence. They speak no English, but we begin to communicate and muddle along well enough. It is clear they both have a lot of work to do, are focused, efficient but not unfriendly. I follow them like a lost child.

  I am taken through the main corridors and enter the central body of the castle. This area has been converted into a small museum containing stuffed birds, paintings and cabinets full of gloves, leashes, bowls, knives, hoods, feathers and rare, historically significant falconry treasures collected or given to the Hiebelers as gifts from around the world.

  Josef’s experience is unquestionable. He travelled to the Russian steppes to study with the Kazakhstani berkutchi. He has worked with the university of Almaty (Kazakhstan), the zoological institute of Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) and the University of Heidelberg (Germany) on eagle-breeding projects. The eagles Josef and Monika breed and own are some of the finest found anywhere in the world. With his experience of the Kazakhstani berkut, the relationship he has with his eagles is an unbroken lineage between the past and present, between ancient East and modern West. Josef and Monika’s understanding of eagles corresponds directly to my experience with the goshawks in Pakistan. We have shared witnessing traditional falconry first-hand and are connected tangentially by our different journeys to the East.

  As I observed at the field meets in Germany and Slovakia, golden eagles need to be muscle-fit and motivated. If they are not, they will fail. If they fail, they will lose confidence, become lacklustre, frustrated, aggressive and difficult to handle. An eagle has a lot of muscle to build and a lot of dangerous aggression to direct. The landscape of Kazakhstan is one of mountainous ranges, sheer cliff edges and steep valleys. The berkutchi use gravity and long distances to help build the fitness and muscles of their eagles. In Austria, under the auspices of Josef and Monika, this traditional vertical training has taken on a distinctly modern twist.

  We move from the museum back out to the grounds of the castle. Of the dozen or so eagles on display, two particular juveniles have waited patiently for their training session to begin. Monika, Pan and a female assistant climb into a people-carrier and drive down into the valley below the castle, while Josef and another female assistant remove the two eagles from the blocks. We move quickly, turn right through a passage then across the courtyard and down into the belly of the castle. The bulk of the eagles throws looming shadows across the curved, cream-coloured ceiling; their excited chupping echoes across the stone walls and floors as we arrive on a private balcony overlooking the valley.

  Below us, the river appears as a silver strip. The red-topped slates of the houses are tiny, like in a medieval model village. To the left of the ribbon of water is a small patch of grass, the size and shape of a lime-green face flannel. When Monika and Pan arrive the people-carrier appears as small as a Dinky toy. A white speck emerges from the trees at the side of the field, a Lipizzaner horse ridden by the female assistant. Josef makes a phone call and the horse starts to gallop from one end of the field to the other. Fastened to a rope and being pulled over the grass is a whole, skinned deer carcass. Josef removes the hood from his eagle and propels her forward out into the sky. His assistant does likewise, and the smaller male follows. Both eagles power down for a few hundred feet, Josef’s female the more determined, folding her wings and stooping with the velocity of a falcon. The male, sensing he will lose and naturally subservient, takes a more leisurely route, circling more slowly, his wings spread wide as he begins soaring, turning and curving above his sister. She reaches the deer carcass at full speed, lifting it from the ground, and the horse pulls to a stop just as the male eagle arrives.

  I am invited to swap positions and the training session begins again. This time the male is much faster and reaches the lure first. Once the vertical training is complete, for the next hour the eagles are flown repeatedly from the glove at the horse-dragged lure. Often the eagles arrive together and begin a sibling crabbing squabble. The eagles have no preference or gender bias, just the desire to be handled correctly. Picking up on their argumentative and negative behaviour, Josef and Monika move and react as one, distracting and diverting the aggression of their eagles with hand-held rewards. Rather than the situation building to a dangerous confrontation, with remarkable softness the eagles take turns feeding on the large pieces of proffered deer flesh. The repetition and precise handling is enough to displace latent belligerence, cleverly condition tolerance and build muscle fitness. The whole process is an impressive orchestration of time and effort. The context and setting are the result of dedication to the lives of golden eagles over several decades, and the techniques a window into a 5,000-year-old past, that is still appropriate, relevant and workable in the present.

  The Hiebelers, along with several other key speakers, would make a presentation in the seminar tent I organized for the first UNESCO festival of falconry.

  The Festival

  The first international festival of falconry was held in the grounds of the Englefield Estate in Reading. Hundreds of falconers from around the world attended. In and around the site, traditional tents and encampments of the various International Association of Falconry members were set up.
People of various languages, colours, creeds, dialects, cultures, races and religion intermingled in a glorious celebration. Specially prepared foods and drinks were brewed or cooked over open charcoal fires. The variety and scope of the dress worn by the human participants and the birds of prey on display were magnificent. There were stalls, education/seminar tents, falconry displays and a parade of the nations. The organizers created a Glastonbury for falconers. As the evening arrived, the inevitable celebrations escalated and gave way to the late-night madness often found on Worthy Farm.

  The history of English falconry has always been one of class. Since the very beginning, there has been an uneasy truce between landed gentry, royalty, their long-winged falcons and the lower-level austringers with their goshawks and sparrowhawks. In his superb book The Hound and the Hawk, The Art of Medieval Hunting, the historian John Cummins quotes a description from a medieval falconry treatise:

  When one sees an ill-formed man, with great big feet and long shapeless shanks, built like a trestle, hump shouldered and skew backed, and one wants to mock him, one says, ‘Look, what a goshawker!’ I know the goshawker would like to beat me for this, but there are two dozen of us falconers to one of them, so I have no fear. Goshawkers are cursed in SCRIPTURE.

  The echoes of this ingrained prejudice still exist. In the evening there was a huge medieval-style banquet of roast quail and vegetables, followed by a ceilidh. Tickets were limited and pricey, and only those on the list were allowed access. As the evening meal ended and the music and dancing began inside the tent, the lower orders, and those without tickets, quite wonderfully proved that times change very little. Bottles of traditional spirits from the Balkans and further east were swapped and mixed with moonshine from the States. Not to be outdone, the Irish and the Scots contributed their own whiskies to the testosterone-fuelled antics.

  Running with both the fox and the hounds, I left the ceilidh and joined the bacchanalian excesses outside the banqueting tent and around the festival grounds. Songs were sung, instruments played, and falconers boasted who had the best hawks and the best bloodlines for breeding. Thick-set Americans and bawdy English goshawkers wrestled one another to the floor, ripping clothes and breaking bones; an ambulance was called. Fires were lit, friendships made and lost in minutes. A quad bike belonging to the chief organizer was ‘accidentally borrowed’ by a drunken heathen and driven at high speed into a pond. On the large lake, ornamental domesticated ducks were hunted with a catapult, thankfully without accuracy; none made it on to the barbecue.

  Merely spectating and avoiding much of these excesses I took the opportunity to talk to an American falconer. Craig told me of his adventures trapping migratory peregrines in South America, the historical background to Japanese goshawking; how they hunt golden pheasant in the emerald bamboo forests with pure white goshawks. I shared my stories of Pakistan and Europe. A friendship was formed and he invited me to visit Illinois and drive across country to the plains of North and South Dakota to trap a prairie falcon and fly gyr falcons. For ten days over Christmas and New Year the following year, that’s exactly what I did.

  Illinois

  Eagles and hawks are usually flown from the glove in direct pursuit of fleeing quarry. It is a flight style that runs parallel to the land. Falconers (as opposed to berkutchi and austringers) are those who fly peregrines and other long-winged falcons. They exploit the natural proclivity of their raptors to fly high and stoop at quarry on a vertical axis. To perfect the flight style, to enhance pitch and power, they train them in a specific way. Northern Illinois in winter is cold, flat and wide, perfect for training falcons.

  Driving across the state with Craig, we meet up with his friend Frank. As we step from the truck on to the training ground and prepare the falcons, the wind is a roaring, sharp white noise. Watery tears are blown sideways and I can feel them begin to crystallize at the entrance of my ears. My ungloved hands and face are burnt frozen in seconds. I watch closely as Frank removes the hood from his falcon. This particular falcon is big, well over two pounds in weight, with rare, highly prized, dark feathers. Poised in contrast against the snow, the falcon appears as negative space, a charcoal void shaped like the flat edge of an oval spear. Unconcerned with the conditions, he rouses, trapping fresh air near his body, turns his head skywards and launches off Frank’s glove. His pointed wings are bigger than a peregrine’s and move in wide arcs, tip to tip, high above the shoulder then deep below the chest.

  In tight circles, he rides through the wind and climbs as if suspended in a colourless tube. Mounting into the sky, spiralling up, he deviates no more than thirty to forty feet either side of our position. At around 800 feet and directly overhead, he looks like a ladybird climbing to the top of a distant windowpane, a slight speck and fleck in the sky. Before he spots something in the distance and begins to drift away, or lower his magnificent pitch, he needs to be rewarded. Frank removes a live duck from his bag, looks up, shouts and lets it go. Startled, it falters, wobbles, and takes flight. The falcon drops with laser-line accuracy, passing through the duck 50 feet above the ground, splitting flesh and breaking bones. The falcon follows the dead duck to the ground. Frank cuts the quarry open, the falcon’s reward of warm blood and fresh flesh smearing across his chest. It looks simple. To me it looked perfect, a textbook training session. Frank has been trapping, breeding and flying these big falcons for nearly forty years. He turns back to the truck, having noticed slight faults, and mutters, ‘It could have been better. He needs to be better for sage grouse.’

  South Dakota

  Later in the week we drive with Frank and his falcons across the US to a hunting lodge shared by friends. We take our time, trying in vain to spot and trap a wild gyr. We find one near a town called Pierre. She is too old, what falconers call haggard. We watch her high on a pylon near a lake and decide to leave her alone. As we cross the state lines, the conditions are all wrong. We stop to talk to a farmer and ask if he has seen any falcons. He has not: ‘Too clear, too windy.’

  Craig and Frank continue talking to the farmer while I stare through the window into the back of his truck. A bright reflected light bounces across the scuffed aluminium base and blinds me to almost everything but the dead coyote. Circles of snow lie unmelted across her forehead. Facing the sky, her eye is small, shrunken, a milky, frost-coated marble. I get out, take pictures and touch her. She has a soft fur face with muscles as hard as steel underneath. A rictus snarl spreads across the muzzle. In minus 35°C, the Alsatian-sized animal is frozen solid.

  The land behind the coyote rolls back to a thin, brittle panorama, an undulating space bouncing subtle blues, zinc, titanium whites, copper-green and silver patterns within lattice-work ice sparkles. It is a harsh kaleidoscopic desert formed in cold tones.

  Visually, a desert of snow and ice appear as the elemental opposite of the deserts of sun, fire and sand. The extreme ends of cold and heat do, however, create similar environmental conditions. Both deserts are dry, clean, and free from bacterial diseases. A lack of running water makes dehydration easy. Both are wide, distant and unforgiving. Both have delicate, intense seasons of life and death. For these specific reasons, both environments produce equivalent birds of prey.

  Gyrs are the largest and most powerful falcon in the world and are highly sought after by falconers from around the globe. They range nomadically across Arctic tundra, stark frozen seas, from Greenland down through Alaska into Middle America, and finally to northern Europe. Despite the specifics of these cold conditions, the gyr falcons of the northwestern hemisphere share the same biological characteristics as the hot-desert falcons of the Arabian peninsulas. The American gyr falcons take on a different form but have evolved in parallel with the sakers, luggers and lanners Salman rehabilitates in Pakistan. These two very separate species, both from markedly different environments, have more in common than they do with any other falcon. The same can be said for the falconers flying them.

  We pull away from the farmer and keep driving as dark
descends. The shared lodge we are heading to is close to the wintering grounds of the most significant indigenous game-bird on the plains of North America. Sage grouse have been here a long time, long before modern America was invented. They feature in ceremonial dances of the Lakota Indians and were once as plentiful as buffalo. Their numbers have dwindled due to modern farming methods and habitat loss, but they endure in numbers where ranchers are careful, and where falconers and gun hunters help preserve natural wild spaces. Highly sensitive, sage grouse take flight at the slightest provocation, at downwind speeds of over 70 miles an hour, they cover huge distances in a matter of seconds. They are tough, will withstand a direct hit by a falcon and despite being driven hard into the ground, will bounce back up unscathed and escape. Equivalent to the goshawks, francolin and quail of Pakistan and Croatia, or the eagle and deer of Germany, the gyr falcon and the sage grouse are a perfect match.

  *

  I wake in the lodge early and stare out the window. The wind is shrill in the blackness and howls all around the lodge roof. Deep and snuggly warm in a wooden bed, the thought of getting up is difficult. By the time I am ready, the falcons and dogs have been loaded into vehicles. We trundle slowly out into the snow. In the back of the truck I rest my forehead on the cold window. My breath condenses, omelette shaped, then evaporates. Through the glass, the sky appears as a watercolour band of pale green spread below dark Prussian blue. The clouds begin to stretch and pull apart and the sun clips the edges, turning them into candyfloss-coloured drifts a mile long. They curl across the curve of the earth like soft, pink Persian slippers. As we approach the feeding grounds of the sage grouse, the multicoloured dawn slowly morphs to a shade of steel. I see a brief shadow and a slight movement behind a bone-grey post. A lone grouse shuttles along from under a bush and takes flight, leaving a light puff of snow. He rises directly into a stern crosswind, banks sideways and flies a mile away in less than ten seconds. Frank and Craig note the movement. I am told to look left. The truck rocks, buffeted sideways by wind, and the metal edges of my binoculars bang the glass. In the distance, at ease and thrilling in the conditions, a large flock of pigeons twists in bumping swirls, fragments of black ribbon spinning in coils high in the sky. I turn my gaze elsewhere. Both falconers laugh and tell me the pigeons are sage grouse. When I try to refocus, the covey has gone. Seemingly impossible, exquisitely unobtainable, they are the fastest, highest-flying gamebird I have ever seen.