Blood Ties

by Crane, Ben;

  Never much of a gardener, I bought seeds and planted them tenderly. In genuine rapture and wonder, a tiny event, the perfect point in time, the runner beans, butternut squash, courgettes, tomatoes and peas grew thick and fast in the rich soil two feet from my door. I ended up with more than I could fit in the freezer. I got tired of eating apples, greengages, plums, damsons and blackberries. Freezing the fruit is easy, but defrosting them is not so good, as they collapse into a soft purée. The mush can be heated into a thick jam-like sauce and is more than edible in winter.

  *

  It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when I began to feel a sense of release. The change was gradual, organic, arriving slowly in layered periods of unrestraint as time rolled forward. I found it in the humour and peculiarity of life in all its forms. It was in the small victories when collecting food, in the slight moments of happiness walking in the woods and along the streams, it was in the strange beauty of the private scenes not normally observed in nature. It was the simple vivacity of life around the cottage.

  Collecting wood, I watched a squirrel running from branch to branch, leaping across a gap in the canopy, missing and falling fifty feet into the edge of a pond with a thwacking bellyflop. Bedraggled and staggering up the bank, she crossed my path and ran straight back up the tree to try again. And missed again. A hibernating snake, accidentally disturbed, shitted on my hand in self-defence, a rancid, high, sticky stink impossible to scrub off. Other times I watched bats, with evolved sonar and supposed accurate echo location, collide into one another at dusk, or swing up into the branches three inches above my head to consume fat, furry moths. They were so close to my ear I could hear the crunch. I found this release in the spinning of my dog as she tried to pull grass from her bottom. In the spider in my window, sensing vibration on its web, shooting out and being beaten by a wasp. In the tiny pink slug touching and testing, delicately navigating the edge of a bottle for twenty minutes. On the lip, just crossing to fresh leaves and food, a bird flew down, smashed it on a flowerpot and ate it. I felt it in a fledging woodpecker on a maiden voyage, a stuttering, half-feathered flight, landing straight into a stream. I lifted the youngster from the water and she attacked me, beak open, hissing, vomiting water and beetle shells. It was in the low-pitched cheeping of kingfisher chicks ensconced deep in the bank of a stream as a predatory mink swam in circles below the entrance. The laser-line-blue parents skimming and screaming across its back. Or in the scattering of baby dormice fallen from a nest, naked in newborn pink and the size of fingernails. In full view, I watched their mother picking each one up and carrying them back to safety. In the five ladybirds side by side in various stages of change, from the soft-spiked, pillow-shaped youngster to the hard, shiny-shelled adult. In spotting (and quickly walking away from) a pair of semi-naked sixty-year-old humans reliving the summer of love and bare-naked frolicking in a secluded corner of a meadow. It was in clearing brush and rotten logs from around the cottage. From the fug of compost and slime, small, thread-like red worms and grubs fell to the floor. A flash of brown from the right, and a small robin darted in, tilted her head and skipped across the earth, picking up another free meal. She followed me around all day, then the next, and the day after that. Growing in confidence, she began landing on the handle of the shovel, then on my boot. As the sun set and I was weak from digging, the shovel merely scraping soil and bouncing off rocks, she landed under the blade and remained. I reached down and folded my hand around her warm body, gently picking her up. In her beak a small worm twisted, trying to free itself. I placed the bird on a branch above my head. She looked at me and gulped down the worm.

  Around mid-June in the second summer, restless with bad dreams and old memories, I padded downstairs, rolled a cigarette, poured a cup of cold tea and sat outside. The dog bumped about, annoyingly nudging a wet nose under my arm, as the sun rose behind an elongated black smudge of the far treeline. Most summer dawns are stunning. This was no exception: it was a cliché unfolding in vivid, delicious detail.

  From the garden I waded out into the crops wearing only boxer shorts. The corn, three quarters grown and young, still had a white, waxy surface. The dog was a shark swimming in a sea of green. Delicate cobwebs swathed the tops of the corn, covering fifty acres with a transparent gossamer sheet of undulating, pulsating bubbles. A million spiders spinning webs in the night, a million spiders climbing up to dry their washing in the dawn. The morning sun caught droplets of dew on each web and sections of the fields burst into patches of paparazzi camera flashes.

  Sweeping my hands across the soft, wet webs, I remember having absolutely no idea what day of the week it was. It could have been a Monday, a Wednesday or a Saturday. The days had leached elastically into one long moment. It did not matter, anyway. I had nowhere to go, no deadlines to meet. I had food, fire, a field of flashing spider webs and two paintings to finish.

  In those few minutes of freedom, between not knowing, knowing and not caring, an old, familiar and euphoric feeling hit me. It was the same sensation I had felt numerous times when travelling. I had felt like this when wandering out into the dawn in Pakistan and sipping tea, watching the boy and his father arrive with the trapped musket. As I stood in the corn and the dawn drew larger over the horizon, I knew my day ahead was a concentrated and amplified version of the splendid isolation I had felt in the hut in Slovakia and when drifting down the highways of Texas. It was the freedom I had felt watching the tip and tuck of descending falcons over the plains of South Dakota and when spiralling through the bubbles with the water snakes of Croatia.

  It had taken me nearly two years to rebalance. I should have stripped back to the bare essentials, emancipated and simplified years ago. Instead, by misdirecting, misunderstanding and denying my own instincts, I had failed spectacularly. I had lived a life of self-created discord and made terrible choices, trapping myself in the rules and worlds of others, hurting them and falsely believing I could fulfil their expectations. The truth was, I was incapable of doing so.

  Here, in a broken-down cottage with no recognizable materialistic possessions and alone save for an undiluted relationship with nature, I was existing without crippling fear or anxiety. I was laughing at woodlice under logs and weevils in the flour, happily weaving the natural world deeper into the fabric of my day-to-day existence. Instead of guilt and shame, I felt an inestimable pride and sense of purpose and, although the living was hard, it was also playful, child-like and fun. I had regained an independence of spirit, I felt a creative cause and effect between my actions and my life. I was controlling the parameters in a constructive way and my unusual behavioural characteristics were a strength. In the right context, the quirks and tics of my biology, my frailties and faults, were of worth, allowing me to exist in my own unique and peculiar way.

  I was free to be myself.

  I felt as free as a bird.

  Freedom and flight are inextricably linked. Flight is a momentary escape from gravity. Flight has levity, moves in any direction, free to travel, in migration, nomadic or on passage. Flight is free spirit, whirling, cavorting, hunting and flying for fun. As a falconer, I knew this as a concrete experience, not as a symbol or a metaphor. I lived alongside hawks and travelled great distances to feel the freedom of flight in equity. Throughout my self-imposed exile and recuperation I knew that sublimating the innate freedom of a hawk as a cure for my pain, to steal it as a distraction from the complexities I had created, would limit, dilute and fundamentally change my relationship with birds of prey. Any semblance of unbalance, lack of time, sadness or pain on my part would mean functioning at half-capacity. I knew a hawk to be simply too important to carry and cure human folly. A hawk deserves, requires every ounce of clear-minded connection and energy. Training and hunting with a hawk is demanding, focused, a labour of love. A love not found in romantic abstraction, in words or thought, but in deeds. It is a love expressed through vocation and action, in the details of care, in a daily routine, in observation and ownership
. For these reasons, I had not owned a hawk for just under two years and, although I had sent him drawings, cartoons, presents, cards and letters, I had not seen my son for a similar period of time. As a falconer and as a father, I had been consistent in only one thing: my absence.

  With this increasingly stable sense of self, it was only a matter of time before the situation turned. In my second summer I received two phone calls from different falconers. Both needed help with injured sparrowhawks, a female and male. A complete set, both wild, both raised by nature. One required help immediately; the other would be ready at a later date.

  Now old enough to talk, to understand absence, old enough to ask questions, my son also wished to see me.

  I agreed to both.

  4

  The Ascent

  I wake early, get up and pad down the stairs. Swinging the door open, I walk to the kitchen, pour a mug of tea and sit on the front step. The shrill, cross-cut sounds of the dawn roll into one another as the sky begins to lighten. I hear a muffled thumping from upstairs: Etta, the dog, is fighting to extricate herself from under the duvet. She staggers down, bowls past me and bumps my shoulder, chasing invisible scents up the path.

  The first injured sparrowhawk arrives today and the prospect precipitates a running bundle of nerves, a deep internal tension. I think ahead, my mind a looping list of equipment needed to keep her safe: food, gloves and drugs, perches, leather, lure, and leash, bells, batteries, scalpels and swivels. Some of these things I already have; others I will need to order.

  Moving back through the cottage, I stop and flip through old magazines, look at photographs, replay short snippets of film and skim falconry books. Surrounding me are the ephemera of nearly fifteen years of hawks and travel: removed by vets from injured birds, small tubes of infections, waxy substrates, splinters of blackthorn and snapped feathers make a macabre museum of accidents and injury. The handmade bells of Mohsin Ali are tied tightly together with string and are suspended from a hook in the kitchen. The brightly beaded ceremonial falconry leash presented by Salman, Haider and Ghulam is coiled in a loop on the arm of a chair. The sofa is covered in the geometric-patterned blanket designed, sewn and given to me by the tribal women. Falcon hoods, coated in cobwebs, hang on pegs above the fireplace. The dried skins and feathers of rabbit, pheasant and partridge are loosely nailed above the doors. A shed golden-eagle feather eighteen inches long is tucked into a hole in the wall. Hollow eggs are mounted on card or kept cool in the fridge. Displayed on the walls, or stapled on oak beams, are drawings, paper clippings, paintings and photographs of hawks, eagles and falcons in flight. Stored in no particular order, books covering subjects as diverse as incubation, fishing knots, canning peaches, wild herbal remedies and dry-smoking meat are piled high in columns or stacked on shelves.

  Alongside this falconry-themed detritus, pinned up, scattered about, some framed, others on curled pages of A4 paper, are multiple drawings by my son. His art is unrelenting, a creative cacophony of weird sketches. Fat dogs farting, aliens and frogs. His mother with a hat or a frying pan on her head. Several smiling figures with elephantine legs and no feet have thin arms and circles for palms and hold their hands up in surrender, or perhaps in a friendly wave. A giant oblong jellyfish is roaring with laughter, a huge grin with teeth the size of tombstones.

  Spidery writing, difficult to decipher, a title or an explanation, walks its way off the edge of each page. My favourite picture by far is an amalgam of paint mashed and smeared across card – a psychedelic hawk with wobbly plastic eyes. The work exists at a level of freedom all happy children possess.

  Etta crashes back through the door, skids across the floor, distracting and snapping short the tangled thoughts of a new hawk and the memories of my son. I finish my tea and get dressed.

  After a short drive across Shropshire, at precisely 9.32 a.m. I set eyes on the first rescue sparrowhawk. She is the size of a kitten and is sitting in a plastic tub, lazily collapsed and spread across newspaper. Overconfident in her abilities, she clambered from her nest and out across the branches before tumbling to the ground. Found by a well-meaning dog-walker, she was passed to a wildlife rescue centre, who in turn gave her to the falconer I am talking to.

  She looks as if she has been stitched and sewn together with oddments of different animals, built in a hurry by a worker from Jim Henson’s Muppet studio. She is both beautifully ugly and interestingly repellent. A lizard-like Gonzo reptilian mixture of legs, wings, scales and wonky feathers.

  Waking to the sound of a new voice, she stands, yawns and stares directly into my eyes. Almost an adult, close to being fully fledged, she retains the awkward, uncoordinated clumsiness of a young hawk. Twisting her head round, she nibbles at new feathers, setting free white fluff that floats about like dandelion clocks puffed off a stem. I open the boot and reach down to pick her up. She is fairly heavy, maybe nine or ten ounces, and very warm.

  She begins to struggle, flailing feet and talons grasping and clasping at air. I feel the poky bones beneath her skin and the bristle-stiff brushing texture of feathers across my palms. Her chest expands and contracts rapidly. I listen to her breathing. The air from her lungs escapes clean and clear into my ear: the noise is healthy, arriving in a regular, soft, meat-scented hiss. Her left foot suddenly springs out and latches to the lip of my cap, pulling it from my head. I place her back into the tub and gently unravel her first ‘kill’.

  Thanking the falconer who has delivered her to me, I carry her to the passenger side of my car, open the door and place her tub on the seat.

  On the drive home she rustles about in her box, is quizzical but relaxed. I begin to run through a list of names in my head. Wishing to keep it simple and knowing she will be released, I settle on the obvious, the functional.

  I call her Girl.

  *

  In the same month as Girl’s arrival I stand nervously in the grassy car park of a National Trust property. A grey/green jeep turns through the gate and approaches. A small boy I do not recognize bounces up and down, trying to escape the confines of the car. A greasy palm-print smear appears across the windscreen. Before his mother can stop, he launches himself through the open door, runs and jumps up with full force, grabbing me tight. I hold him tighter, squeeze him until he lets out a grunt and a giggle. For such a lithe human, my son feels heavy, hot and extremely bony. I can hear him breathing, feel his heartbeat. He smells savoury-sweet, a mixture of Mini Cheddars and jam sandwiches. I am surprised at his emotional warmth. I had no idea I would elicit such a strong reaction.

  We walk around the park for a few hours before finally sitting down on a soft blanket and eating some food, a picnic of sorts. I feel a strange, disconcerting recognition, a feeling absent when he was smaller, absent when I last saw him. It has been a long time coming, and I start to relax. As I look at him, I see the vaguely traced shadows of my younger self. He is different in shape and size from me but, as he turns and moves, I recognize our similarities and our differences.

  His skull is large and his ears stick out. His eyes are dark brown, like his mother’s, whereas mine are electric blue. Like mine, they are wide and intense, almost almond-shaped. His face is thin and he has a shallow, pointed jaw. When I make him laugh I can see that his front teeth, like mine, are slightly angular and twisted. From the canines back they are perfectly shaped, similar to his mother’s. When he agrees with something I say, he nods and smiles like me. His vocabulary is broad and surprising. He is chatty and the intonation of his words is an almost perfect echo of my own. He looks and sounds like an attractive elf, and this recognition, this resonance of myself, makes him strangely beautiful to me in a way I did not feel when he was a baby.

  We begin playing with his toys. Without thinking, my son calls me Daddy. He was too young to use this word before. This is the first time I have ever been called Daddy. At first, I do not respond. I do not consider myself to be a father; the word does not correlate to who I think I am. I try to shut these thoughts away,
and we continue to play normally. But it jars, ‘Daddy’ feels weird. I still have no idea what a father should be. I am out of my depth and somewhat scared. My son seems to know more about who and what I am than I do. That this small boy attaches himself to me so easily, anoints me and unquestioningly confers on me the role of a father is an act of faith and survival I find startling. The power of his attachment is alarming.

  After a few hours it is time for me to leave. As first meetings go, it was perfect. I feel good. Then halfway home an unexpected sadness washes over me and I experience a sudden exhaustion.

  By any level of objective reasoning, I am a rubbish dad. I make no sense to myself. Meticulous and naturally confident in my relationship towards an entirely different species, I possess a restless confusion and sense of failure towards something I created.

  The whole situation feels totally unnatural. It’s like looking at two ends of a piece of string and the messy middle is balled up at my feet and fails to connect. I begin to miss him profoundly. I begin to miss him in a way I have never missed anyone before.

  *

  At the cottage I place Girl near the fire and leave her to unfazed snoozing. While she sleeps, I walk to the freezer and remove her dinner of two small yellow cockerel chicks. I let them defrost in a plastic tub and pick up my mobile phone.

  The legal possession and ownership of a wild hawk in England is a convoluted business. It is not sufficient to simply take possession of Girl, nurse her back to health and then set her free. She is heavily protected by law. Rehabilitation carries legal responsibilities and complexities which, if sidestepped, ignored or not followed, could lead to prosecution and a custodial sentence. I dial the number for the department of Natural England and explain that Girl is in my possession, where she has come from and my intention to release her. I phone the local wildlife police liaison officer and invite him to inspect my premises. By late afternoon Girl is correctly monitored and declared, her legal position vis-à-vis various government departments secure.