by Crane, Ben;
Moving back to the kitchen, I peel the fur off the pliably soft chicks and carry Girl’s first meal to her. She immediately stands up and flaps forward, grabbing the chicks in her feet. She pulls and tears at each chick. The first few mouthfuls are swallowed in an aggressive manner, a kneejerk reaction. I know she is not hungry, but her instinct to feed overrides all else. Just as quickly, she grows bored, stops eating and, leaving three quarters of her meal, bounces back up on to her perch.
In a week or so I estimate she will be fully feathered and able to fly. It would be easier and less time-consuming to simply release her then. The direct contact with humans has most definitely saved her life, but it has also stalled her natural upbringing. If I let her go so soon, she would be vulnerable, young and immature. If Girl is to survive, before I can release her I will have to train her, make sure she is in good health and can hunt independently of humans. Unfortunately, a significant proportion of Girl’s natural quarry is off limits. Like Girl, they are protected by law. Running concurrently with all the other legal strictures of rehabilitation, I return to the phone and am shunted between different government departments as I request and apply for a licence to temporarily hunt a small number of birds as part of Girl’s rehabilitation.
There are further complications. Being wild-bred, Girl does not have a legal breeder’s ring or any legal documentation. She will be impossible to insure. Until the time of her release, all medicine, food, housing and other sundry costs will have to come from my own pocket. If she falls ill or is injured, her treatment could potentially cost thousands of pounds in specialist vet fees. If she breaks her wing, blinds herself or becomes disabled and cannot be released, her protected status makes it illegal to euthanize her. I will therefore have to feed and house her for the remainder of her natural life. Girl could live for up to ten years in captivity, and the cost of her upkeep would continue to mount as the years passed. Over and above the trivialities of finance, my deepest fear would be keeping Girl in a depressing half-existence, trapped, caged and contained in an aviary for the rest of her life.
I return to Girl and now she has eaten the remainder of her dinner, she emits a satisfied, low twittering and stares at me with piercing eyes of green-grey blue. Shuffling her feet, she lifts her tail, vibrates and explodes a slice of faeces (a mute) three feet across the room. With unerring accuracy, it loops cleanly up over the muzzle of Etta. Girl wobbles back around, commences to flap and lift a few inches above her perch, lands abruptly, then makes a snickering sneeze. She is utterly unconcerned about her future.
*
During the first half of living life with Girl a relaxed sense of fun permeates the cottage. Riding high on the fat of the land, nothing is required other than eating, flapping and sleeping. On a full diet she quickly morphs from the fragmented, odd-angled juvenile into the smooth outlines of an adult hawk. In under two weeks she is now the size and shape of a delicate, refined blown-glass vase, all traces of white and grey fluff gone, exchanged for an overall light, tree-brown coloration. In scale-on-scale layering, each thumb-sized feather on the arc of her shoulders has thin, inverted C-shaped bronze edging. The underside of her wings and tail are pale white and striped with bars of grey. Her chest pulses with tics and swirls of autumnal coffee over pale cream.
When touched, Girl’s flight muscles feel rotund, the bones of her legs and feet toughened to thin rods of steel. Her eyesight has developed exponentially. She locks on to the slightest movement in the cottage. Moths, wasps, flies, scuttling beetles, the mop, the flames of the log burner and, particularly, the dog, are followed with avid interest and increasing determination.
One morning I find she has caught a mouse. Her neck is bulging, there is a small patch of blood and a tuft of fur under her perch. For the rest of the day she makes contented beeps and thin tweets of self-satisfaction. The death of the mouse is significant and points in one direction only. Her drive to kill means it is time to start her training.
If truth be told, I have been putting it off for a few days, and my growing sense of unease begins to unfold like a flower. The build-up to training any hawk is always tense, like a cord tugging and attached to the solar plexus, pulling me towards the inevitable. When I force change, when training begins, I know Girl will reject and vociferously protest against the process. Initially, she will not waver and one mistake on my part may mean disaster. The fluidity of these first few weeks is never without issue or indeed brief moments of grave despair.
When training my first sparrowhawk, on her very first free flight she simply flew off into the woods and became a small dot, dissolving invisibly through light and shade. My world condensed and collapsed with a sense of utter helplessness. Any romantic thoughts of freedom and flight were quickly squashed and swapped for a violent urge to climb up into the sky and punch the sun. I entered the wood, looked about for a while and then did the only thing a falconer can do when a hawk is lost. I started whistling at trees. After what felt like a lifetime she moved and, following the sound of her bell, I chased her around for several hours before she returned. It was close. She could have been lost for ever.
The first falcon I trained, a little merlin, followed almost the same pattern. After a week’s preparation I removed his training line, set him on a fence post and called him in. He flew from the post, across my shoulder, and curled straight up into the sky. I watched helplessly as he slid through the air with the rolling ease of a consummate professional. His entire physicality changed, as if to say, So this is what I am for, and he began flying with surging, unexpected energy, reaching hundreds of feet in three fast-flying turns. He was so far up and so far away I lost sight of him. I was devastated and meekly followed in his general direction, swinging the lure and calling. Five minutes later he reappeared high above me, dive-bombing swifts and swallows before landing on the roof of an old church. Climbing the bell tower, I skidded about on an 800-year-old roof roughly 150 feet above the ground and grabbed his legs, pulling him back to earth.
The recurring problem with young birds of prey is that they lie. They pretend to be ready for free flight and they are convincing. The temporary loss of a hawk is therefore almost a certainty until a routine and trust have been set in place. This takes time and delicate observation.
*
My son lives a long way from me. Three motorways and a five-hour drive. He has his own routines and is a homebody. The journey he took to meet me with his mother involved a massive traffic jam on the M25. He tells me with humour, good grace, but in no uncertain terms: ‘I am not doing that again’.
This makes me laugh. I know exactly what he means.
On my first extended visit I stay in a motel near his house, spending time with him during the day. Towards the end of the first day I start clock-watching, time bends, speeds up. It is upsetting coming and going; it is neither one thing nor the other. I feel awkward, under pressure to perform, to cram everything in, and the time to leave arrives far too quickly.
On the second day my son asks if I will stay the night. I tense up, absolve myself from committing to anything: ‘It is not up to me, mate.’
His mother says she does not mind.
I wish I had said no.
It is easy for adults to pretend to be nice to one another in front of a child, but it’s far harder to maintain over time and in close proximity. I know from my own background that the history of fractured families is full of venom. Emotional poison flows through intra-family relationships when they split. There are always rolling recriminations and the dragging up of misdemeanours: he said, she said, you did this, I did that. That’s just how it goes. It is what I am expecting.
The whole day I am uncomfortable, my antenna high, my guard up. I am waiting for a comment, a look, a raised eyebrow. I am waiting for any sign of righteous animosity, anger or negativity. I listen to what my son says, waiting to hear him accidentally repeat some snide comment fed to him about how feckless his father is.
I hear nothing of the sort.
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I see nothing of the sort.
I am perplexed.
I begin to see that, without the pressure and expectations of a fixed relationship, our dynamics have changed for the better. His mother is wholly different, less controlling, less stubborn, less critical. The grinding tedium that accompanies the end of a relationship and the hatred that so easily festers are non-existent. There are no bitter broken words when I put a fork in the wrong drawer, there is no splenetic rage when I eat the last biscuit, no cold annoyance at my very existence. That I breathe is not an issue.
I begin to think that maybe she sees me in her son. Through him, maybe she has a better understanding of who I am. It is more likely that I do not figure in this change of attitude at all. The love for her son is clear. It overwhelms all else. Anything that may hurt him – any negativity, words or actions of the past – have been banished. All that matters is the here and now. Then again, I too have changed. I am far more relaxed, less argumentative, less angry, far less fearful and a lot less destructive.
I watch them intently. Listen to them interact. She has done an exceptional job building their lives. She is not a victim of my weaknesses or my behaviour. She is not a pushover. She does not suffer fools gladly. Her job in London involves managing multimillion-pound budgets, organizing a workforce, placing people to perform to the best of their abilities. She has applied the same determination towards her son and is protective and generous. The relationship she has created with her son functions perfectly well, with or without me. Nothing I do will interfere with what she has created. She has her own independence and freedom, and my son thrives because of it. I can see clearly how the structure of their lives functions. I can see where I fit in, what my purpose is. I feel valued. I am able to participate.
When he is in bed she tells me that what happened doesn’t matter. What matters is how we move forward. It is easier to communicate with her now. We say the same things using different words. We agree not to argue. It is far better to be kind than to carry the exhausting weight of hatred for the next forty years. It is that simple. That black and white.
In the morning my son wanders downstairs and climbs on my sofa bed in the front room. His hair is standing on end, he looks a bit crumpled, a bit bleary-eyed. He nestles under the duvet and we watch cartoons. When his mother wakes up we have a cooked breakfast sitting in the sunshine.
All I want is space and time to learn the one thing that does not come naturally to me. How to be a father. This is what I am given.
*
On the first day of Girl’s training I place her on the top of a fence post, walk a few yards from her then call her to the glove. She lands hard and snaps off her back talon. Thick, deep-red blood flows freely, smears across the leather thumb of my glove and drips to the floor. This is very bad.
I run towards home with Girl on the glove, blood oozing up through my fingers as I frantically try to stem the flow. Restless and upset, she flaps about, swinging heavily around on the end of her leash. When she is reclaimed, replaced and stable, I notice that a second outer-right talon is split and frayed at the end.
Once inside the cottage, the keratin coating on each damaged talon slides away, revealing a small nub of pinkish-red raw nerve endings on each toe. The pain must be immense – like tearing a nail from a thumb and forefinger and being expected to complete a Rubik’s cube. I search frantically for the first-aid kit as blood continues to fall from her wounds, dropping with a tip-tap to the floor.
Iodine is a remarkable compound, a potent antiseptic and caustic, perfect for chemically cauterizing wounds. Shaped in spiky hexagonal crystals and purple in tone, tipped from a tube in panic it bunches up on a table like iron filings on a magnet. In crystal form it is highly concentrated and, if blown across the room by the draught of a hawk’s wings, stains wooden floors a deep puce. If an errant crystal is mistakenly eaten, the taste is stark and wincingly sour. Poured into a wound, iodine stings like lemon juice in a paper cut.
I dip a wet cotton bud into a small pile of iodine and press it with force on to the nub of Girl’s exposed toes. I tense up, expecting her reaction to be one of violence. Instead of explosive anger, she lowers her head and gently nibbles her wounds, as if scratching an itch rather than reacting to a burn.
Inadvertently, she has taken a tiny fleck of crystal in her mouth. Her arrow-shaped tongue turns deep purple. I watch as the taste hits the back of her throat. She pokes out the angular tip in disgust but remains calm. It takes a few minutes for the blood to stop leaking out from under the iodine. When it does, I place Girl in a darkened room to keep her calm and quietly close the door.
Like all hawks, Girl’s blood is highly oxygenated, so it has a viscous consistency similar to watered-down strawberry jam. It takes a few minutes to wash my hands and wipe away the trail of blood through the cottage. I find spots and splatters on the front door, the step, the path, the garden gate and halfway down the track back towards the training ground. It is the heaviest blood loss I have seen in any hawk.
I check on Girl periodically through the night. By dawn, the iodine crystals have dried to a black crust. I peel it off, check for pin-prick bleeding and apply a second layer. Once this second shell falls away, I spread a thin layer of liquid skin over the ends of her toes to act as a flexible, porous barrier against further infection.
I spend several days impatiently waiting, internally arguing about the merits of flying a hawk with two missing talons. All arguments cease when Girl stops eating and starts flicking food across the floor. The spiralling disaster of ill health continues to turn. Due to shock or simple bad luck, the soft, warm edges of her mouth become a breeding ground for a yeast infection called frounce.
Running down the blue/grey and pink edges of her throat, small white speckles blossom to the size of grains of rice. These soft pillows of fungus act like a fish bone trapped in the throat. They block her windpipe, inhibiting her ability to swallow. I catch a sour smell when she breathes, the rotten tang of old flesh or metallic, stinky fish. The infection is slowly turning her breath rancid.
Without medication, the frounce will continue to multiply and Girl will starve. I roll her up in a cloth and gently tug at the feathers below her lower mandible, opening her beak. Using a moist cotton bud, I scrape the effluent from inside her mouth so she can swallow. I mince her food to a sloppy pulp, add a drop of water, avian vitamins and a course of crushed-up, inexpensive anti-protozoal drugs from the vet. It takes a few days of throat-scraping and drug-laced soup before the frounce begins to recede.
By the end of the second week Girl does her best to eat four whole chicks a day, but they sit awkwardly, slip through the gaps left by her missing talons. She also finds it difficult to stay on her perch properly and keeps sliding around on it. She is hysterically restless. To stop her bursting open the scabs, the only option left is to raise her weight to its highest, healthiest levels and set her free in an aviary. If her talons fail to grow back or are misshapen, or the base of her toe damaged to the point that it cannot regenerate new talons, my deepest fear of Girl living her life in captivity has been realized.
I am heartbroken for her.
I am heartbroken for myself.
*
At the far end of my garden, past the pampas grass, almost into the wood, is a small area about an eighth of an acre in size. It’s overgrown, half in sunlight, half in shade, and in it voles shriek and fight, snakes sunbathe and a tawny owl nests above a hive of wild honeybees. It is a private place, secluded, ankle deep in fallen acorns, chest high in nettles and surrounded by plum and damson trees. I strim back the nettles, clearing a space, and build Girl a large, secluded aviary.
Hawks do not like being caged. If the design of Girl’s aviary is wrong she will haphazardly crash about, relentlessly flying into the walls and corners. A badly designed aviary will cause her to smash feathers, split her beak or, worse still, break her bones. Before I put the roof on Girl’s new home, I stretch several layers of soft mesh ne
tting across the top and staple it in place. If startled, Girl will gently bounce off the netting without injury. Along the right side, facing out over fields, I screw vertical rows of white overflow piping across large squares cut away from the walls. This allows free-flowing air and sunlight to stream between the bars. In any attempt to escape, Girl will simply grab the piping and slip safely to the floor. For a fresh supply of flowing water, I drill a hole in the bottom-right-hand corner and push a hosepipe down into a large circular bath. Several thick perches are attached to the walls and across the centre of the aviary. A small ledge and feeding hatch complete her new home.
I release Girl into the aviary, duck down and hide quietly behind a damson tree. After initial suspicion, she dances about on the different perches, flies to the floor and has a bath. Wet and spiky, she hops back up near the window and calmly preens and cleans her feathers. Sneaking around the side, I drop diced pigeon breast coated with calcium and vitamin powder and what remains of her medicine through the feeding hatch. She is safe, settled and comfortable in her home. I have done as much as I can. Other than feeding her daily, the rest is up to her. There is nothing more I can do to speed up her recovery: nature cannot be rushed, and a talon takes eight months to grow back. I will have to keep Girl contained through the autumn and winter. It will not be until next spring that I find out if her rehabilitation can continue and whether she can be released.
*
My son and I are in a church in December, and it is freezing. Cold, and echoing in a way that only very old churches do. My son is semi-naked and excited. He twists and turns, laughing in my lap. Trying to get Nebuchadnezzar into his costume, preparing him for the birth of the baby Jesus, is proving more complex than it should. A small sheep and a camel wander across the stone flooring and ask if I am Nebuchadnezzar’s dad. Happy with the answer, they wander back to their respective herds.
