by Crane, Ben;
We return the fish carefully, thank our new fishing friend and head off to our own corner. Five hours later, we are covered in fish slime, he has chocolate mousse around his mouth and in his hair. We have caught a lot of beautiful fish. It is a day when my plans and quiet expectations match reality. It is the first time I have felt the deep joy of paternity.
*
Entering Girl into the world of wild quarry proves a lot harder. Her inconsistency means she flounders and keeps missing. When she misses, I find her empty footed, tightly bound to twigs and rolling around like a disturbed child. She will not let me touch her until she is utterly calm. I wait up to fifteen minutes before she decides to clamber on to the glove with a footful of leaves and blackthorn twigs. She begins to collect multiple scratches, cuts, piercings and bumps on her feet. She does not take kindly to me spraying her feet with disinfectant and scrubbing them with a toothbrush each day.
Sexy Lexi was another female sparrowhawk I owned, and she would act very much like Girl. On nearly every miss she would foot branches with a powerful pumping movement. Half a dozen machine-gun pulsing clamps within a second. Perfect for killing birds but not for spiked branches. A blackthorn tip snapped off, embedded into the soft pad of her foot and a small scab grew over the top. The swelling, a build-up of pus, crystallized into a hard, flinty fragment the size of the rounded sulphurous tip of a matchstick. Lexi had to be sedated and undergo surgery at a cost of around £1,000. If Girl continues to behave in this manner, it is only a matter of time before she succumbs to a similar injury. The only solution is to keep away from blackthorn hedges and strike out into open fields. Here there is less chance of Girl further injuring her feet but also less chance of making a kill. It is a frustrating choice: the situations are as bad as one another.
The following day Girl is hot, cantankerous and frustrated. I match her mood perfectly. We have been walking cut, flat fields for three hours with no success. Absent-mindedly, I cross to a cluster of corn stalks untouched by combine harvesters. A bird breaks across the gap and bobs and tips about on the floor picking up discarded seeds. We all look at one another. Girl doesn’t even bother to chase. The bird takes the opportunity to escape and flies to a small, frothy patch of nettles under an old aluminium water trough. The bird is easily bumped out by the dogs. Girl changes heart, grabs her meal ten feet out and eight feet up. Unexpected, sudden, and fast. I am stunned. Girl has done it.
The relief is brief. We move from poetry to pain in less than a second as I watch Girl fly hard and fast, curl up over a hedge and disappear into the landscape. For half an hour I sweep the sky with the telemetry. Nothing. Switching to another channel, I get a positive signal and track her down three fields away. I hear the smallest, muffled sound of a bell. I look on the ground, fold over patches of long grass and lift branches, trying to find her.
At the base of a large oak one or two finger-length feathers are stuck in the ground. The leaves above are dense and too thick to see through. Standing against the rough trunk, my arms wrapped around the circumference, I stumble in a circle looking up. Halfway out on a branch, Girl is eating her kill. Clever Girl! She has learnt to fly to elevated cover and to feed in safety. This is good for her survival, not so good for me. There is no way she is coming down until she has finished eating. She may also move again, if disturbed. Sitting on the ground directly below her position, I roll a cigarette and wait. Girl plucks and pulls at her meal. As if a fairy has burst a pillow, small feathers rotate down from the branches, touching and tickling my face. When the snowstorm stops I look up and wave her daily rations around in my hand. I am expecting her to refuse, but she drops from her branch and lands on my glove with a soft bump, then leans over and begins to eat my offering. I nearly fall over with shock; she is almost normal. The relief is sublime.
*
There are very few things more delightful than a wild hawk making its first kill. The laughter of a small boy being tickled until snot bubbles form is one; the other is the realization that halfway through a walk his wellingtons are pointing in the wrong direction to his feet. His boots are on the wrong way round. We cry with laughter as he marches about like a court jester then parades up and down, moonwalks and refuses to put them on the right way round.
*
Boy’s aptitude and number of kills rises steadily. Girl’s remains the same: one. Her failure is followed by a slow return to frustration and anger. I have no choice but to once again change tactics. Both methods I have in mind add subterfuge, both will provide Girl with a better chance of realizing her full potential. Unfortunately, both are inherently risky.
In the past, falconers in England would fly hawks and falcons from horseback to gain a height advantage and cover rough ground easily. In a modern context, the form is different, but the theory remains the same. Some falconers now use trucks and off-road vehicles for the same purpose. Crows, pigeons and magpies are less wary of a truck crossing farmland than of a falconer walking with a hawk. The element of surprise usually tips the outcome in favour of the hawk. Precluding the idiocy of human accidents, car hawking works well.
Years previously, driving in the fields close to my home, the hawk I was flying had caught and secured a magpie. I jumped from the truck and ran the short distance to help. Kneeling down, focused on watching her feed, a strange beeping noise broke the adrenaline rush. I turned around, confused, and watched in horror. The Toyota Hilux was moving steadily backwards across the path, the dog looking passively through the open door. When leaping from the automatic truck I had accidentally kicked it into reverse. Before I could act, over a ton of expensive truck (which I had borrowed from my son’s mother before he was born and which, technically, did not belong to me) disappeared into a ditch, rolling towards a farm pond. The open door caught a tree and the truck slowed to the sound of creaking, squealing metal, followed by an exploding, bursting sound as the door bent backwards and the Hilux carried on down the slope towards the pond. The damage took a lot of explaining away (I blamed the dog) and I vowed that it would be my last foray into motorized falconry.
Aside from the use of a vehicle, the only other option is to let Girl fly free from trees like the two eagles in Germany. Unfortunately, after a handful of captures, Girl would be even more difficult to control. She would begin to actively search out high positions, become wholly reluctant to return and start self-hunting. In falconry terms, encouraging self-hunting is bad since the potential for losing a hawk is huge. For a rehabilitated hawk, it is perfect. The balancing act would be knowing when to stop. If I pushed too far, allowed her too much freedom and she failed to return, Girl would be flying free with a bell, anklets and telemetry. The loss of equipment is of no real consequence, but the noise of a permanently attached bell would draw attention to Girl for the rest of her life. In the summer, this is not an issue, as the innocence and inexperience of fledging youngsters tips the balance in Girl’s favour. In heavy winter, her quarry hyper-alert, fit, robust and with less cover acting as camouflage, the bell would be easily detected. A bell left on her leg would mean the difference between survival or death.
If free flight were to work, I would have to control all the elements closely. It would have to be the final stage before release. All the planning in the world will not stop it from going wrong. If it fails, the love between hawk and human is easily replaced with frustrated disappointment and a directionless hatred of falconry.
*
I have always wanted to take my son to the seaside. The seaside in my mind is the one I love the best, the one I want to share with him. It is a place of happy childhood memories, and a location I return to as an adult when I want the taste and smell of the sea on my tongue. Situated on the Welsh coast, it is a small natural cove that doubles up as a tiny campsite for half a dozen people. The farmer allows fires and sells burgers and chops from the lambs he butchers from his back door. The sun sets perfectly. I have seen porpoises, caught huge sea bass in nets and pulled lobsters from deep fissures in the rocks. W
hen the tide turns, the pools heave with creatures: a handful of smashed limpets or snails makes the floor move with life. Thumb-sized anemones begin to wave like palm trees in a gale. Crabs, an assortment of shrimp and prawns, club-headed gobies and bootlace conger eels scoot out from rocks and chomp down on the leathery discarded flesh. It is a place where buckets are filled easily, where time slides away and where you get sunburnt without realizing it.
Unfortunately, this place is about eight hours from where my son lives. A daytrip is out of the question. A compromise is reached. He lives forty-five minutes from the south coast. So we head off for the day, our expectations and planned adventures well beyond sky high.
At first, we cannot find anywhere to park. All the car parks are full. All the streets have double yellow lines, signs and traffic wardens in numbers almost equalling the crowds. When we reach the sea the tide is in and not due out for another six hours. I had forgotten to check the times. The water of the English Channel is a swirling, murky, mud-brown soup. There are no rock pools. The beach is stunningly stark, just a long line of shale and shingle. Admittedly, the stones in between the lumps of discarded plastic are beautiful, but the beach is uniform from left to right to the width of the horizon. Someone allows their dog to take a shit right next to us and fails to pick it up.
Undeterred, we start skimming stones, building piles of rocks and knocking them over. We make collections of the prettier shells, comparing their sizes, shapes and colours. We walk and explore. Etta and Flash swim and chase the seagulls eating chips from bins. We find several mermaid’s purses and cuttlefish bones. If I put a positive spin on it, it is not too bad. After a couple of hours, we get an ice cream and drive home.
Halfway home my son turns to me with a serious face:
‘Well, that was a SERIOUS disappointment.’
I roar with laughter. It is exactly what I was thinking. It is very honest. Totally inappropriate. The sort of thing I would say. He has no idea how happy he has just made me.
From nowhere, an unexpected wave of emotion washes over me, arrives without forethought or prompting. I am shocked by its natural power. I try to control it, force it back down, then give up and let it run its course. I turn and say:
‘I love you.’
This is the first time I have told him. This is the first time he is old enough to listen.
*
On the first morning of free-flying I take Girl to a small wood near the cottage and sweep my arm sideways and up, letting go of her jesses. She lands in a tree above a thick blanket of nettles to my left. The resident blackbird, thrush and other woodland birds begin their clicking, ticking alarm calls. A pair of wood pigeon explode out of a thick mass of ivy on the trunk of a dead tree. Several smaller birds break from under my boots and Girl moves. I hear her bell above and I assume she has chosen to pursue. I pause to listen. If she was flying, or far away, the noise would recede with the distance. It doesn’t. Instead, it remains clear and loud, chimes in a regular beat. Ting… pause… Ting… pause… Ting. I smile: this is a familiar marker. The jolt of flesh ripped piecemeal from a kill moves a bell’s dapper with the same force, in the same direction, creating the same noise; Ting… pause… Ting … pause… Ting. Girl has killed. I look about, trying to pinpoint the direction. The sound is delicate and is thrown about like a ventriloquist’s voice. On squeaking wings, the pigeons sweep back above me, touch the ivy, startle and immediately break out of the wood in different directions. I have found Girl, and Girl has found the pigeon’s nest high above me.
I have no choice but to climb.
At the top of the tree I find Girl perched precariously on a strange mass of old twigs. She has a partially fledged dead pigeon in her feet. Its brother or sister looks on, unconcerned. Trying not to fall, I lower myself along the tree and crawl in deeper. Girl keeps feeding. I inch forward and hold the dead pigeon still. Girl adjusts her feet and her left foot gently spreads over the back of my hand. She continues ripping at the skin and soft meat, breaks into the chest cavity and slurps up warm blood and fresh liver. I am no more than four or five inches from her. I can taste the stale dust of dry, powdered excrement, see the curling unbinding skin on twigs and the whitewash slash of pigeon shit over the edge of the nest. I smell the blood and see the herds of red mites running over Girl’s talons and across my hand. Small insects and beetles slip and slide between rotting feathers in the bottom of the nest. I hear flies buzzing and feel the waxy green leaves of the ivy touch my face. Damp moss wets my knees and chest. Splinters of rotten wood and dead ivy scratch up my sleeves and fall down between the cheeks of my arse. The pigeon which is still alive has a bulbous beak and deadpan eyes and shuffles back against the ivy, breathing steadily. It is a fairly grim situation but not without a silver lining. I figure that, with one sibling gone, the remaining chick will get double rations when we have left. Even if it doesn’t, Girl has taught herself another incalculable lesson. A sneaky, opportunistic trick, of use when she is free. This is how Girl and Boy will hunt most of the time. This is how wild sparrowhawks survive, and pigeon is an excellent meal, the best. The kill took low levels of effort for a high-energy reward. For two or three days Girl’s body will benefit; she will feel different, stronger, powerful. The association made will no doubt help keep her alive when free. I pull Girl up with the remains of her breakfast, tie her tightly to my glove, pat the remaining pigeon on the head and slide like a chimpanzee down the fallen trunk.
*
I am suspended high above the ground in a harness clipped to a thick metal wire. My son is in front of me and we are a little bit scared. We are on an assault course called Go Ape! in the woods near his home. There are a lot of other families with children, all of whom are at various stages of completing the course. It is a clever design and good fun. After we have done a couple of laps we begin to get a little bit cocky, a bit brave. We start rushing and challenging ourselves: one-handed, hopping, eyes closed, backwards, daring each other to do silly things. My son gets more and more excited and enthusiastic. We run up against the family in front. Their little boy is the same age as my son but a lot more hesitant. They are both going across a shaky bridge on a sky platform and I can see my son beginning a whispered conversation with the boy. He is quiet, the words just below audibility, a low mumbling that forces the other boy to keep turning around. The boy grimaces and he begins to get angry. I know exactly what is happening. Only a child with my genetic make-up could possibly begin to cause an argument suspended fifty feet above the ground. I know I shouldn’t, but I feel a strange pride. I used to get into fights a lot in secondary school. I had a compulsive urge to say things, always to the wrong person, usually teachers, often bigger, older pupils. I have learnt to tame it as I’ve got older or to avoid situations where it is likely to happen and I can still see him whispering, like a naughty macaque. The other boy is now seriously agitated and starting to wobble about. Thankfully, his father is below, tapping away on his i-Phone; otherwise, it would no doubt have escalated into an intergenerational confrontation. I hear my son say, ‘I am only being sarcastic.’ That is not a good word to hear from a small boy. It generally spells trouble. I intervene just in time to stop it escalating into a full-on monkey fight. My son smiles mischievously, is coy. I wink at him. There is a silent recognition between us as we swing on then slide down the ropes, landing with a soft bump.
*
I continue to fly Girl from hedges, trees and fence posts. She has the most success working a long line of larch, catching young magpies, then a jackdaw. Realizing bigger birds are a legitimate food source, Girl takes to chasing crows, on one occasion for over two or three hundred yards. I know this to be dangerous. As she is so close to release, I try to curtail her enthusiasm, but she is vigorous in pursuit and actively searches them out. In her first year Lexi would do the same, with near-fatal results.
The single young crow selected was in the centre of a field and vulnerable. Not spotting the hawk until too late, it lifted in panic and L
exi rotated up underneath, snatching it twenty feet off the ground. They fell like two stones spinning on string. It was awkward for me to get to her quickly: I had to run the length of a hedge before coming to the gate. On the ploughed field my feet became bogged down and thick with clay. It was like running in concrete boots. Even at such a long distance, I could see something was wrong. The crow had flipped Lexi on to her back and had a black, curling claw around her head. The crow began calling. From the tops of the far tree line, what looked like a swirling mass of black butterflies enlarged into the sky with a roaring noise. A huge corpus of crows, easily 300 in number, all intent on defence. They made it to the hawk far quicker than I could manage. On the ground, they circled around, taking turns jagging and pestering the sparrowhawk like vultures or hyenas tugging at the body of a fallen calf. When I arrived they refused to move or be scared away and formed a writhing black mass, powerful and extremely loud. The moment I killed the crow a weird ripple flowed through the mob and they lifted as one, a thick black sheet low over my head. The noise peaked to a truly scary level. I lay over the hawk and covered my head with my hands. With eerie speed, the noise reduced and I watched the crows break off in groups, retracting upwards in a vortex and with the smoothness of smoke returning back to the coppice. Since then I have a deep respect for crows – they are intelligent, brave and, on close inspection, rather beautiful, but if Girl continues to chase crows when free, without the help of a falconer, she will undoubtedly be killed. To prevent this, I have to change locations. I begin hunting with her in the wood where she will be released, slowly easing her into her last lessons.
