Blood Ties

by Crane, Ben;

  The next day the pain is immense, the whole of my right side, from my collar bone across my chest and down to my waist is burnished yellow, green, and purple. It looks like I have been hit by a car.

  I text Steve:

  “What the fuck is the point of an imprint goshawk?! I am not a sadomasochist. I am in agony.”

  With oblique, arch knowledge, he replies:

  “Use the force, young Jedi. Wait until the freezer is full, then you’ll see what the point is. Also, learn to move a bit quicker.”

  He is right of course. Far from being a problem, this behaviour is to be understood and accepted. It is this innate fearless aggression I wish to harness for hunting. All CC needs is turning outwards, given the chance to function in the world in the correct manner. He needs to fulfil his instincts and celebrate his skills. He needs to kill.

  *

  The letter in my hand states:

  ‘The children will be learning about the Stone Ages. We encourage them to come to school dressed as a caveman or cavewoman.’

  When we get home we sweep through Google, searching for images. He is certain he wants to be a chief catcher, a tribal hunter. We find pictures of antelope skulls used as headgear and work out a plan. I begin to get overly artistic. Within three hours I have the basic shape of the skull slotted together with cardboard, the horns made of rolled-up newspaper. I drive to a model-making shop and buy Modroc, paint, polystyrene bones, a large roll of fake tiger fur and some plimsolls. I begin the final construction, my son gives a nod or a shake of his head and I adjust my plans in accordance with his requirements. This is our first serious exploration in art and I am in safe territory. I know the intrinsic value of arts and crafts. This is the best of me. I have no hesitation in showing him what I can do. I am driven to impress him, to make him proud of me.

  My ability in other domains as a role model is less precise. I do not conform to the general consensus of what it is to be a man. I observe the lives of other men in their forties, see their families and their possessions, and know I am out of synch, anachronistic, an oddity. I know the problems that will inevitably arise as my son lives his life will not be met with the usual advice, guidance or a standard point of view. How he will respond to who I am, to my thoughts and feelings, as he begins to form his own personality into adulthood, causes me a mixture of concern and interest. At best, I can offer a creative, contrary alternative; at worst, I will be totally unhelpful.

  At the table I continue to creatively show off. I add Modroc to the mask, shaping it and smoothing it to the texture of bone. I add paint: yellow ochre and white. I brush tones and shadows around the eyes and base of the horns. I go for a walk near the woods behind his mother’s house and collect pheasant feathers, twigs and a long length of old binder twine. I cut holes in the polystyrene bones and thread them on to the twine. I add flaps of Modroc to the ends and paint them red, replicating pieces of fresh flesh. I fold the fake tiger fur in half and cut a hole in the centre to form a poncho. With the remainder of the twine I make a belt to tie around his waist. I break the twigs into small lengths and glue them to the plimsolls, making a pair of caveman clogs. For the final effect I cut and shape a spear, tying the remainder of the feathers around the tip. My work complete, I lay it on the table and my son gives a final nod of appreciation. There is no question he will be the best-dressed, hunting, gathering, meat-eating killer caveman the world has ever seen.

  *

  We have been out for two hours and seen nothing. I am sweating heavily. Inside my shirt, droplets fall from under my arms and down the side of my rib cage. The hatband on my head is stained black and liquid salt drips through my eyebrows into my eyes and stings. The night before there was heavy rainfall. The corn stubble clicks and ticks, drying in the heat with the sound of a thousand miniature clocks. The dogs are exhausted and whirls of heat vapour lift off the ground. Etta is fussing around my feet, stops and rolls on to her side, panting. I give up, tell her we are off to the stream to cool down.

  Up in front, at forty yards, a rabbit materializes out of the corn and runs, sending up puffs of dust down the tractor tracks. I look at CC and wait. He is engrossed elsewhere, cleaning the edges of his wings, and does not see it. Neither do the dogs. I stand straight and raise my arm vertically. I feel a slight bump and strangely weightless, as if I have detached and thrown my arm forward in silence. CC accelerates to fifty or sixty miles an hour, closing down the distance quickly. The rabbit is still running, makes it to seventy, eighty yards. Inexplicably, it stops, turns and looks at the hawk. CC hits it hard and lifts it cleanly off the ground. The rabbit flaps beneath him like a loose sail set free in the wind, and they land way past the point of impact.

  Sprinting the distance, skidding on my knees, CC’s back right talon is buried deep into the base of the rabbit’s skull. It is dead, but still moving. CC has killed it outright. To be certain, I lean in and break the rabbit’s neck quickly and cleanly. CC protests at my interference, is screaming and mantling. I move back and let him settle. He pulls hard at the rabbit’s fur, stripping light tufts, filaments of which stick to his beak and eyeballs. Frustrated, he rolls his head across his wings, shakes the fur free and sneezes. I lean in with my gloved hand, cut a small slit in the rabbit’s chest and pull it apart, exposing the ribs and inner chest cavity. CC is suddenly silent and clamps down hard on the carcass. Once again I step back and let him feed. The blood pools around the rabbit’s lungs and heart. CC moves and the rabbit tips. Blood spills over his feet, coats his feathers, drips in small dots and spreads out in rivulets across the earth. I push my hand inside the rabbit’s body and feel an intense, wet heat. CC continues to dip and rip into the chest cavity, allowing me to pull apart small pieces of flesh and hand-feed him.

  I place a large piece of warm liver in my mouth. It feels like firm jelly, tastes sharp and metallic. CC picks up a blue/grey intestine and begins to eat it. Intestines are not a good meal for a hawk. I grab the end and we have a brief tug of war. I remove the rest of the stomach and throw them behind me, allowing CC to feed on the choicest meat only. The dogs find it and have a tussle. As CC fills himself up, he calms. I reach in a final time and cut free the rabbit’s head. I hold it deep within the palm of my glove and offer it to him. He stops feeding, looks at it, wants what I have, thinks it’s a fair swap. He hops off the rabbit and bounces across the floor on to the glove. He continues to tear and pull at the flesh on the skull. It cracks and splits under the strength and power of his beak. Fragments of bone around the eye socket collapse, he pops an eyeball and fluid spurts out on to my shirt. I kneel down and slip what remains of the rabbit into the pocket of my hawking jacket. After twenty minutes of tearing and peeling the skull, CC’s crop is fully distended and he stands sated in blood-soaked contentment on the glove. His vocalization is reduced to a low, grinding beep. He leans low over the glove, cleans the dry, flaking meat and blood from the side of his beak along the leather edge. He once again leans over his shoulders wiping fur from his eyes. His grip lessens and we begin the long walk home. The bumping weight of the dead rabbit pulls the straps of my jacket into my shoulders. As always, and with deep-seated seriousness, I am aware of the brutality of my actions and the responsibility I owe to life taken.

  I have eaten rabbit hundreds of times before. When I had money to waste I happily paid for the pleasure in restaurants. The rabbit, presumably farmed, had passed through many hands before arriving at my table. The distance between its life and my food absolved all concern about the way it died. I think of the television shows that have reduced the most intimate parts of once magnificent and vivacious animals to mere props. I remember my 5 a.m. winter starts working on the mechanical lines of a slaughterhouse where for six months I participated and witnessed the killing of 250 cattle and many more pigs and chickens in a single day, a level of processing and production so fast and vast that a certain type of complacency kicked in. It was a place where pieces of offal, heart and chunks of lungs were thrown for fun betwee
n lines. Where blood was flicked or smeared in faces as a way to cure boredom and elicit humour. A place where wages were low and the context of mass production turned animals into humiliated units sliced and diced without thought or effort, and where the final product was delivered to the five main supermarkets in Britain, the rest frozen in a huge mountain of meat never to be eaten.

  I feel the rabbit’s blood drying tight on my hands and under my nails. I accept full responsibility for its life and for every other life we intend to take during the rest of the season. I feel comfortable with the way it died. I sense the authenticity of the moment. I understand the hard work we have gone through to attain it and I feel the direct honesty of my actions and those of the hawk. There is no moral ambiguity. The rabbit was hunted and died naturally, was killed fairly and with respect. Better still, many of its brothers and sisters escaped back into the landscape to continue living.

  Back at the cottage, I place CC in his weathering and go indoors. I cut the rabbit up, remove the bones, divide the kill, feed some to the dogs, then cook the rest quickly over an open fire. My stomach distends in delight.

  The following morning CC still has rabbit left in his crop, so we rest, returning to the field the following dawn.

  *

  Trying to get my son to eat is something I find far more difficult than giving him a bath. His taste buds are exceptionally sensitive, in much the same way as my eyes are sensitive to light. I once sneakily fed him bread on the edge of being out of date, and he spotted it instantly. What he likes to eat can therefore be complicated. His mother leaves me instructions, but I forget. He is skinny and grazes, eats like a sparrow: peck, peck, peck. I am worried he will get hungry.

  Left to my own devices, I also fall into routines around food, often for months on end. I drink cold tea by the pint mug. I once ate so much pork belly I ballooned up to fourteen stone. Then I switched solely to cucumbers. Whatever I do eat, it is usually only once a day. My feeding habits are perfect for falconry: I can eat any number of pheasant or rabbit without the need for choice or variation. My son is the same. He has a broad range of food that he eats, he is willing to try different things, but he has favourites that he returns to time and again, all prepared to an exacting standard. A meat-and-veg, keep-it-simple type of person.

  I go through a list of breakfast-style food. He normally has a jam sandwich but he is not hungry. I open the fridge and freezer and look for ideas. He ends up having a big bowl of vanilla ice cream, followed by another, with golden syrup on it. He thinks this is a marvellous turn of events and begins bouncing off the walls within fifteen minutes.

  It is the worst parental decision I have so far made.

  *

  I watch CC leave the glove, and the rabbit runs across the grass, twisting and traversing along the base of a fence. CC hits the wire with full force. His neck snaps back, folding like a punched cardboard tube. He falls to the floor, sprawled in leaf litter. He vibrates and begins a weird, floating, rotating fit. His head flicks left then right. He stands, he falls, staggers about, cannot focus, looks drunk.

  He is dying.

  Rooted to the spot in shock, I watch the last jerking shudders of his life. Searching for safety, for solace, he rows pathetically across the floor back towards me. I experience a heartbeat pause of unshackled pointless drift and detachment. It feels as if someone has stroked an electrode over the soft surface of my brain. I wretch and taste vomit, shout out loud. My senses close down. Standing in silence, I watch him unwind and finally stop moving.

  Two or three seconds later he twitches. Then flaps. Then rolls over, stands and screams. I scoop him up and hold him tight. I swear at him: ‘You bastard sod!’

  As he slowly comes round and regains the glove, I descend into a foul, angry mood. I curse the stupidity of the private worlds and private land of England, where a lot of goshawks die hitting fences. I am not a romantic. There has never been a halcyon day when a goshawk was free to fly anywhere in the United Kingdom. Kingdom. I curse the word. I wish a pox on all their houses, I spit on the past. I curse those who started carving up the land for their own selfish gain. Enclosure: a process that has nearly killed my hawk. Above all else, I curse myself for letting CC go. I should have held back.

  I know this is just the start. A heavy concussion does not always kill a hawk. It can take several days for blood to seep into the brain, causing an embolism, the trauma and shock of which then kills them. Even if this does not happen, if he was to have another knock of this magnitude he will die instantly rather than be knocked unconscious. What is worse, there is also a high probability of a secondary infection, the vilest of which would be aspergillosis.

  Aspergillosis is a tiny fungal spore that settles in the internal cavity of a hawk. Birds do not have a diaphragm; their bodies are exposed to infection in any part of their chest, stomach, lungs, trachea and even their wings. It is warm and damp in these little pockets of space and the aspergillosis spores can settle anywhere and multiply. It is a deadly disease and tough. It hangs about, takes its time and is powerful enough to kill a human. Eighty per cent of goshawks suffering from aspergillosis die.

  Bill Sykes was a resplendent male in mature plumage and came to me on loan from another falconer. Like Boy, his eyes were the coal-fire orange of maturity. His feathers were a slate grey and blue. Kept locked away in a mews for over four years, he was a difficult hawk to handle or even understand. Bill’s silent, locked-down, parent-reared moods were complex. Like a recidivist sociopathic prisoner on day release, he just could not settle.

  The first prey he caught was a grey squirrel which bit him hard above his ankle. The hole, positioned badly, was in an impossible place to stitch. Left to heal naturally, the vet prescribed a huge dose of antibiotics to counteract potential infection. Giving antibiotics to a bird of prey lowers its immune system. It was Hobson’s choice, a balance between treating the immediate problem or opening the door to other infections.

  After a few days I detected a slow, low rattling: a thick phlegm-flecked gurgle in Bill’s breathing, like the sound of mucus-covered bubbles blowing up through a drain. At a specialist surgery for avian medicine, a circular endoscope was pushed down Bill’s throat. The images bouncing up the optic fibre showed an internal lunar landscape of undulating pale organic surfaces, ripped, broken and slit by a dense fungal growth curving and folding like mould back over his trachea. Deeper down, scarred and bruised lung tissue revealed a previously unknown infection. The spores of this recent infection had set deep on the lip of Bill’s air sacs and his chances of survival were slim.

  Treatment started with the extremely expensive surgical removal of the aspergillosis spores, followed by three types of complicated medication, to be administered over the next two months. In order to speed up his recuperation, I fed Bill up to his highest, healthiest weight. Consequently, he was not hungry and became highly agitated. Two of the three treatments required crushed pills and the secretion of a liquid inside his food twice a day. I would dose him with medication, only to return an hour later and, frustratingly, find a foaming pink pill under the perch or liquid flicked up across the wall. Taking the medication every day was critical to his health, so I took to physically forcing the medicine into him by hand. He hated me with a vengeance.

  A third, concurrent treatment required the nebulization of an avian disinfectant called F10. A nebulizer is a small, noisy pump and tubing system used to treat mouth, lung and throat disease in humans. A mixture of water and F10 flows through the nebulizer and explodes in a thin mist which is breathed in through a face mask and deep into the lungs. For it to work on Bill, he had to be placed into a large box with the door closed and a tube inserted into the side.

  The nebulization took half an hour twice a day, once in the morning and then once again in the evening. Bill frantically beat at the door, trying to escape, smashing and breaking his feathers. He bruised the flesh over his beak and cut his face. This treatment went on for more than 200 hours.

&n
bsp; The prolonged procedure tested my faith in falconry and my love of birds of prey and nature itself. Ultimately, I saved his life, but Bill would never hunt again. Many, many times, I felt it would have been kinder to let him die.

  Waiting for infection to strike in CC, I sink into darker reflections motivated by the fear of his mortality. I start to see the strange contradiction between falconry and our relationship to death. At one end, I actively seek its presence in the quarry, at the other I resist it vociferously, trying to protect the hawk from accidents, illness and injury. The distinction I make between the two is motivated by a false dichotomy between the hawk’s life and that of other animals.

  I know from watching CC flailing about on the floor, seeing the aspergillosis spores in Bill, the peel and poke of Girl’s frayed talons, Boy’s broken feathers, that nature does not share my distinction. It has no such hierarchies. Life throws death about in hard-hitting moments. Nothing escapes. From top to bottom, human to hawk, rabbit to pheasant, flicking insects, soft slugs, nematodes, plants, down deep to microbes, at all levels and at all times we are connected by two simple things: the vitality of our lives and the certitude of our death.

  In the short time I have shared watching CC grow, seeing him breathe, feed, fly, feeling him break into my body, the time we have spent being ‘out there’, out flying, I have become deeply connected to him. If it was a case of a talon or broken feather, I would not hesitate to intervene. But aspergillosis is a wholly different matter. His life, like any other, should be lived as a galloping, free-wheeling experience. It should be lived through the immediate free expression of positive natural behaviours. What is his life worth, if he is broken and left standing on a perch for the next fifteen years?