by Crane, Ben;
The pain of this realization becomes too much. I am filled with deep sadness. I am powerless. Instead of fighting it, I draw myself down into it and let it roll over me. I think maybe I should turn my back on falconry and stop. That I should absolve myself and bow out. Stop participating, and walk back to the ease, expediency and security of a life without hawks. But the whole process, the totality of hawks and hunting, are intrinsic to my identity. Cut me, and I bleed feathers. It is the closest thing to what I consider sacred. It would be like stopping breathing. It would be like denying nature itself.
As a respite from the scar-tissue toughness of goshawking, to see if I am all right, Steve and Hollie come to visit with CC’s stepbrother, Sir Percival the merlin. He is the diametric opposite of CC on many levels and the break is a welcome distraction.
When he was laid, Sir Percival’s egg was small with a light copper-brown base and splotchy dark chocolate patches rolling around and down over the top. When hatched, he was the size of a bumblebee, his beak no bigger than the yellow piece of pie from a Trivial Pursuit boardgame. His legs and feet were pale pink, a pair of thin, stringy worms that have toughened and turned yellow over time.
Steve places him on a post perch in the front garden. Sir P is small and slight, ten inches tall and five ounces in weight. Picking him up, he scrabbles about on Steve’s bare hand then stands on the table in the cottage. He preens and conducts himself with a self-possessed bravery. He has an air of arrogant intensity, is inquisitive and cheeky, a spring-released, fearless, bouncing mousetrap. He reminds me of a charming child, a son, scoffing handfuls of Haribo for breakfast. Coated in a fine, lustrous, mustardy rust brown, unlike CC, Sir P has evolved to fly small birds with persistence and determination.
Distil the purest, finest, most ethereal points of falconry, condense them into a feathered entity, and the result is a Sir Percival. If they were any bigger, merlins would be the greatest bird of prey in the world. Steve tells me that, when Sir P flies, he is as brave and persistent as a gyr falcon. There is only one bird that is an even match for the concentrated supremacy and mighty-mouse power of Sir Percival.
A ringing, singing, ascending skylark rises high over summer crops, drops, dives; a white-edged tail spreads before it mounts once more, hundreds of feet. It is a feat of remarkable endurance and style. Up with the lark and larking about, a merlin will match the flight of this little songbird equally. Flying a merlin is the only branch of falconry not overly concerned with catching. The flight of Sir Percival is one of aesthetics – a work of art, refined in fine lines drawn across a late-summer sky, writ large in duration, context and form and controlled under strict licence for six weeks of the year. A merlin and its prey embody perfect, pure flight without the need for blood. This I what I need. This is a good thing.
We load the car with the dogs and drive from the cottage for several hours to the hawking grounds. Larks nest in little scuffs no deeper than a heel mark in the ground, laying thin-shelled eggs the size of a penny piece. In this area of England during the spring I counted several nesting pairs with three or four eggs to each. The larks had a good breeding season, as they did last year, the year before and the year before that. Their habitat and overwintering grounds were key to their survival rates and numbers, their fecundity an example of careful and thoughtful farming.
In November they grouped together in large flocks, rippling out across the stubble, flickering wings, dancing, drifting up high in the strongest winds, leaving me spellbound. How such a little bird creates so much energy and stamina on a diet of seeds and small insects is nothing short of miraculous.
Sweating in T-shirts under a mid-September sun, Steve and I walk Sir P across the stubble. A light breeze brushes our skin, cools the heat, the world pin-sharp bright, the dry ground shimmering and wobbling in localized mirages. The horizon is a pale cerulean blue that rises overhead into the cleanest ultramarine. Birds are high in the sky and spread across adjacent fields, thirty or more, invisible, save for the most melodic song raining down through the heat in complex golden notes and overlapping sound that spreads for well over a hundred acres.
The first few flights fail. Sir P notes some strength in the larks and pulls off shortly after flying them. Each time, he glides back around and lands on my head, stamps around in frustration, pulling at my hair, his talons like acupuncture on my scalp. Finally, on the crest of a large, rolling field, the right lark fires into the sky. The merlin, on a mercurial, mechanical wingbeat, quickly locks in behind it. Pacing one another, they skirt up in concentric circles, a cone-shaped twirl, and roll around the sky like the pearlescent sweeping spiral of a sea shell. Two delicate tango dancers, they joust, push and parry one another back and forth as they climb. On the unfolding line of flight they continue to go up and up, like blown leaves spinning on thermals. The higher they rise, the louder the lark sounds; it twists in the air, the sun shimmers off her pale feathers, she is confident, cocky and mocking. They curve past the sun. I squint, close my eyes. Their flight line flashes white on the back of my eyelids. I open my eyes and try to refocus. When I see them they have slowed, almost stalled, and are seemingly motionless at a height of 200 feet. On the cusp of contact the lark stops, drops, and Sir P stoops. Twisting as they fall, the lark dodges, skipping away as Sir P tries snatching at speed. The lark slips into the crack of a haystack. Percy pulls up, skims low over dusty stubble and returns to the lure swung by Steve. The flight was poetry in motion and is enough for today. We feed Percy his full reward and head home.
At the cottage Steve and Hollie are less rigid than I am. They have brought a huge feast of five-topping pizzas, pork ribs, chicken, little bottles of French beer, chips and dips. I break easily and tuck in. It would be rude to decline. Before leaving, Steve declares CC to be free of the shadow of secondary infection, free from aspergillosis and simply says:
‘Just remember, they are working animals, not pets. This isn’t Kes, and you’re not Billy Casper. Accidents happen. If you can’t accept it, buy a sheep and hunt grass.’
When the time comes and we step back into the field, CC returns with unstrained vigour, lust, style and surprising intelligence.
*
My son comes down from sleeping distressed and pale. He has been vomiting. He is wan, yellow and has dark bags under his eyes. I have seen lots of sick children and sent them home from school without a second thought, but the feeling that spirals up through me is very different. It is horrible. The secret spirit that drives my son has been sucked from him. This is a side of him I do not recognize. It is awful. I feel protective but also powerlessly inept. His illness remains and, before he recovers, I have to leave without seeing him back to full health.
He continues to be ill for several days and when I call and speak to his mother she tells me that, although he tried his best, he missed his caveman day. He did not get to wear his costume to school. He was extremely upset not to be a chief catcher. I do not care. I am happy that he is eating and drinking fluids and not throwing up. I tell her that when I next visit I will show him how to make fire using sticks and we will film it so he can take it in and show his teachers.
*
Having nearly died trying to catch a rabbit, by association, CC begins to hesitate when slipped at further rabbits. For several days I watch him work through the experience of hitting the fence. On the surface, he seems to be flying with increased determination, launching off the glove towards any rabbits at distances of three or four hundred yards. At the moment of contact the rabbits miraculously escape. I cannot figure out what is wrong. Eventually, I get close enough to see what is happening.
As we move round a hedge CC lets out a scream. Hearing his call, a rabbit ducks down in the centre of the field, ears flat, perfectly still. Viewing the situation, waiting to make a move, the rabbit twitches forward, then stops. It is enough. CC moves with speed. The rabbit, overwhelmed, stays still and flattens even further into the grass. At the split second of contact, CC flares out his tail, stalls mi
d-air, pulls his legs up and bounces back as if on an invisible cord, then peels off and lands in a nearby tree. The rabbit takes full advantage, hippity-hops and ambles across the remainder of the field, through a fence and into the safety of his burrow.
I have my answer.
To continue to hunt would be pointless and would only compound the problem. In CC’s mind the association between rabbits and injury has been established. He is pre-empting hitting a fence even when it is not there. As with attaching his backpack and tail mount, he needs time and motivation to forget. For the next three days I take a tip from the Hiebelers’ methods. I feed him as much food as he can eat from inside a split-open rabbit carcass. On the fourth day I feed him nothing. On the morning of the fifth day he kills his second rabbit within five yards of leaving the fist. The association is broken.
We slide into another blank patch of over a week, and CC’s behaviour switches back to frustration and, in particular, screaming. Again, I try to figure out why. When I leave him on his perch in the garden and take the dogs for a walk, his noise carries clearly across several fields. The rest of the natural world reacts accordingly. The problem of our continued failure is now less about CC’s ability and more about the adaptive ability of his quarry. The rabbits have learnt our routine, know our noise and slowly dissolve away from their usual haunts. I make a switch from hawking in the afternoons to the early mornings.
A summer dawn at 4 a.m. is a procession of vast tangerine fire skies and mist rolling over grass, a perfect world, vibrating, full of potential. The unrestrained natural noise released by lack of human activity allows all wildlife to move about at peak freedom and in abundance. Summer dawns feel like a momentary piece of prehistory in a modern world, an echo of what the countryside was before we multiplied. For several weeks we exist alone and the early-morning sessions are beautiful periods. More importantly we begin to kill again.
CC’s fitness, determination and success reach peak levels. Wisps of mist swirl around the outer edges of his wings as he slips off the glove, repeatedly hurtling through the dawn. On several occasions he teases me, makes my heart stop dead. I watch him fold his wings, slip through the square metal netting of the sheep fences at over fifty miles an hour. He is so close, and more than once his tail bell pings on galvanized wire. In these moments I fear for him and love him in equal measure. He reminds me of a small boy showing off by pulling wheelies or riding a ramp of his own creation. I swear and shout encouragement. He repays me in kind. He never hits another fence.
*
It is early morning. I am silently standing outside CC’s mews. The silvery darkness of this dawn has the texture of a total eclipse of the sun. My breathing is shallow and excited. In the hoary half-light the silhouette of a wild female goshawk is perched on an electricity pole twenty feet above my head – she is right above CC’s aviary. This is the first wild goshawk I have ever seen in England. Presumably attracted by his daylight calling, she is huge, easily three pounds in weight. I open the mews and prepare CC. She is still there when we step into the stubble. CC notices her, tilts his head at an angle and becomes silent. She heaves out of the branches, away to the distant treeline twice as fast as CC.
Hunting out of the dark dawn into the daylight, I walk him from the cottage, exploring different spaces and places to keep the food coming. We arrive at a disused sand quarry. Cresting the ridge and pushing through a row of larch, the ground drops sharply, a treacherous incline down to the base of a bowl a hundred and fifty feet below. The hole in the ground is about four acres wide. Two decades previously, the pit and its fine sand were scooped out with giant mechanical hands. The bounty plundered and sold, it now possesses beautiful neglect, a secret cove known only to a few locals. The untouched, delicate sparseness, bleached dry roots and fences crumple at odd angles; there are unexpected creatures in unexpected places. Moss and small tufts of grass, bramble and lichen grow across the earth. I have seen snakes and slow worms, hundreds of different insects, and like the desert scrub in Texas, this place contains a vast number of rabbits.
As we move about on the lip of the quarry the lunar-like surface is illuminated by the blood red and the pink coral of the morning dawn. Long shadows are cast by mounds and bumps, a surreal Saturn landscape. On a soft sandbank I stop to watch a weasel hopping out from under a thick tumble of dead branches. CC looks at it. He has never seen one before and its strange movement makes him silent. Dizzily focused, the weasel’s attention is elsewhere and the wind carrying our scent is in the wrong direction. A twitch of his tail, and he zips down a rabbit-hole ten feet from us. We wait. The building tension is almost too much. A light drizzle descends and a double rainbow materializes over the crater. I hear a sudden rumble of thunder, a thumping sound from underground. A pile of early-autumn leaves bulges at my feet then explodes as a rabbit bolts free, fleeing from the weasel. CC makes a short, powerful flight and pins the rabbit to the floor. When CC is settled on the glove eating the rabbit’s head, I cut the back legs off the carcass and place them in the woodpile. We find a quiet spot and sit on the damp ground waiting for our furry hunting companion to rejoin us.
In the distance, an unfamiliar noise breaks our silence. The morning commute, cars hissing along the road through a warm morning shower, a demarcation and the outer edge of a wholly different world to the one I exist in this morning. I remember it well, and I know which I want to belong to today.
Autumn
On clear, chilly nights there is no light pollution here. The moon and stars are free to appear in glorious multitudes over the cottage. Directly opposite my front door is a huge oak tree. Cloaked in darkness, it takes on the shape and silhouette of W. C. Fields: a round, bulbous head with swelling edges, bumps and a bobbly, nose-like protuberance. Tilted, the constellation of the plough sits suspended close to the top edge of the canopy. When it is in this position I know autumn is approaching. The soft scent of rotting apples and mouldy leaves wafts down the path. The empty frames that held runner beans have been blown by the winds and stagger left and right, empty and broken like old scarecrows. The smoke from the fire is noticeably heavier. As the temperature drops it blows down in thick clouds, over the hearth and into the cottage. The shortening days bring the first tentative blossoms of frost.
A fit goshawk will kill rabbits all day long. Once, when masculine competition and goading surpassed sensible behaviour, Steve caught nine in a short afternoon. If so inclined, he could have caught a lot more, but they proved too heavy to carry from the hill. CC is now so adept, confident and clever that he could catch eight or even ten rabbits in a day if he was allowed. But if this was the only point, I would buy a gun.
Instead, it is time to leave them alone and move with the season, move to what is there to harvest. Feather on feather, flight against flight, feather is the measure – it is time to hunt a different type of animal. England used to be awash with wild indigenous quarry. The famed Elizabethan goshawker Edmund Bert once caught a dozen brace of grey partridge in a day. In the 300 years since Bert walked his goshawk across the landscape the numbers of wild quarry and natural spaces are very much depleted. Much as I would love to replicate Bert’s achievements there are not enough grey partridge in my area to sustain CC for a day, let alone a season. So we turn instead to a released bird common to many.
I heard the first pheasant a week ago, a rusted, grating, kekking call in the early morning. More and more are beginning to appear: I hear them in the distant woods and find them pecking at dawn on the spilled grain in the garden and up the lane. Pheasants, duck and migratory birds are the truest test of any goshawk. More importantly, these birds provide higher nutritional balance and higher quantities of meat than a rabbit: two important natural factors for both of us when the winter arrives.
*
A heavy thunderstorm the day before has drenched the ground and the dawn is wet and patterned with fallen leaves. Columns and sheets of mist hang heavy, the beams of sunlight catching particles of moisture in the air.
The stubble and smashed stalks of the rapeseed are soft, soaked with beads of water.
Two days ago CC killed a pigeon, his first feathered quarry. Just a youngster, it took flight only for a few yards before being caught in the air. It was important to let him eat as much as he could and cement a positive association between food and creatures that fly. Having rested for the day, he is overweight, but his instincts have not been directed or fulfilled. He now stands ready. The feathers on the back of his head are crested. His focus is intense. His grip is slight and his head bobs forward; his calling drops to two or three screams every ten minutes. He is in full yarak. This is the first time I have seen him at this point.
We enter a potato field with long, steep piles of soil under the dying, brown plants. Flash runs ahead thirty or forty feet, leaving Etta to potter about and struggle with the irregular earth. I turn to look at her just as she pulls up, slowly freezing on point.
Instinctively, I tell Flash to ‘stay’; he tries his best, but he knows what Etta is doing and keeps bum-shuffling a few inches forward as the seconds tick by. I step towards Etta. Before the command to flush has left my lips, Flash is off into the cover. The first pheasant of the season launches out from under the green. Flash jumps, trying to snap it from the air; CC jinks out of the way then rights his flight line. The pheasant rises higher and higher. CC follows with a quick, clipping wingbeat. Together they mount over the trees and stream and disappear.
It takes time running in the same direction, pushing through heavy hazel and bramble and dropping down into the water to climb up the opposite bank. The dogs begin barking at the fence. I go back and lift Etta and Flash over, retrace my footsteps and run along the top of a far bank. I stop and listen. The new dawn is muted, all sound woollen and muffled by mist. I hear no bell.
