by Crane, Ben;
My son is about to visit the cottage for the first time. His mother has brought him to see the place where he was born. He is interested in his history. When he arrives I go into overdrive and offer him an assortment of food and drink. He refuses all but the Ferrero Rocher chocolates his mother has bought.
As he mooches through the front door I am a little bit embarrassed at the state of the cottage. He doesn’t know the word ‘rustic’, and the life of a single man is often less than spotless. Maybe he doesn’t notice, or even care, but his mother’s eyes flick about and scan the small warm room with its low beams and cobwebs. I think she is more concerned about the open fire than anything else.
We all walk into the garden. I untie the leash and remove CC from his perch. My son’s mother shares her knowledge of falconry. My son listens intently, discovers a side of her he never knew existed. She has hand-raised and held sparrowhawk chicks, hunted with golden eagles, seen them chasing hares over the dark, fertile soil of Lincolnshire before he was born. It’s well out of his frame of reference: he does not associate his mother with falconry and I watch him trying to work out the timeline, trying to work out how this tiny dot of a woman could possibly hold on to a fourteen-pound golden eagle.
I ask him: ‘Ready?’
‘Yep.’
I slip the dogs from their leads. They skirt wide out into the field adjoining the garden. My son skips and walks ahead at ease. The usual tense focus I feel, the seriousness of falconry, evaporates. He begins chattering away about all sorts of subjects, a free-rolling stream of consciousness. His use of complex words and language always startles me. I ask him if he knows what the word ‘mortified’ means and what certain other words he uses mean. He gives a clear explanation of each then carries on nattering. I am pleasantly distracted, looking at the hair on the top of his head.
We walk around the edge of a small lake, up a slight incline and through a gap in a hedge. A long way ahead a cock pheasant walks nonchalantly out of the brambles. CC bates. I look up and stop talking. The pheasant stops and almost does a double-take at our weird, marching menagerie. It begins running along the edge of the field. I let CC go. He loops around the side of my son and, for the first time in my life, I am not looking at the hawk. I am watching my son watching the hawk. The sight makes me extraordinarily happy. I look up, the pheasant tries to rise and fly. CC smashes it into the hedge. My son takes to his heels and mud sprays up behind his boots. He runs like me, runs like a falconer. I overtake him, shouting encouragement, shouting for him to catch up.
I find CC ripping into the cock bird. When my son finally finds me he scrambles between the broken wooden fence and crouches next to me in the hedge. I can hear him breathing heavily. He is so close I smell a waft of chocolate on his breath. I kill the pheasant. Its wings clatter and sweep dead leaves and twigs into the air. CC grips tighter and it stops moving. Peeling the skin and feathers from its chest, I cut it open with my knife. The blood flows freely over the sharp metal and on to my hand. I pass the knife to my son. He is fascinated by the blade. Eyes wide and excited, he watches CC tear into the pheasant, drawing chunks of liver and blood up through a hole in the rib cage.
The head of the pheasant lies discarded in the leaf litter, red, fleshy cheeks against green, shimmering silvers and mottled black. My son picks up a stick and without mercy beats the pheasant’s head into the ground. I laugh. His mother chides him: ‘Have some respect.’
I stop laughing. She is right. But that only comes with time. I laugh because he reminds me of myself at his age. He reminds me of the tribal children taunting one another with the egret. My son is acting in exactly the same way as them. This is the first kill he has seen and his reaction is not something I have taught him, and it is wholly unexpected. With moral certitude, instinctively he displays an unfettered tactile exploration of the natural world. Without prompting, my son, like the children of the tribe, like children the world over, is simply showing an undiluted interest in food all hunter-gatherers have shown since time immemorial.
At his mother’s behest he stops hitting the pheasant’s head and inquisitively picks up the long copper-and-gold pulled and plucked tail feathers. Holding them in his hand, he sits back on his haunches, silently sucking up the information spread out before him. Once again, I watch my son watching CC. He is fascinating. His sense of enquiry and ease around the hawk is a revelation. All the travels and torments, all the lost hawks, the learning, the frustrations and failures, of Boy and Girl and CC, flow through me, encapsulated in this moment. It is the most intimate, private part of who I am and, as I cut meat from the carcass and feed CC, I pass the experience forward to my son as an act of love and education. He relishes it more than I could have hoped. He seems to innately understand the vitality of the visceral and, as the life of the pheasant descends, new knowledge in my son slowly rises. He is one of only a small number of children in the world to have successfully hunted with a fully made imprint goshawk. Without knowing it, he has been entered as the most recent participant in a travelling song line stretching back to the ridges of Kazakhstan, to the tribal falconers, and to every falconer from every continent over the last 5,000 years. I am truly proud of him.
Whether he becomes a falconer or not does not matter. What matters is that I have attempted to sow the seed and will continue to sow more. In doing so I have hopefully introduced him to a unique way of understanding the natural world. Whether he allows this seed to grow is up to him. He is smart enough and clever enough to work it out for himself. I trust him to decide in his own time and come to it under his own volition. What is certain is that I want to be there and watch him make this choice. I know I will make many more mistakes, that I will fail and no doubt frustrate him as he transforms into a man. No matter what happens, or how he reacts, I know I will not leave him again. I will always be here in my own peculiar way.
I swap CC off the kill and on to the glove. I ask my son to push the carcass into the pocket of my hawking jacket. We climb over the fence and rejoin his mother and all of us walk slowly back to the cottage. When we get there I notice he has something in his hand.
I ask him what it is.
‘This is my blood stick.’
I look closer. True to his word, it is a small stick covered in dark red, congealed pheasant blood. He holds it up to the light. A blood stick as memento and memory. A blood stick as bond.
Blood sticks to the hawk and the human.
Blood ties us both.
EPILOGUE
I am sitting at the back of a room, tucked away in the far-right corner, my back is against the wall and I feel safe. There are about twenty other adults, all of us sitting on slightly uncomfortable benches. The group is made up predominantly of women but there are also one or two men scattered among the crowd.
The children file in through a double door and sit cross-legged on the flaky shellacked parquet flooring. The head teacher asks for quiet, goes through several announcements, they sing some songs and various awards are handed out.
My son is invited out to the front. He stares straight at me with his wide brown eyes and I raise both thumbs and smile. This is my first school sharing assembly. He begins talking and explaining his chosen topic in a clear voice and without nerves. He points to a huge screen and a frozen image of a short video appears. He nods to his friend, who presses play. In the video, the merlin I am holding launches off my glove and flies towards my son, who is swinging a lure halfway across the field. The little falcon zooms past him, curves up into the sky, holds its position then makes a quick stoop back across the lure. It is a beautiful flight, my son’s technique perfect. The collected group of children and adults let out a slight breath of surprise. Appreciation and quiet murmurs begin to flow around the hall. The short film stops and my son explains what they have just seen. He nods again to his friend and a second video begins. This one shows him sitting next to the merlin as it feeds on the lure he has just swung. In the video he begins touching and stroking the falcon, the
n reaches in and starts pulling off small chunks of meat and hand-feeding them to ‘The Phantom’. When he finishes explaining how he has trained his first bird of prey, the head teacher begins clapping.
As do I.
We hope you enjoyed this book.
Endpapers
About Ben Crane
An Invitation from the Publisher
Endpapers
Head study of female goshawk bred by Steve, mixed media on canvas, 2018
CC on cock pheasant, mixed media on canvas, 2018
About Ben Crane
BEN CRANE is a photographer, falconer, artist and filmmaker. This is his first book of nonfiction.
An Invitation from the Publisher
Apollo is an imprint of Head of Zeus.
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This is an Apollo book, first published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Ben Crane, 2018
The moral right of Ben Crane to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781788546232
ISBN (HB) 9781788546249
Jacket painting © Anna Dergacheva / Alamy Stock Photo
Endpapers © Ben Crane
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