Anthony’s self-punishments spared his father having to recall many times when he had inflicted punishment upon him. There were some and they returned now to repay him tenfold for every lash, but they were blessedly few.
He learned to expect—and to respect—Anthony’s days of self-castigation. Now he had to ask himself, was it for some unatonable error that he was punishing himself at the end? Before it had seemed, if a little unusual, perhaps even a little excessive, not alarming, indeed rather amusing and even admirable, probably indicative of a life of high achievement, that impatience with his own imperfection. Did some people hasten their mortality because they could not accept that it was the common lot?
To someone who lived at such a pitch of expectation, someone young and tender, not toughened to disappointment, like Anthony, not much would have been needed to topple him from his high, and when he fell he would fall low. Completely uncompetitive against others, the boy had always been fiercely in competition with himself. Like a lone polevaulter, no sooner had he cleared a height than he raised the bar. There had seemed nothing ominous in that at the time, but the way he tested himself against no standards but his own: what was one to make of that in light of what came later? Was it a morbid fear of being bested or was it a Luciferian pride—the feeling that no one was good enough to be worth his contending against? Organized sports he had shunned, yet as did every adolescent American boy he had his basketball hoop over the garage door and spent hours shooting at it. But always alone. Whenever one of his few friends suggested a skirmish he said no. To his father this had been a trifle worrisome; too late, he wondered whether he ought not to have worried more. Yet surely he was not to blame for not having seen in it a clue to what was to come?
Intensity did not cover it—the boy had been compulsive. Whatever he took up it was with passionate involvement and the determination to master it. And once he had, he seemed to hold his own attainment in contempt, as though to say “I’ve licked that one, what other tests have you got for me?” Should a father have seen in that a tendency to run through life’s challenges and exhaust them all too early? He had excelled at whatever he attempted and he envied no boy his abilities. Anthony had his faults but envy was not one of them. He was saved from that by one of his faults. He was too proud ever to envy anybody anything.
For as long as something interested him nothing else did. His absorption in it was single-minded. Such devotion could not really be requited, not by any boyish pursuits. To expect trout fishing or any other pastime to reward in kind devotion that intense was sure to lead to disappointment for anybody but a fanatic. But having run through one interest, Anthony was quick to replace it with another just as absorbing. Who could have read a tendency toward self-destruction in what had seemed instead intense self-exploration? Could the world pall and go flat for a youngster interested, one thing at a time, in so much of it? Apathy, indifference, boredom, lack of curiosity, premature cynicism, those would seem to be attitudes more to be suspected, mistrusted. He spent much of his time alone but that seemed then to suggest a liking for his own company, not a predisposition toward a murderous rejection of it.
People who killed themselves on the doorsill of life were ones to whom life’s challenges seemed too great for the effort, weren’t they? That certainly did not fit Anthony. He thrived on challenge, sought it out, added to it on his own. Had there been no other, his falconry alone was evidence of that. What did it tell you about a person, himself a rara avis, who took up that uncommon sport?
Wild animals had been Anthony’s first and most enduring fascination—indeed, it was to study biology preparatory to going into veterinary medicine that had made him suddenly change his mind about going to college. (Did unnatural death turn everything to bitter irony? Biology: from the Greek for “the study of life.”) Every sort of animal interested him. (Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all?) He trusted all, feared none. He liked insects, unlike his allergic father, was attracted to reptiles, was rather contemptuous of people who feared or were repelled by them. Was rather contemptuous of people anyway when compared with animals. Wild animals. He was fairly indifferent to domestic ones, kept no pets, but kept at one time or another a menagerie of the kinds the least responsive to human attentions. That certainly included hawks, and now when Anthony came to mind it was most often with his hawk on his wrist. A hawk required undivided attention, repaid it with nothing. Owning one was like being a partner in a bad marriage.
Anthony’s first hawk was one he found wounded—and his comment on that was revelatory of his attitude. He said, and he seemed to mean every word of it, “I’d like to shoot whoever shot this bird.”
He kept it in his bathtub, nursed it, and callously fed it the pigeons that had been one of his former fancies. When it was plain to see that the bird would never fly again but would be a dependent cripple he broke its neck with one quick snap. As he had broken his own rather than live on in whatever way it was that he felt himself impaired.
He had been violating the law just by bringing the bird home. Everything possible was done to discourage the would-be falconer. Captive hawks were solitary creatures. They would not mate, would not even consort with one another. They seemed to despise one another for having capitulated to their subjection. So even if it had been legal you could not go to a hawk breeder and buy yourself one. But all traffic in them was against the law. You had to capture your own, an eyas from the nest or a passager, an adult bird. For this you had to have the state’s permission and to obtain that you had to have a raptor’s license. To qualify for a license you had to pass a lengthy written examination, a field test, and an inspection of your premises for a bird. Pass all these and you might still be rejected unless your examiners were convinced of the sincerity of your interest, because hard as they made it for you to acquire a bird, once you had one you were not only not allowed to sell it, you couldn’t even give it away, couldn’t even release it back to the wild, without their permission. The bond between the bird and you was more than a marriage, it was a Siamese twinship. Nobody who ever questioned him had doubts about the sincerity of an interest of Anthony’s.
The apprentice falconer had to capture his bird under the supervision of a master, and apprenticeship was for two years. And just as in olden times when the keeping of birds of prey was the prerogative of nobility and the species were allotted by patent of birth, with the eagle the sole right of the emperor, the peregrine that of the prince, and so on down to the lowly merlin for the landless villein, so today’s apprentice was restricted to the red-tailed hawk or the sparrow hawk.
Considering all these deterrents it was not surprising that in the entire state there were no more than a couple of dozen falconers. For Anthony this very exclusiveness of the club to which he aspired to belong was one of its attractions, and all the obstacles in his path only made him the more determined to reach its end. What was more, once out of his apprenticeship and licensed to own the goshawk which it was his ambition to own, to add a difficulty himself. He was intent on capturing not a nestling but a mature hawk, one already hunting on its own, or rather, on her own, for it was the bigger and more predatory female that every falconer wanted, thus one with a will of her own and all the harder to man and to train.
Of hawks, as distinct from falcons, the goshawk was the fiercest and most fearless. It was the only one that would attack a man, and it did so with little provocation. To venture within a mile of one’s nest was dangerous, to look up into its tree was almost an invitation to attack. One could knock a man down, lacerate, even blind him. An eyas was taken from a goshawk’s nest only by a man clad in leather from top to toe. The enthusiasm with which he told all this was enough to make one think that the goshawk’s misanthropy was something Anthony admired, even shared. Indeed, his disgust with what had been done by man to spoil the environment had embittered him toward his own kind and blackened his view of the future. He was always on the side of the wild.
He was n
ow in correspondence with members around the country of the zealous, beleaguered little band who called themselves falconers. Despised by landowners, disowned by their fellow sportsmen, hampered by bureaucrats in well-meaning but benighted conservation agencies, they were like a band of coreligionists, proscribed, dispersed, but still stubbornly devout, keeping their ancient rites and rituals in a secret brotherhood with its own antiquated and arcane vocabulary. His father informed Anthony that to the ancient Egyptians the hawk was a god and they worshiped stone and painted wooden statues of him. Indeed, he and his pen pals might have been the last remnant of that cult. He was telling Anthony nothing not already known to him. In the rather quizzical look he got for his pains he detected a feeling that being uninitiated he profaned that knowledge.
In the fall of the year, excused from classes, even given field credit for the venture in his biology course, Anthony and one of the master falconers with whom he corresponded backpacked into the Ramapo Mountains, on the eastern flyway for migrating hawks, and, provisioned for a week’s stay, pitched a tent and set a trap for the bird he sought. The trap, a net sprung by pulling a string, was baited with a live pigeon, one of several they took with them in a cage, tethered to a stake.
They built a blind of boughs, dressed themselves in camouflage and daubed their faces with mud, and took turns watching the trap, spelling each other every three hours. On the morning of the fifth day, with Anthony on watch, a hawk from out of nowhere plummeted and struck, instantly killing the pigeon. Anthony pulled the string, the net closed, and he had his goshawk. It was a female, his haggard.
Jesses for her legs and a hood for her head, even a name, were waiting for her, and all of them fit. He called her Jezebel for her inbred and incorrigible faithlessness.
Other hawks were paintings, but the goshawk was a pencil drawing in shades of gray. It gave the impression of being as starkly functional as a bullet, too busy at its one deadly task for ornamentation. Its underside was pale with dark speckles, its back black, its tail gray barred black. Its only touches of color were its red eyes, which gleamed like twin warning lights, its yellow legs, and its gunmetal-blue talons. For swiftness in flight its feathers were shingled as closely as the scales of a fish.
He had observed the manning of the bird. Manning: accustoming it to man, his ways, the sounds and the motions he made. The old falconry manuals taught that the initial step in manning a bird was to exhaust it into submission by depriving it of sleep for three days and nights. Which meant the falconer’s depriving himself of the same amount of sleep. One wondered how either the bird or the man survived the ordeal, much less cooperated thereafter in the hunt. But this torture was totally unnecessary; nowadays the bird was starved into submission—or rather, it starved itself.
For forty-eight hours this one ignored the bloody half of a fresh-killed pigeon that she was offered. She would have fed if left to herself but she must be made dependent for her food upon her owner (master she would never have) and associate it with his gloved hand. There and there only would she eat from now on. Evidently she would sooner starve to death.
The indomitable glare she fixed upon all humankind, the cold contemptuous blink with which she dismissed it! In accepting her hood it was not as though she were submitting to restraint but rather as though she were obliging you to remove your offensive self from her sight. She would not abide being looked at herself; your very gaze seemed to sully her, and in her rage she would bate—hurl herself off the wrist and hang by her jesses upside down, furiously beating her wings and screaming. Stock still, the boy waited out these tantrums and set her back in place on the glove. When she was stroked with a feather to soothe her ruffled feelings she accepted the attentions with the thanklessness of an empress for a slave.
Between them it was a contest of wills, yet should he succeed in breaking hers the most he could hope for from her was an admission of dependency. She was a heartless thing, incapable of affection or fealty. A pet she would never be. Was it selflessness or was it slavishness, this devotion to a creature that would never requite you with more than bare toleration? Her unapproachable hauteur, her fierce independence, her contempt for all humankind including himself was just what the boy admired in her, though with that sneer of hers and that blink of her basilisk eyes she seemed to say, “The sight of you wearies me.”
On the evening of the third day of her hunger strike, here in this dimly lit room, she was offered the half of yet another freshly killed pigeon. An hour passed, although, arrested in that timeless tableau as boy and bird sat motionless, it seemed to stand still. Both expressionless, they might have been a statue in an Egyptian temple, he representing a priest of the cult of the hawk, his head averted in deference to the god that permitted no human to gaze upon it, the bird the cult’s remote and inscrutable idol.
It was only after an hour had passed that the hawk’s head began to incline. Slowly, stiffly, as though in violation of her will, by degrees it bent down. There was visible an involuntary working of her throat, the pangs of hunger which not even the proudest and most indomitable will could deny.
Her table manners were a surprise. Far from being the ravenous harpy he had expected, she was downright dainty. She mantled, that is, spread her wings to conceal her eating. She plucked at the pigeon, tore off small bits, was satisfied with a morsel of the breast. Or maybe this was not daintiness but loyalty to herself, a way of saying, “I may be in your debt but it’s not for much, so don’t expect any thanks.”
Now Anthony went in for falconry as he did for everything, with unstinting energy, and in this sport there was the added incentive of its having a long history and an extensive literature. The tradition and the lore of falconry were a full-time study, sufficient to occupy a person for a lifetime. The demands of the bird for constant exercise, for regular hunting lest she forget her training, tied Anthony to her. She even had to be weighed regularly to determine the state of her health and to ration her diet. When he returned to school she went with him. One of the school’s employees kept her in a coop at his house.
Your troubles were not over once you were licensed and had your hawk and she was manned. In areas suitable for flying hawks you seldom encountered the enlightened attitude that tolerated them and favored their protection. That was found among birdlovers, but they were no friends of falconers; they opposed trapping and robbing nests to capture birds. Farmers and hunters alike hated birds of prey, the one seeing in them a menace to his poultry, the other a rapacious destroyer of the game he himself sought, and both looked upon the person who favored them as peculiar, not to say perverted, one who had betrayed his race by allying himself with one of its blood enemies. They routinely flouted the law and shot hawks and sincerely believed they were doing both nature and man a service. Most who did so would have been surprised, even mystified, but still unmoved to learn that the one he had just killed embodied countless hours of training by someone who doted upon it.
These obstacles and attitudes Anthony seemed not only not to mind, he seemed positively to thrive on them. They seemed to strengthen the bond between the bird, protected by law but outlawed by custom, and him. He soared above the contemptible common prejudice as the hawk soared in her solitary flight. He worried only that he risked her life each time he flew her. Ought his father to have worried over his identification with this predatory pariah of a bird? Princeton University’s admissions officer didn’t. Anthony’s Falconer’s Journal had been instrumental in gaining him admission.
Anthony found in the hawk a creature like himself in this: neither could endure failure. All hawks, not just his, were the same in their self-demands: nothing short of perfection in their every performance. Should Jezebel miss her mark two times running in a day she had to be hooded and taken home, and she was a disgruntled and bedraggled looking thing then. No pride in her pose, no fire in her eye. A most dejected and droopy fowl she was, more like a wet hen than a hawk. To have flown her for a third time on such a day would have been to risk hav
ing her fly away and not come back for shame. The implication was that she would go off and hide herself and die in disgrace. Not disgrace in men’s eyes—disgrace in her own eyes. So it was with the boy; for the world’s he cared nothing, it was his own disapproval he could not endure.
Jezebel’s failures, never many, grew still more infrequent the longer Anthony flew her. Nature had shaped her with a singleness of purpose like that of a knife and all she needed was sharpening. She communicated to him, first by a downward stiffening of her wings, then by a hunching of her shoulders, when she was “in yarak”—that is, when the urge to kill was upon her. A pure bloodlust this was, for she never ate her kill; she was rewarded for it with a portion of a pigeon or the heart of a chicken. Sometimes, when he was home from school, Anthony used his father’s old English setter to find birds for her. When her kill was made out of sight but within hearing they could follow it by the sound of her bells. While she hovered in flight they tinkled in the breeze but when she was hurtling toward her mark they rang like an alarm and when she struck, talons extended, they crashed like a cymbal. Then she tumbled earthward with the grouse or the duck—often as big as she, or bigger—in her grasp.
Images in the pristine colors of Persian miniatures, books of hours, medieval tapestries—lords and ladies of the court, hooded and tasseled falcons on their gauntleted wrists, lean greyhounds on leashes, and a recumbent unicorn in jewellike flower gardens amid trees laden with imperishable fruit—a modern-day American boy in blue jeans on a windy hill about to launch the hawk on his wrist could conjure up all that, such was the lore of that princely pursuit brought back from Byzantium by the crusaders, and since then so fallen into neglect as to be an anachronism recalling the days of Roland and the Knights of the Round Table.
Jezebel’s glove was stained and stiffened now with the blood of many a pigeon and pullet. That left arm of Anthony’s belonged to the bird as a mother’s belongs to her baby. And when they were separated, he fixedly tracking her as she glided and hovered overhead, it was as though they were in communication on a wavelength all their own. The thermals she rode in her aerial acrobatics he seemed to ride with her and when the flutter of her wings as she hung on air signaled to him that she had sighted prey he tensed visibly. Then down she dropped the more closely to spy her quarry, gathered herself together, compacted her wings against her body, and aimed herself earthward like a bomb.
Hostages to Fortune Page 11
