by Tim Severin
THE HAWKING SEASON was now upon us, and for the previous two months we had been preparing Edgar’s hunting birds as they emerged from their moult. The hack house contained three peregrine falcons, a merlin, and a pair of small sparrowhawks, as well as the costly gyrfalcon which had first got me into trouble. The gyrfalcon, Edgar pointed out, was worth its weight in pure silver or ‘the price of three male slaves or perhaps four useless kennelmen’. He and I would go into the hack house every day, to ‘man’ the birds as he put it. This meant picking them up and getting them used to being handled by humans while feeding them special titbits to increase their strength and condition as their new feathers grew. Edgar proved to be just as expert with birds as he was with hounds. He favoured a diet of goslings, eels and adders for the long-winged falcons and mice for the short-winged hawks. Now I learned why there was sandy floor beneath their perches: it allowed us to find and collect the droppings from each bird, which Edgar examined with close attention. He explained that hunting birds could suffer from almost-human ailments, including itch, rheum, worms, mouth ulcers and cough. When Edgar detected a suspicion of gout in one of the peregrines, an older bird, he sent me to find a hedgehog for it to eat, which he pronounced to be the only cure.
Most of the birds, with the exception of the gyrfalcon and one of the sparrowhawks, were already trained. When they had their new feathers, it was only necessary to reintroduce them to their hunting duties. But the gyrfalcon had recently arrived in the hack house when I first saw it. That was why its eyelids had been sewn shut. ‘It keeps the bird calm and quiet when it’s being transported,’ Edgar explained. ‘Once it arrives in its new home, I ease the thread little by little so that the bird looks out on its surroundings gradually and settles in without stress. It may seem cruel, but the only other method is to enclose its head in a leather hood, and I don’t like to do that to a bird captured after it has learned to hunt in the wild. Putting on the hood too soon can cause chafing and distress.’
Edgar also had a warning. ‘A dog comes to depend upon its master, but a hunting bird keeps its independence,’ he said. ‘You may tame and train a bird to work with you, and there is no greater pleasure in any sport than to fly your bird and see it take its prey and then return to your hand. But always remember that the moment the bird takes to the air it has the choice of liberty. It may fly away and never return. Then you will suffer falconer’s heartbreak.’
Their free spirit attracted me to the hunting birds and I quickly found that I had a natural talent for handling them. Edgar started me off with one of the little sparrowhawks, the least valuable of his charges. He chose the one which had never yet been trained and showed me how to tie six-inch strips of leather to the bird’s ankles with a special knot, then slip a longer leash through the metal rings at their ends. He equipped me with a falconer’s protective glove, and each day I fed the hawk its diet of fresh mouse, encouraging it to leap from the perch to the warm carcass in my hand. The sparrowhawk was shrill and bad tempered when it first arrived – a sure sign, according to Edgar, that it had been taken from the nest as a fledgling and not caught after it had left the nest – yet within two weeks I had it hopping back and forth like a garden pet. Edgar confessed he had never seen a sparrowhawk tamed so fast. ‘You seem to have a way with women,’ he commented, slily because only the female sparrowhawk is any use for hunting.
Not long afterwards he decided that I was the right person to train the gyrfalcon. It was a bold decision and may have been superstitious on Edgar’s part, thinking that I would have some special understanding of the spear falcon because I came from its homeland. But Edgar knew that I had been brought to Northampton at the express wish of Aelfgifu, and he may have been playing a deeper game. He made me the gyrfalcon’s keeper. I handled her – she was also a female – two or three times each day, fed her, bathed her once a week in a bath of yellow powder to get rid of lice, gave her chicken wings to tug and twist as she stood on her perch so her neck and body muscles grew strong, and held out my glove, a much stouter one this time, so she could hop from perch to hand. Within a month the gyrfalcon was quiet enough to wear a leather hood without alarm, and she and I were allowed outside the hack house, where the splendid white and speckled bird flew on a long leash to reach lumps of meat I placed on a stump of wood. A week after that and Edgar was tossing into the air a leather sock dressed with pigeon’s wings, and the gyrfalcon, still tethered, was flying off from my glove to strike the lure and pin it to the ground and earn a reward of gosling. ‘You have the makings of a first-class falconer,’ Edgar commented and I glowed with satisfaction.
Two days after Aelgifu’s outburst at the banquet, we allowed the gyrfalcon to fly free for the first time. It was a critical and delicate moment in her training. Soon after dawn Edgar and I carried the falcon to a quiet spot, well away from the burh. Edgar whirled the lure on its cord. Standing fifty paces away with the gyrfalcon on my glove, I lifted off the leather hood, loosed the leather straps, and raised my arm on high. The falcon caught sight at once of the whirling lure, thrust off from the glove with a powerful leap that I felt right to my shoulder, and flashed straight at the target in a single, deadly swoop. She hit the leather lure with a solid thump that tore the tethering cord from Edgar’s grasp, then carried the lure and its trailing cord up into a tree. For a moment Edgar and I stood aghast, wondering if the falcon would now take her chance to fly free. There was nothing we could do. But when I slowly held up my arm again, the gyrfalcon dropped quietly from her branch, glided back to my glove and settled there. I rewarded her with a morsel of raw pigeon’s breast.
‘So she finally comes to claim her royal prerogative,’ Edgar said quietly to me as he saw who was waiting beside the hack house as we walked back. Aelfgifu was standing there, accompanied by two attendants. For a moment I resented the mischievous implication in Edgar’s comment, but then a familiar feeling washed over me. I felt light-headed at being in the presence of the most beautiful and desirable woman in existence.
‘Good morning, my lady,’ said Edgar. ‘Come to see your falcon?’
‘Yes, Edgar,’ she replied. ‘Is the bird ready yet?’
‘Not quite, my lady. Another week or ten days of training and we should have her fit for the hunt.’
‘And have you thought of a name for her?’ asked Aelfgifu.
‘Well, Thorgils here has,’ said Edgar.
Aelfgifu turned towards me as if seeing me for the first time in her life. ‘So what name have you chosen to call my falcon?’ she asked. ‘I trust it is one I will approve.’
‘I call the falcon Habrok,’ I answered. ‘It means high breeches, after the fluffy feathers on its legs.’
She gave a slight smile which made my heart lurch. ‘I know it does; Habrok was also the “finest of all hawks” according to the tales of the ancient Gods, was it not? A good name.’
I felt as if I was walking on air.
‘Edgar,’ she went on, ‘I’ll keep you to your promise. In ten days from now I begin hawking. I need to get out into the countryside and relax. Two hunts a week if the hawks stay fit.’
So began the most idyllic autumn I ever spent in England. On hawking days Aelfgifu would arrive at the hack house on horseback, usually with a single woman attendant. Occasionally she came alone. Edgar and I, also mounted, would be waiting for her. The hawks we carried depended on our prey. Edgar usually brought one of the peregrines, myself the gyrfalcon, and Aelfgifu accepted from us the merlin or one of the sparrowhawks, which were lighter birds and more suitable for a woman to carry. We always rode to the same spot, a broad area of open land, a mix of heath and marsh, where the hunting birds had room to fly.
There we tethered the horses, leaving them in the care of Aelfgifu’s servant, and the three of us would walk across the open ground with its tussock grass and small bushes, its ponds and ditches, ideal country for the game we sought. Here Edgar would loose his favourite peregrine, and the experienced bird would mount higher and higher in the sky o
ver his head and wait, circling, until it could see its target. With the peregrine in position, we advanced on foot, perhaps startling a duck from a ditch or a woodcock from the brushwood. As the panicked creature rose into the air, the peregrine far above would note the direction of its flight and begin its dive. Plummeting through the air, making minute adjustments for the speed of its prey, it hurtled down towards its target like a feathered thunderbolt from Thor. Sometimes it killed with the first strike. At other times it might miss its stoop as the quarry jinked or dived, and then the peregrine would mount again to launch another attack or pursue the quarry at ground level. Occasionally, but not often, the peregrine would fail, and then Edgar and I would whirl our lures and coax the disappointed and angry bird to return to human hand.
‘Would you like to fly Habrok next?’ Edgar asked Aelfgifu halfway through our first afternoon of hunting and he set my heart racing. The gyrfalcon was a royal bird, fit for a king to fly, and a queen, of course. But Habrok was too heavy for Aelfgifu to carry, so it was I who stood beside her ready to cast the falcon off. As luck would have it, the next game we saw was a hare. It sprang out of a clump of grass, a fine animal, sleek and strong, and went bounding away arrogantly, ears up, a sure sign that it was confident of escape. I glanced at Aelfgifu and she nodded. With one hand I slipped Habrok’s leash – the hood was already off – and tossed the splendid bird clear. For a moment she faltered, then caught a distant glimpse of her prey leaping through the rough grass and reeds. A few wing beats to gain height and have a clear sight of the hare, then Habrok sped towards the fleeing animal. The hare realised its danger and increased its pace, swerved and sought protection in a thicket of grass at the very instant the falcon shot by. Habrok curved up into the air, turned and swooped again, this time attacking from the other side. The hare, alarmed, broke cover and began to run towards the woods, ears back, full pace now, straining every sinew. Again it was lucky. As she was about to strike, the gyrfalcon was foiled by an intervening bush and forced to check her dive. Now the hare was nearing refuge and almost safe. Suddenly, Habrok shot ahead of her prey, turned and came straight at the hare from ahead. There was a tremendous flurry, a swirl of fur and feather, and predator and prey vanished into the thick grass. I ran forward, guided by the faint jingle of the bells on Habrok’s legs. As I parted the grass, I came upon the hawk, standing on the dead carcass. She had bitten through the hare’s neck, using the sharp point on her beak which Edgar called the ‘falcon’s tooth’ and was beginning to feed, tearing open the fur to get at the warm flesh. I let Habrok feed for a moment, then gently picked her up and hooded her.
‘Don’t allow a hunting bird to eat too much from its prey, or it will not want to hunt again that day,’ Edgar had instructed. Now he too came running up, delighted with the performance in front of Aelfgifu. ‘Could not have done better,’ he exulted. ‘No peregrine could have matched that. Only a gyrfalcon will pursue and pursue its prey, and never give up,’ and then he could not resist adding, ‘rather like its owner.’
But the hunt was not the main reason why I remember those glorious afternoons. Our hunting took us deep into the marshy heath, and after an hour or so, when we were a safe distance from the attendant watching our horses, Edgar would hang back or take a different path, tactfully leaving Aelfgifu and me alone together. Then we would find a quiet spot, screened by tall reeds and grasses, and I would set Habrok down on a temporary perch, a branch curved over and the two ends pushed into the earth to make a hoop. And there, while the falcon sat quietly under her hood, Aelfgifu and I would make love. Under the vault of England’s summer sky we were in a blissful world of our own. And when Edgar judged that it was time to return to the burh, we would hear him approaching in the distance, softly jingling a hawk bell to give us warning so that we were dressed and ready when he arrived.
On one such hawking excursion – it must have been the third or fourth time that Aelfgifu and I were walking the marshland together – we came across a small abandoned shelter at the tip of a tongue of land which projected into a mere. Who had made the secluded hut of interlaced reeds and heather it was impossible to know, probably a wild fowler come to take birds from the mere by stealth. At any rate Aelfgifu and I claimed it for our own as our love bower, and it became our habit to direct our steps towards it, and spent the afternoon there curled up in one another’s arms while Edgar stood guard at the neck of land.
These were times of glorious pleasure and intimacy: and at last I could tell Aelfgifu how much I longed for her and how inadequate I felt, she being so much more experienced and high born.
‘Love needs no teaching,’ she replied softly and with that characteristic habit of hers she ran the tip of her finger along the profile of my face. We were lying naked, side by side, so her finger continued across my chest and belly. ‘And haven’t you ever heard the saying that love makes all men equal? That means women too.’
I bent over to brush my lips across her cheek and she smiled with contentment.
‘And speaking of teaching, Edgar tells me that you trained Habrok in less than five weeks. That you have a natural way with hunting birds. Why do you think that is?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied, ‘but maybe it has something to do with my veneration for Odinn. Since I was a child in Greenland I have been attracted to Odinn’s ways. He is the God whose accomplishments I most admire. He gave mankind so much of what we possess – whether poetry or self-knowledge or the master spells – and he is always seeking to learn more. So much so that he sacrificed the sight of one eye to gain extra wisdom. He comes in many forms, but to any person who wanders as far from home as I have done, Odinn can be an inspiration. He is ever the traveller himself and a seeker after truths. That is why I venerate him as Odinn the wanderer, the empowerer of journeys.’
‘So what, my little courtier, has your devotion to Odinn to do with birds and teaching them?’ she enquired. ‘I thought that Odinn is the God of War, bringing victory on the battlefield. That, at least, is how my husband and his war captains regard him. They invoke Odinn before their campaigns. While their priests do the same to the White Christ.’
‘Odinn is the God of victories, yes, and the God of the dead too,’ I answered. ‘But do you know how he learned the secret of poetry and gave it to men?’
‘Tell me,’ Aelfgifu said, nestling closer.
‘Poetry is the mead of the Gods, created from their spittle, which ran in the veins of the creature Kvasir. But Kvasir was killed by evil dwarves, who preserved his blood in three great cauldrons. When these cauldrons passed into the possession of the giant Suttung and his daughter Gunnlod, Odinn took it upon himself to steal the mead. He changed himself into a snake – Odinn is a shape-changer, as is often said – and crept through a hole in the mountain which guarded Suttung’s lair, and seduced Gunnlod into allowing him three sips, one at each cauldron. Such was Odinn’s power that he drained each cauldron dry. Then he changed himself into an eagle to fly back to Asgard, the home of the Gods, with the precious liquid in his throat. But the giant Suttung also changed himself into a great eagle and pursued Odinn, chasing him as fast as Edgar’s peregrine chases a fleeing hawk. Suttung would have overtaken Odinn, if Odinn had not spewed out a few drops of the mead and thus lightened of his precious load managed to reach the safety of Asgard just ahead of his pursuer. He escaped by the narrowest of margins. Suttung had come so close that when he swung his sword at the fleeing Odinn-eagle, Odinn was forced to dodge and dive and the sword cut away the tips of his tail feathers.’
‘A charming story,’ said Aelfgifu as I finished. ‘But is it true?’
‘Look over there,’ I answered, rolling onto my side, and pointing to where Habrok sat quietly on her perch. ‘Ever since Odinn lost his tail feathers to Suttung’s sword, all hawks and falcons have been born with short tail feathers.’
Just then the gentle tinkle of Edgar’s hawk bells warned us it was time to return to the burh.
Our idyll could not last for ever and
there was to be just one more tryst at our hidden refuge before its sanctuary was destroyed. The day was sultry with the threat of a thunderstorm and, for some reason, when Aelfgifu arrived to meet Edgar and myself she had no attendant with her but had chosen to bring her lapdog. To most people it was an appealing little creature, brown and white, constantly alert, with bright intelligent eyes. But I knew Edgar’s view of lapdogs – he thought they were spoiled pests – and I had a sense of foreboding which, mistakenly, I put down to my usual dislike of dogs.
Aelfgifu detected our disapproval and was adamant. ‘I insist Maccus comes with us today. He too needs his fun in the country. He will not disturb Habrok or the other hawks.’
So we rode out, Maccus riding on the pommel of Aelfgifu’s saddle, until we tethered our mounts at the usual place and walked into the marshland. Maccus bounced happily ahead through the undergrowth and long grass, his ears flapping. He even put up a partridge, which Habrok struck down in a dazzling attacking flight. ‘Look!’ said Aelfgifu to me, ‘I don’t know why you and Edgar made such long faces about the little dog. He’s proving himself useful.’
It was when she and I were once again in our bower and had made love that Maccus barked excitedly. A moment later I heard Edgar’s warning bell ring urgently. Aelfgifu and I dressed quickly. Hurriedly I picked up Habrok and tried to pretend that we had been waiting in ambush by the mere. It was too late. A servant, Aelfgifu’s old nursemaid, had been sent to find her mistress as she was wanted at the burh, and Maccus’s enthusiastic barking had led her to where Edgar was standing guard. Edgar tried to distract the servant from advancing along the little causeway leading to the bower, but the dog went dashing out from our little hut and eagerly led her servant to our trysting place. Not till much later did I know what harm had been done.
