The Goshawk Read Free Page B

jesses on him at once, but he flew up before I had pulled myself together: and it was only when the great bundle of young feathers was perching on the rafters that one could see the jesses already on him. Jesses were what they called the thongs about his feet. Jessed but not belled, perched at the top of the old gamekeeper’s loft, baleful and extraordinary, I left the goshawk to settle down: while we three went out to the public house for a kind of last supper, at which none was more impatient of translation than the departing guest.
    They brought me back at about eleven o’clock, and by midnight I had given them drink and wished them fortune. They were good people, so far as their race went, for they were among the few in it who had warm hearts, but I was glad to see them go: glad to shake off with them the last of an old human life, and to turn to the cobwebby outhouse where Gos and a new destiny sat together in contrary arrogance.
    The hawk was on the highest rafter, out of reach, looking down with his head on one side and a faint suggestion of Lars Porsena. Humanity could not get there.
    Fortunately my human manœuvres disturbed the creature, shook him off the high perch to which he was entitled by nature and unused by practice — unused by the practice which had stormed at him with mechanical noises and shaken him with industrial jolts and bent his tail feathers into a parody of a Woolworth mop.
    He flew, stupid with too many experiences, off the perch at which he would have been impregnable. There was sorrow in the inapt evasion. A goshawk, too gigantic for a British species, and only three inches shorter than the golden eagle, was not meant to run away but to run after. The result was that now in this confinement of unknown brick walls, he fled gauchely, round and about the dreary room: until he was caught after a few circuits by the jesses, and I stood, stupefied at such temerity, with the monster on my fist.
Night
    The yellowish breast-feathers — Naples Yellow — were streaked downward with long, arrow-shaped hackles of Burnt Umber: his talons, like scimitars, clutched the leather glove on which he stood with a convulsive grip: for an instant he stared upon me with a mad, marigold or dandelion eye, all his plumage flat to the body and his head crouched like a snake’s in fear or hatred, then bated wildly from the fist.
    Bated. They still said that Jones minor got into a bate that morning, at preparatory schools. It was a word that had been used since falcons were first flown in England, since England was first a country therefore. It meant the headlong dive of rage and terror, by which a leashed hawk leaps from the fist in a wild bid for freedom, and hangs upside down by his jesses in a flurry of pinions like a chicken being decapitated, revolving, struggling, in danger of damaging his primaries.
    It was the falconer’s duty to lift the hawk back to the fist with his other hand in gentleness and patience, only to have him bate again, once, twice, twenty, fifty times, all night — in the shadowy, midnight barn, by the light of the second-hand paraffin lamp.
    It was two years ago. [1] I had never trained a serious hawk before, nor met a living falconer, nor seen a hawk that had been trained. I had three books. One of them was by Gilbert Blaine, the second was a half-volume in the Badminton Library and the third was Bert’s Treatise of Hawks and Hawking , which had been printed in 1619. From these I had a theoretical idea, and a very out-of-date idea, of the way to man a hawk.
    In teaching a hawk it was useless to bludgeon the creature into submission. The raptors had no tradition of masochism, and the more one menaced or tortured them, the more they menaced in return. Wild and intransigent, it was yet necessary to ‘break’ them somehow or other, before they could be tamed and taught. Any cruelty, being immediately resented, was worse than useless, because the bird would