The Goshawk by T. H. White
Monday
The next thing was to catch a blackbird; a feat reasonably easy in the winter time, when hedges were bare and hunger made them tamely come for crumbs, but not so easy in the profusion and wildness of late summer. I could think of no sure means except bird lime, which was illegal. For that matter, nearly everything concerned with falconry was illegal: our modern legislators, busily passing laws for urban criminals, had forgotten altogether, or never heard, that hawk-mastery existed. Half the things we did were forbidden by laws recently passed to curtail quite different activities: the other half were presumably still governed by laws passed before Elizabeth, which nobody had troubled to repeal. I believed, for instance, that under one of the latter kinds of law I was legally able to go hawking on all my neighbour’s property without asking his permission, while under one of the former I was hardly allowed to hawk at all. In this state of confusion I thought it better to remain unacquainted with any law, while attempting to be as humane as possible.
I took Gos to Silston, the great poaching village of the neighbourhood, and hence the village which knew most about birds and beasts, and there we made inquiries about bird lime. The second person I asked, merely an unknown pedestrian who had passed the time of day and fallen into conversation about the beauties of Gos, was kind enough to bicycle a mile after me, bringing the advertisement of a firm which supplied this commodity. It was illegal, it seemed, to use bird lime, but not illegal to advertise or sell it. However, I was now set upon other courses.
There was a packet of size in my coal-shed, size which I had used for the walls upstairs. You mixed....
But why define these endless mixings? Heavy machine oil, size, paraffin, water: on a stove in the garden I brewed these liquids and any others I could lay hands upon. Everything dried to the consistency of marble, and to this consistency it dried in less than two minutes. The shades varied from jet black to toffee, a challenge to Michelangelo but not to the birds. At three o’clock in the afternoon, turning with a sinking heart from these loathly preparations, I found a wandering publican of my acquaintance leaning over the garden gate. It seemed a direct providence, for he had a car, and before anybody could say knife we were in Buckingham: where, within a few minutes I had bought a new wireless set, two tame pigeons in lieu of blackbirds, and all the bird lime I wanted. I procured the lime quite easily by stopping X, who was passing in another car, and reflected that it was very lucky that I had once stood X a drink in the Swan and Castle. So much for law and order.
The day degenerated into beer, argument, darts and skittles, at public houses over half the countryside. Afterwards we came home and had an argument until half after midnight. Since (I realized next morning), the publican had been arguing about the Grafton hounds while I had been arguing about the licensing laws, no definite conclusion was then reached.
In the course of this intemperate and wasted day, Gos had been taught at odd moments to tolerate being carried at low speeds on a bicycle, and I had done my best to man him to motor cars by getting the publican to drive along beside us in bottom gear, talking to us through the window. But I was relaxing my pressure upon the hawk, thinking the job nearly finished, and I was due for trouble.
Tuesday
How the whole thing did not finish that morning, was beyond comprehension. I was a wicked and bibulous man, and I could only suppose that these persons God allowed immoderately to flourish.
Gos had been getting above himself, a result of that full crop after his first hundred yards, and of the present fever for sparrow-hawks which was among other things inevitably resulting in his neglect, so he had been given very little supper on the Monday night. On this morning I took him up from the mews with a tiny piece of beef, and, supposing him to be sharp set, carried him straight out to the well-head with a creance of fifty yards. The idea was to concentrate on making him come quickly rather than far, by bringing him on this half creance every hour for a piece of beef, which should be denied unless he came at once.
I sat him down on the well-head, tied on the creance, and was whistling about the Lord my Shepherd when Mrs. Wheeler came up the farm road in a car. I left the hawk and ran over to her, to tell her about the new wireless. Gos did not object to this, for I looked back as I went. We got into conversation. After five minutes we parted, and I ran in front of the car to open the next gate for it: then turned back to the well, about a hundred yards away. I had walked quite half this distance before I realized that Gos was no longer on his rail.
The setting in motion of the car, and the sight of his master running in front of it, must have upset him. He had flown to the full length of his creance, and was now sitting in the outermost twigs of a high oak which had no branches for the first ten feet. He had managed to spin the creance in and out of the twigs, and was sitting composedly in a kind of cocoon.
I informed him that the Lord was my Shepherd, waving beef and a handkerchief. I stupidly tried to pull the creance from the well end. I ought to have loosed the well end, annoyed him so that he bated from the tree without impediment from behind, and taken him up when he came to the ground. However, I did the other thing, which came more naturally, and this caused a bate, and the cocoon became inextricable. A fact which made matters much worse was that the creance itself, of tarred twine, had turned out to be of poor quality with hardly any breaking strain. It had already been broken twice in spite of the elastic.
I fetched a ladder and solicited the aid of my nearest neighbour’s son, William. William’s white shirt, without a coat over it, and the strange ladder, further wove the web. Gos spent five minutes hanging head downward by his jesses, and broke one of his remaining tail feathers at the old hunger trace. The ladder would not reach to the first branch.
Even if I had been able to climb the tree, which I tried to do, I should now have had to saw off practically all its eastward branches, among which the creance was entangled, and the ensuing ruin would almost certainly have dashed the hapless hawk to pieces.
I fetched a seventeen-foot salmon rod, tied some beef to the top ring, and, standing tip-toe, was just able to present it within striking distance. No reaction: or rather, that most exasperating of all his reactions, a silly, chicken-like indecision. William was busy tying two ladders together for me to climb, in what looked a fatal way.
We must have been at it for an hour and a half before I thought of screwing a picture hook through the top ring of the rod. I managed to entangle the jesses with this and to drag him down.
He bated at me when I picked him up, and stood on my glove even more tattered than before, looking at me angrily as if it had been my fault. I said to him: ‘There you are, Gos dear, perfectly all right. What a silly little chap you are’ — and, with the kindest vocal intonation but with all my heart — ‘you bloody little sod.’
Wednesday
There seem to have been two textures working side by side toward the wordless climax of this week. The new, insensate El Dorado of the sparrow-hawk was dictated by apparently opposite states of feeling: the conquest of Gos, now nearly over, had proved too easy and was therefore too difficult. The relaxation from a task hitherto supposed to be practically impossible of accomplishment had left me face to face with its real difficulties, and not strong enough to face them without depression.
Nobody would be an austringer by choice. Nothing could express the weariness of treating with the largest of the short-winged hawks, nothing the dejections around every corner in this, the least facile of the sports. I had gone into it blindfold, I told myself, and now not hated but drooped my wings before it, as Gos had done when he was watched three nights. It was six weeks since I had averted my eyes from the hag-ridden pupils of this lunatic, half a week since he had come on a creance quite perfectly a hundred yards. I had lived with this hawk, its slave, butcher, nursemaid and flunkey. What clothes it wore were made by me, what house it had was swept out and kept sweet by me, what food it ate was killed and eviscerated and hacked into pieces and served by me, wha
I did not then know that this was a common state of affairs with goshawks, that the best of them were always haunted by moods and mania. Their training was never done, the danger of losing them in the field never absent. But to have worked with incessant benevolence, forethought and assurance: to have worked thus for six weeks in the dark: then to find that, as I supposed, all this work might never have been, that some fault in myself, and a fault which one could not remember or understand, had put the imbecile back in the asylum: it was hard then to do anything but droop the head. At some times one could have joyfully wrung his neck, have with active pleasure and fierce, deep croaks of lustful joy dragged him in half, knocked his head on a gatepost. But today it was only collapse, only loathing and incapacity.
The weariness of life that has no will
To climb the steepening hill:
The sickness of the soul for sleep and to be still.
And then once more the impassioned pygmy fist
Clenched cloudward and defiant;
The pride that would prevail, the doomed protagonist
Grappling the ghostly giant.
I took up the burden again, put off the use of the bow net till a more propitious occasion, and redevoted the whole of my attention to Gos. After a hard day’s carrying and working on the creance, together with a reduction of his rations to washed meat, I sat down in the evening to sum up the progress of six weeks. The day had brought the hawk back to normal and I made a list of debits and credits, as Robinson Crusoe did on his island.
He would allow me to stroke his legs, crop, breast and panell. He would travel on my fist while I bicycled, so long as I did not ride fast downhill. He was reasonably good with other traffic on the roads, and with other people: but I could not always promise that he would not bate. He would come a hundred yards on a creance, though not so quickly as he ought to do. He would not allow me to stroke his back or head.
I looked at the list and summed it up. The devil spoke softly in my ear. I could afford to take a day off tomorrow, and try the sparrow-hawks. The trap had been left long enough for them to have become accustomed to its presence.
Thursday
The alarum rang its full hysteria before I woke at four o’clock. Seeing that it was dark, I concluded the alarum to be false and turned over to go to sleep again. In the middle of the turn I got up and began to fumble with my clothes. Somnambulist, a stranger to myself since numbed in all the higher centres, I obeyed the stranger that I had been yesterday, automatically. The heavy, iron-shod boots, with their leather laces: the packet of sandwiches and thermos of coffee which I had put up the night before: the bottle of beer: the dark, high-necked pullover and the dark mackintosh, for it was going to rain: the two live pigeons from the bakehouse: the trout-reel with the strong line, which was going to pull the trap: the sock into which my sparrow-hawk would be thrust head first immediately after capture: the pocketful of maize and oats. A docile Frankenstein, dumb and looming in the dark, I obeyed myself slowly and carefully: shut Brownie in the parlour, stumbled out into the night with one pigeon in my pocket and one sitting sleepily in false jesses on my finger.
Last night the clouds had been curdled high over heaven, and now they had come down to earth. The mist was stratus at ground level and the moon hid her haunted face in diminished power. The monster plodded along methodically, moving with a heavy step, setting down his burdens to fumble with the gates — a moon-touched misty Caliban, trudging his two miles all alone. Nothing woke, no owls, no foxes. Two or three cows rose as he walked between them.
We had made the hide in a place where the Silston people had been cutting wood a month or two before. So my own bits of stick would fade naturally into a background of chips and stacked branches. It was fifteen yards from the bow-net, and all lay as we had left it.
I tied the least well-favoured of the pigeons to its metal loop, stretched the trout line from the trap to the hide (the reel dismaying me — one of the points which had been overlooked — by making its loud clack), scattered some maize round the trap to keep the pigeon occupied, and crawled into the hide. Already it was beginning to be day, and the hawks — later experience made me doubt whether these sounds might not have been those of little owls — were on the wing. I could hear their single inter-answering notes, and they might have seen me. It was for fear of this that I had come so early.
For the next fourteen hours it was necessary to remain in a space less than six feet by three, and to remain in vain. For the last three hours the rain soaked down the neck and ran up the sleeves. It was impossible to see the sky, for the sky would have seen me, and the proximity of the hawks (now definitely not little owls), had to be judged by their mewing: it was impossible to smoke or read or make a noise. I made a long job of my sandwiches, cut myself a little three-masted frigate out of hazel with a penknife, watched the lure. A woodland mouse, lonely as I was and less accustomed to man, came boldly to eat my biscuits, and was soon tugging at one side of the biscuit while I tugged at the other. A wild pigeon lighted on the roof and went off with a clatter when I poked it in the tummy, an innocent and I thought pardonable joke. A solitary hen blackbird ate the maize. The spare pigeon, the one who had confidingly sat upon my finger, consented to make friends with me. I eased its jesses, which were too tight for its feet.
Fourteen hours, and then, soaked to the skin, I made all sound: covered a few poor places in the roof, worked the trap, set and strewed it again with dead leaves, tied a long leash to the sacrificial pigeon, and left him in a tree beside the trap. By this means I hoped that no fox would get at him, since the long leash left him free to perch out of reach, and that the hawks might get accustomed to his presence or even kill him before my next visit, thus learning that there was easy food to be got at this place. I left him with plenty of corn and water, for that day he would be alone, and retied the jesses so that they could not irk his legs.
While I was feeding Gos at home, and feeding the dog, and feeding myself, I thought over the day’s work. It seemed to be all conjectural. Perhaps they were not sparrow-hawks: perhaps this was not the way to catch them: perhaps, as foxes were alleged to do, they refrained from killing near home. Certainly, when I performed my next full-dress watch, I should have to go earlier and more silently — no reel this time — for all depended upon my not being seen to enter the hide. Tom had laid me thirty-three to one that I should not make a catch. Hawks could see through a brick wall, said Tom.
Friday
It was so wet, so wet without prospect of ever seeing a decent summer again, that I spent the day indoors with Gos, apart from a visit to the tied pigeon in the wood. The latter seemed to have retained the confused good spirits of tame pigeons.
Gos hated being carried in the rain, and still had to be taught that the bare hand, stroking his head and back, was not an outrage. I decided to teach him this in the kitchen, to the sound of the wireless set, rewarding him after each familiarity with a very small piece of beef. There was one thing which stood to Gos’s credit, and that was his genuine love of music. He sat here absolutely entranced, giving the strange box his full attention and watching me as I fiddled with the knobs. It was a beautifully-mannered visit, the eagle sitting courteously in the cottager’s ben and sharing his humble entertainment.
I stroked and thought. The whole thing was an unsleeping social problem, a tireless ‘What does A do?’ which confronted the Columbus at every step. Some days ago, for instance, Gos had been sitting on the bow perc
In the time which it took to slip on a gauntlet and walk six paces I had been forced to confront these facts: (a) Gos had enjoyed a full crop the night before and might not be hungry enough to learn anything that night if he ate the mouse. (b) If I took the mouse away from him it might teach him to ‘carry’ later on. (‘Carrying’ was the act by which a trained hawk would go off with the quarry at which he had been successfully flown. Jealous of the food, ill-mannered, suspicious that it was going to be taken from him, he would pick it up in his talons and fly a little further off at each approach of the austringer.) (c) But Gos should not associate food with his own, unflown, personal effort, unaided by me.
I had summed it up briefly. I could not stand aside without interference because of (c): I could not take the mouse away because of (b): and I did not want him to have the mouse because of (a). The chain had been forced to break at its weakest link. I had stepped across to him, taken the mouse in my hand, helped him to eat it, and, because really I had been more of a hindrance than a help with such a small morsel, had fetched for him at once, from the meat safe, a small additional piece of rabbit’s liver. By this means I hoped I had begun to teach him that, having done his own killing, good would accrue by allowing me to interfere.
Now, recollecting this dilemma as I cautiously stroked the stiff-necked generation, I was amused by a similar problem which occurred to me. When I first bought Gos I had also asked for a merlin which I hoped to fly at larks. A merlin was flown ‘at hack’. That is to say, it was allowed to fly free during its first fortnight, coming into the mews only for its two meals a day. This, of course, applied only to the eyas or nest-taken merlin that was learning to fly, not to the wild adult caught by trap. A merlin was a confiding little creature — it used to be recognized as the lady’s hawk — and the one which I had paid for had dropped down beside a goshawk’s perch on the very day that she was to be sent to me. The goshawk had killed her.