The Goshawk by T. H. White

  This day I watched blackbirds in a heatless thunderstorm for two hours. I was sure that the scare of yesterday would have driven them away, but watched to prove the certainty, and did not trouble to set the trap. I came away convinced that it would be many weeks before a blackbird visited that net again for grain.

  Meanwhile it dewed, and stormed and thundered. What protest could one make against this devilish providence? Nothing, I supposed, except, like Mr. McMahon, to go out and have a shot at the King whom we then professed to love.

  Wednesday, Thursday, Friday

  One was expending an enormous amount of patience and ingenuity, but nothing seemed to come of it. Perhaps a pigeon was too large a decoy for a sparrow-hawk, whose usual prey when trained was the blackbird. It was no good muddling along like this, in the effort to do everything at once. (Already one was attempting to catch hawks without devoting a preliminary week or two to making sure that they were there.) If a blackbird was necessary as a lure, then I had better devote my energies to catching a blackbird before expending them upon catching a hawk. But it hurt to leave the bow-net unused, when, for all one knew, the still unplaced hawks of Three Parks might migrate at any moment.

  I determined to make the bow-net automatic, and as efficient as possible, while the quest for blackbirds was carried on. There was a stuffed teal on the mantel-piece, so I converted him into a decoy, in place of the live pigeon which had to be watched. Being stuffed, he did not move about. He was as stationary as the pieces of cheese in a mousetrap, and it was into something very like a moustrap that I converted the bownet for the time being.

  This oblation having been offered to fortune—it caught a weasel in the end, but he easily ate his way out, leaving only his footmarks—I set about the capture of the blackbirds. Since it is only illegal to take birds with bird lime, but not to manufacture or to advertise it, I can offer the experiences on this subject without fear of the dock. I warmed it, allowed it to spread on a nine-inch square of cardboard, sprinkled the same with maize or tasty-looking hedge fruits, and set it out in places frequented by blackbirds within view of the cottage. It was popular not only with the birds (who would hop about in it, and, standing on one leg, examine their feet with evident satisfaction) but also with the Wheeler pigs, who would eat the whole squares, cardboard and all, as fast as I could lay them down. It was not till some months afterward that I discovered the secret of this product, from a farmer who owned clap-nets, and who seemed on these matters to live a life haunted by visions of the law. The secret was to spread it on straws or any small twigs. These, he informed me, would catch on various parts of the bird, sticking from leg to wing and so forth, until he became too hampered for flight.

  Bird lime proving of little value, I constructed a kind of net-sieve, in the garden, on the old-fashioned principle, and led the string to my bedroom window. There I stuck the shaving mirror at a convenient angle, so that, taking my siesta, I could keep half an eye on the maize and blackberries which were to tempt my blackbirds into captivity. The bedroom was a pleasant change after the hide.

  They never came, of course. There was far too much fruit left in other parts of the garden, and in hedgerows unmenaced by strange erections, for any sensible blackbird to take much interest in mine. In the winter it might have worked, but in the late summer it was only a laughing stock.

  The pigs came, however, those ubiquitous Wheeler pigs which had eaten all the gooseberries, black and red currants, windfall apples or plums, and lures tied out for Gos on his perches. They often came into the kitchen to eat the dog’s bread and milk. I sometimes feared that they would come upstairs and eat me. They would have done it unconcernedly I suppose, munching away while I tried to drive them off with a stick or something. All the hedges were barricaded with old iron bedsteads, crockery, anything that could be thrown into the breach. They thrust all aside. Eventually they ate the sieve.

  But I—lying with one eye on the mirror—and occasionally rushing downstairs to hit a pig with a polo stick, which I kept outside the back door for that purpose—rested for three days and skimmed one eye through Shakespeare.

  Astounding genius (it was Sir Walter Raleigh who had written him, mainly while in the tower) his instinct for falconry had been that of a falconer. (Raleigh was fond of hawking.) No amateur could have chosen as an example of incredible portent that ‘a falcon towering in her pride of place’ (how nobly said!) ‘was by a mousing owl’ (with what contempt!) ‘hawked at and killed’.

  Then there was Hamlet’s: ‘We’ll e’en to it like French falconers, fly at anything we see.’ Turn it into the modern idiom—‘We’ll set about it like French shooters, loose off at any bird we see, at any range’—and the race stood constant from King James’s day to our own. It was in Hamlet that the undercurrent was strongest. Probably it was in falconry that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had amused themselves with the young prince, when they were at the university together. In any case their scenes were maintained by this background of thought: ‘if you love me, hold not off’, ‘your secrecy to the King and Queen moult no feather’, ‘an aery of children, little eyases’, ‘afraid of goose quills’, and the famous hawk whose counterpart might have been a heron-shaw. Perhaps one of the most terrible images in the whole play was that indignant question to his sometime friends: ‘why do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you would drive me into a toil?’ Menaced by the dangers which on all sides he perceived to be in contrivance for him, waiting, as it were, while the plot was woven to beset him, a creature that was being hunted but not yet attacked, his mind went to the heron against which two falcons were achieving their deadly spirals. ‘Why are you going round and round so cunningly as if you were trying to get above and upwind of me—to the position from which the peregrine makes her sudden and death-dealing stoop?’

  Saturday

  I spent the day in the grave, a not uncomfortable nor unacceptable fate. Two years before I had passed an evening in a public house with a trained nurse and midwife who had been laying out one of the local farmers who had died. Between the numerous draughts of Guinness which we stood her, this singularly intelligent and communicative spinster had explained in detail the full process of cleaning, trussing, stuffing and laying out a corpse. She had parted from me with the following good wish: ‘Well, I ’opes yer stuffs nicely.’

  So it was easy enough to arrange oneself with decency and comfort under the hummock of grassy mustard. With room for plenty of play for the elbows, I could have clasped my hands across my chest and held some flowers in them: a practice discouraged by undertakers since it makes the elbows stick out and thus calls for a wider coffin. I lay moistened and miserable, sometimes reading, sometimes sleeping, always listening, from four in the morning until four at night. It was at the latter hour that the decoy pigeon suddenly broke his jesses and flew away. I had made him leather jesses, not liking the string which must always irk their legs a little, and he managed to detach them from the screw which held them to the stump. I rose, like Lazarus, visited the teal trap (unsprung) the spring trap (sprung but empty), and plodded home. Then I made a new trap for the blackbirds.

  Providence was very fair on the whole, only at present it delighted to jog me. At five o’clock in the morning, slow-fingered and suffering, I had been tying the pigeon to his screw. He had flapped his wings just at the wrong moment, the jesses had slipped through the hands that were trying to knot them, and off he had flown: taking with him the whole point of rising at this lonely hour. I would have had to walk for sixty minutes to fetch another pigeon, and by then it would have been too light to enter the hide in possible view of the hawks. I had been standing dumbstruck, numbed by this one additional stroke so similar to that with which my lovely Gos had deserted me, when the pigeon had come down in a hedge only a hundred yards away. I had gone over, expecting nothing, and been fortunate enough to find that he had hooked himself up. Then, in the evening, he went for good.

  No less than three poachers walked over me that m
orning, Silston people, in a ride which was generally supposed to be untrodden by the foot of man. Some idea of the forlorn hope in trying to capture a resident hawk was derived from the reflection that each of these poachers, though not resident, must have seen clearly that somebody had been in this lonely place before him, owing to the fact that the rabbits had retreated into the wood. We humans left traces behind, black footsteps in the dew suddenly ceasing at the place where we imagined ourselves to be lying hidden, game disturbed, rooks absent, blackbirds cursing, a noise or a silence, an interruption of the accustomed animal routine all too obvious to the hawk on the dead branch or even to the man in the grave. I could have caught one of the poachers by the foot.

  Sunday

  I took the round metal trap, which had been sprung on the previous day, up to the woodside hedge in the vicinity of the grave. Climbing a small maple with some effort I contrived to fix it at the top of the pole, and left it to its mechanical watch. The teal trap was still unsprung.

  I had learned that traps which needed constant attendance from four or five o’clock in the morning were not worth setting without certain knowledge of the whereabouts of the hawks for which they were set. They might be useful near the eyrie in the spring. When I could catch a blackbird for bait I would give the grave one more day of agony, but after that it would have to be a kind of trap which would spring itself.

  The following is the way in which passage hawks used to be taken at Valkenswaard. The falconer possessed a more or less commodious turf dug-out, on the heath, perhaps even with a little stove in it. Beside his dug-out he had at least two traps. From the first trap, which was at the top of a high pole, he could fly a tied pigeon which would be visible for a considerable distance, and which could be pulled back again into the trap at the last moment: from the second, which was at ground level in the centre of his bow-net, he could offer a second victim.

  In the Middle Ages they believed, quite a good belief, that everything on land had its counterpart in the sea. The elephant was doubled by the whale, the dog-fish by the dog. In the same way, we might expect a counterpart in the air. At any rate, as there are hounds for foxes and pigs for truffles and setters for grouse, so the grey shrike took particular notice of hawks. The falconer at Valkenswaard had a couple of these birds tethered outside his dug-out.

  The birds migrated, the hawks followed the birds to Holland, the shrike set up a cry and pointed, the falconer released his high pigeon, the hawk saw it and hurried to the kill, the trap concealed the decoy once again, the baffled hawk swung round, the second pigeon in the bow net was disclosed, the hawk stooped, and the ingenuity of man had added one more wild grace to the stock of passage hawks which were to be loved all over Europe.

  Monday

  Poachers, a class of people whose outlook few had troubled to understand, were not without their own grievances. I met one of them cheerfully bicycling up Tofield’s Riding with his wife’s ornamental plaited basket full of wires. As I was off my own shooting land I could scarcely reproach him for being on Tofield’s. In any case he told me a long story, which neither of us believed, about how Musser Tofield had said to him, Charlie my boy (or whatever his name was) them rabbits up agen Three Parks want to be kept down, you know, and so forth. But the interesting thing was the real indignation with which he concluded his remarks on wiring. ‘Them wires,’ he complained, giving them a look of disgust, ‘why nowadays us got to be a watching of ’em the hull night, if us doant want ’em pinched.’ It seemed that rabbit snaring was going to the dogs in these decadent times; even a law-abiding poacher could not be left to steal in peace.

  Tuesday

  My blood had the false feeling that we had turned St. Lucie’s day. Life, shrunk to the bed’s foot, seemed to be creating itself, seemed in the blank walls of chaos to be discovering an opening, or speck of light. To begin with there was an answer from Germany. ‘Dear Sir!’ wrote the ordenmeister of the deutscher falken-orden, very fortunately in English, ‘I got your letter and thank you for it. I am very sorry that you don’t wrote me some days bevor.’ (I did wrote him several days bevor, but the letter went astray.) ‘Gesterday a had a very bad luck. My half trained passager-gos killed my second trained passager gos on the screen perch. Both birds was standing to near. Ma 8 years old very fine and goud female gos Medusaa is still moulting. I don’t like to part with her. My onlyst passager female-gos from this year, caught in the beginning from September, is now tame, coming to the fist and beginning to fly rabbits well. I think this bird will also take hares if she has very strong feets. Perhaps I have to art with her later. I will certainly try to get for you a other passager Gos (female). Please are so kind and write me if you like a trained or untrained bird. Female Gosses are much rarer as male-ones.’

  I wrote back to this noble and courteous gentleman, who had taken the trouble to write in English and had had the forethought to save me the foreign handwriting by using a typewriter (where I, unable to write German at all, have only poked a little fun at his very triumphant efforts) that a gos of either sex would do, so long as he or she was untrained. But what a devil the goshawk was. My attempt to get a merlin in the spring had ended in the merlin being eaten by a goshawk on the premises of the secretary of the English Hawking Club; my letter for help to Gilbert Blaine had got a reply that there was already a goshawk lost and loose on his own island; and now perhaps the greatest living austringer, who seemed to have trained or at least half-trained a goshawk in three weeks, wrote that his own mews was suffering a bereavement.

  The next moment of excitement came when going round my traps in the afternoon. There were two to visit since the bow-net had been rendered automatic, an alteration which I felt shy about and did not expect to work.

  The metal trap in the maple was sprung and there was something in it. Setting out I had suddenly felt optimistic and taken along the leather glove, and an old sock, two appurtenances which I had not troubled to carry for a fortnight. Now I had a gun over my arm, pretending that I was really only out to pick up a hare for dinner. When I saw the occupied trap I was several hundred yards away and at a particularly good place for hares. I tried to pay attention to hares, to proceed calmly according to schedule. But it was impossible. The feet made for the trap, not for the long grass. More and more quickly, till finally quite regardless of the fine leveret which got up at fifteen yards, I scurried for a sure view of the pole.

  It was a little owl, as usual. The padded trap caught three of these eventually, and one brown owl, before I put it out of action. It was never very safe and one of the little owls dislocated the hock of its leg, so I gave up using it.

  PART THREE

  SO that was two failures. The winter had adopted what the summer began, wrapped everything in a dull blanket of refusal, opposing to love and interest an impenetrable cotton wool. I had been wrong also, on that very distant day — for failure seemed to make time much longer — when, standing for a few moments in the early morning, I had wondered whether I was well or ill. It had been appendicitis, they now said, and took me away from the staunch cottage among the bare trees, away from a perplexed dog, to a real world of being sick, of people, knives and stitches: and I was then forced, on the day before they cut me up, to refuse a female passage goshawk which Renz Waller had got. It was a sad blow, for the passage hawk could only be taken at the winter or spring migrations, and now there was nothing to do but wait for spring.

  There was nothing to do but wait, yet still the now lacerated body opposed its small forces against destiny. Toward the end of January a pair of kestrels were reported roosting in a hovel nearby. A cowman, going out early to bring in the cows and taking with him an electric torch to save himself from puddled gateways, had seen them, had jumped up to the rafters and touched the tail of one before they flew away. I went next day and found their mutes and castings. The latter had beetles’ wings in them, with the fur of mice. But the touch had scared them. One never came back, and the other, sleeping suspiciously alone, was too wa
ry for many midnight footsteps in the crunching snow.

  The time dragged on, the snow fell and lay, the chimney smoked, and the old oaks which had kept their tattered mantles of brown rags about them made a hissing sound in the north wind. Then the snow-drops came, to be punished with much more snow, and after that, after many seeming years of cruelty and dejection — when the motors were abandoned in snow-drifts, and the farm gateways were foully puddled for acres, and gum-boots sucked in the holding mud, and the rivers and gutters swirled brown and broad and wicked from the unceasing rain — there came the waifs of lambs, and their swelled and wet-sodden mothers got the fluke. More ages passed, while the people themselves shook with a hot influenza or coughed with rasping throats, and then there was a little mild. Hunting had stopped early, after several accidents because of the impossible conditions, but now, and weeks late, there came a burst of dirty Naples yellow on the willows and the various thorns gave out a green and tender effusion. The birds made the still ridings rinse and ring with their music. There were violets and many other small, pretty flowers, unknown to my dumb mind, all over the floors of the woods. The grey squirrels ran angrily between their nests. The wise and charming rooks flew about with twigs in their mouths. The nightingales sang like angels. A pair of very early nightjars were suddenly there at dusk, churring but not yet clapping their wings, and a blessed postcard came from Waller that two goshawks had at last been caught — his only specimens for that spring. One was a haggard-tiercel, the other a female in her first plumage, much damaged. He would send the latter.