The Goshawk by T. H. White
Friday, Saturday, Sunday
They were days of attack and counter-attack, a kind of sweeping to and fro across disputed battle fields. Gos had gone back a long way toward wildness with his first sleep. Each day the ceaseless calls of housekeeping and lardering called Crusoe away from him, as his educational needs called him back, and so it was backward and forward the whole time. Sometimes he would step to the glove after hesitation, but without temper, and sometimes he would fly away as if I had come to do him murder. We walked alone for hours every day, Gos sometimes conversing in amicable if puzzled mews, sometimes flapping and bating twice every minute. All the time there was a single commandment to be observed. Patience. There was no other weapon. In the face of all set-backs, of all stupidities, of all failures and scenes and exasperating blows across the face with his wings as he struggled, there was only one thing one could seek to do. Patience ceased to be negative, became a positive action. For it had to be active benevolence. One could torture the bird, merely by giving it a hard and bitter look.
No wonder the old austringers used to love their hawks. The effort which went into them, the worry which they occasioned, the two months of human life devoted to them both waking and dreaming, these things made the hawk, for the man who trained it, a part of himself. I was startled by the upper classes, surprised by the gentleman who allowed a ghillie to gaff his salmon for him — it made the salmon so much the less his — and, with hawking especially, could not understand a nobleman who kept a falconer. What pleasure would he get, taking this strange bird from the fist of a stranger and hurling it into the air? But to the falconer, to the man who for two months had made that bird, almost like a mother nourishing her child inside her, for the sub-consciousness of the man and the bird became really linked by a mind’s cord: to the man who had created out of a part of his life, what pleasure to fly, what terror of disaster, what triumph of success!
The end in view was to make Gos come for food. In the end he was to come a distance of at least a hundred yards, the moment he was called, but at present it was enough if he would first not fly away when I approached. Next he had to learn to step to the fist for a reward of food. (The way to every creature’s heart was through the belly. This was why women had insisted on the prerogative of being allowed to cook.) Finally he must jump to the fist with one flap of the wings, as a preliminary to increasing the distance.
It was only patience which could achieve this end. I realized that the hawk must be tied to his perch by a leash, and now for three days stood a yard away from him, holding meat out in my hand. I went to him again and again, speaking to him from outside the mews, opening the door slowly, edging forward on feet that moved like the hands of a clock.
Here comes (one thought, suddenly catching oneself out) that excellent piece of work called man, with his capacity for looking before and after, his abilities to reflect upon the enigmas of philosophy, and the minted storehouse of an education that had cost between two and three thousand pounds, walking sideways to a tied bird, with his hand held out in front of him, looking the other way and mewing like a cat.
But it was pure joy, even joy to stand absolutely motionless for fifteen minutes, or while one slowly counted a thousand.
Part of the joy was that now, for the first time in my life, I was absolutely free. Even if I only had a hundred pounds, I had no master, no property, no fetters. I could eat, sleep, rise, stay or go as I liked. I was freer than the Archbishop of Canterbury, who no doubt had his fixed times and seasons. I was as free as a hawk.
Gos had to be taught to know his call. Later on he might get out of sight when being flown at game, and had to be so taught that he could be recalled by the whistle. Most falconers used an ordinary metal whistle, but my escaped soul felt too poetical for that. I felt that Gos was too beautiful to be shrilled at with a policeman’s mechanical note. He was to come to a tune, and if I could have played it I would have bought a penny whistle. But I could only whistle with my mouth, and that had to do. Our melody was a hymn, ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’ — the old metrical Scottish one.
Hawks were taught to come to their whistle by associating it with food, like Pavlov’s famous dog. Whenever they were fed the whistle was blown, a kind of dinner gong. So now, as one sidled up to that fierce, suspicious eye, the mews reverberated day in and day out with this sweet highland tune. One came to hate it in the end, but not so much as one would have hated anything else. Besides, I whistled it so sadly that there was always a faint interest in trying to keep to the right notes.
Monday
Gos had on the whole a pessimistic and apprehensive expression, a characteristic of most predatory creatures. We are pugnacious through our inferiority complexes. Even the pike’s ironic mouth has a hint of depression in it.
The day was probably typical of training a goshawk, only most austringers had better tempers. It was now nearly a week since I had devoted most of my time and all my thought to him, it was several days since he had begun stepping fairly regularly to the glove, and that morning he had been carried for four hours. So it was not rewarding when the extraordinary creature bated away the moment I entered at two-fifteen. I sat down for ten minutes about a yard from his perch, talking and whistling to him, holding out a piece of liver. He only bated absent-mindedly, so I went to pick him up. Now he bated in earnest, as if he had never seen me before. We had a scene in which at least the master behaved well, and at last we were able to sit down with him on the glove, trying to make him feed. He would not feed. No stroking, offering, nor teasing had any effect. I thought: well, we will go for a walk instead and feed when we get back. The moment the man stood up, with infinite caution and joint by joint, the bird started to behave like a lunatic. And a lunatic he verily was: probably not certifiable, and normally sane enough to outward appearances, yet a sufferer from intermittent delusional insanity. For the next five minutes, inside and outside the mews (the weather had broken again and there was a tempestuous wind blowing, a nuisance which he seemed to attribute to myself) for the next five minutes there was pandemonium. He screamed once, as he had used to do in his first days: it was the scream of a tortured maniac.
Now I too began to lose my temper. The week of ceaseless work, the fears which had always been there lest he should get ill — with the cramp that had killed that boy’s eyas spar-hawk, or the keks, or the vertigo, or any other terrible and curiously named ailment which the books spoke about — the culmination also of nervous strain in three nights’ watching: it was too much. Probably my unfathomable mind had been initially tending toward ill-humour that day, and this, indeed, may have been the cause of temper in Gos. Hawks were psychic, like red setters, and rage was contagious between unconscious hearts. Anyway, my self-control began to go. I lost it so far as anyone who might remotely dream of calling himself an austringer would dare to lose it: that is to say, ceased to help him back to the glove in the middle of a bate.
When the hawk flies off, in danger of being left to hang upside down, you can induce him back to the glove with a slight flick of the wrist while he is still beating his wings. I did not give this flip. Raging in my heart, I thought: Well then, bate you filthy bugger. Gos climbed back up his jesses, in a worse temper than before; but only to bate again. Now came the sin against the Holy Ghost. After half a dozen more bates — the flurry was almost continuous — I inclined my hand against his efforts to climb up the jess. Sometimes a hawk will fall off and hang passively, his head cocked sideways to observe the floor as he twists slowly round and round, and then it is reasonable to leave him hanging for a moment, while you collect yourself, straighten out the leash or jesses, and give him time to calm down. This was not a case of that. Gos was trying to get back, and capable of doing so, when I definitely thwarted him by twisting my hand against the leathers. Both our worlds were quite black.
In a second the fit was over. Gos, with mouth open and protruding tongue, was panting with amazement and staring at me in a high temperature, and I, with an equal
Well, I thought, you had better go on the bow perch in the garden while I collect myself. We are obviously not fit for each other’s society today.
A bow perch looked exactly like the bow which won the battle of Agincourt, so like that it seemed impossible that the one should not have developed from the other. Somebody with a taste for archery as well as hawking must have stuck his bow into the ground for his hawk to sit on.
I took him to the perch, in a fury of scenes all the way, and went back to the mews with a saw, to make an alteration in the portable indoor perch which I had erected so that his sleeping quarters could be carried into the kitchen when he was being watched. This perch, which had evolved itself spontaneously, was a perch made out of a tea chest. It looked like this:
Two of the sides of the thing were cut away, so that if he was sitting on the perch his tail feathers could not fall foul of them. The other two sides were too far apart to interfere. There was a heavy stone in the middle to prevent the affair from capsizing when he bated away from it. It was probably an inefficient perch; but it was portable and I had invented it myself. Another merit was that it was highly suitable for people who happened to have tea chests.
By the time the alterations had been completed I had regained the official mastery of my soul, and could think in a direct line once more. I was happy because I had invented a nice perch. I felt that I could face Gos again, and went back to him on the lawn in a good temper, as heaven was my destination. I had recovered my manhood, my equanimous nature, my philanthropic and affable attitude towards the inefficient products of evolution which surrounded me. Gos had not.
He bated when I arrived and while he was being picked up: he bated all the way back to the mews: he bated in the mews, till I popped a bloody kidney into his mouth as he opened it to curse. In twenty minutes, without further transition, he had eaten a whole rabbit’s liver and leg, ravenously, as if he had been wanting to eat all the time, together with two or three small pieces of my forefinger and thumb which had been turning the red and greasy shreds for him to get a better purchase on them. Good, I was pleased with this triumph of patience, and erroneously thought that Gos was pleased too. His beak was decorated with small scraps of fur and sinew, and it was my office to clean them off. I lifted my hand to do so, as had been done without protest a score of times since the previous Wednesday. He bated. I tried again, gently. He bated. Again, cautiously. Bate, a worse one. I stood up. He tried to fly to his perch, which was out of range. I raised my hand. He tightened his feathers, stuck out his crop, dilated his eyes, opened his beak, panted a hot and smelly breath, and bated. I got warm and moved too quickly. In a minute it was a dog fight.
This time I was injudicious: but did nothing discreditable to humanity. In the heat and battle of the wings, with which he was striking me on the nose, knocking cigarettes out of my mouth, and for which one was continuously in the terrible fear of broken feathers, I kept repeating a sentence out of one of my books: ‘A hawk should never be disturbed after feeding.’ But also I was compelled to think that the beak must be cleaned, the authority established, the perseverance not now flouted lest it should be thought of as weak thereafter. I feared to give in lest the hawk should slip back.
After five minutes the beak was clean but Gos was in such a temper that his eyes were starting out of his head. He was a choleric beast. When he was like this it was possible to calm him down by slipping the bare hand over his crop, down his breast and under his stomach. Then, with four fingers between his legs, one could hold up the beating heart which seemed to fill the whole of his body. I did this now, and for two or three minutes Gos leaned forward on the hand exhausted: then, shutting his beak, giving his head a sudden twist, closing his wings, rousing and settling his feathers, taking an easier stance upon the fist, the unaccountable creature began to beam all over his face. He cocked an eye as if none of this had ever happened, and finished the rest of that day in a blaze of vernal confidence.
[1]In 1937.
[2] See Postscript.
CHAPTER II
Tuesday
WHEN we had dipped the hawk’s tail in boiling water and were first able to get a better view of it, a grievous fact had come to light. Gos was suffering from a hunger trace. If a growing eyas was stinted in his food, say for a day or two, the lengthening feathers would add a weak section during those days. The stamina might be picked up again, and the feathers might continue to increase in length, healthy and strong; but always, until the next year’s moult, the tell-tale weak section would lie like a semicircular slash across the full grown plume.
It was not that it made any difference from the point of view of appearance, but the feathers were actually weak at the hunger trace, and would probably break off at it one by one. With Gos, two had already gone — one of them before he came to the cottage.
Now a bird with damaged feathers was the same as an aeroplane with damaged fabric: as more and more feathers broke off the bird would become more and more incapable of efficient flight. And, since the feathers rested upon one another, as soon as one was broken the next one to it was liable to go. For this reason broken feathers had to be mended by a process called ‘imping’. Most people who have been compelled to read Shakespeare for examinations will be familiar with the word. ‘Imp out our imperfections with your thought’ or ‘imp out our drooping country’s broken wing’.
The stub left in the bird was trimmed, a piece of feather corresponding to the part broken off was selected from the store kept handy since last year’s moult, an imping needle sharpened at both ends and triangular in section was dipped in seccotine or brine, and the two parts were joined.
Gos had a hunger trace, a visible threat that sooner or later the art of imping would have to be practised on the living bird. The effect of this blemish was to make one frightened of giving him another while his feathers were still growing. (All, except the two deck feathers, were already hard penned.) And the result of this fear was that one’s first object was to fill him with food. I did not realize it for many days, but actually he was being fed far too well. The troubles which arose during the previous and the next week were due to the fact that, in ignorance of his normal cubic content, the tetchy princeling had been reduced to a condition of acute liverish repletion. I for my part was trying to teach him to fly a yard or two toward me, by holding out a piece of meat, and he for his part was certain of one thing only — that he detested the very sight of it.
I could think of nothing at first except to continue the old treatment. I would walk round and round Gos, holding out a rabbit leg, while he bated whenever it came too close: then I would come away without feeding him. There was nothing about it in the books. It became more and more apparent that there was something wrong. His mutes were heavily and with effort dropped, not slashed out with a proud squirt as he had been in the habit of doing, in my eye, and they were bright green. I wondered innocently if he could have eaten some gall with his liver last night? Was his bile induced by his mood or his mood by his bile? The books said nothing about emerald mutes, and so one could do nothing about them. Anyway Gos had not eaten all day, and was in a terrible state of nerves. I proposed to go to bed, to get up at 1 a.m. and to spend the night with him. It gave one the sense of doing something definite at least. ‘He shall eat when he jumps to my fist for it, not before,’ I wrote hopefully in the day-book. ‘Starvation is the only cure for stomach troubles. But perhaps tomorrow give him some egg?’
‘He shall eat when he jumps to my fist for it, not before.’ If only we had stuck to that sensible pronouncement his training would have been shortened by three weeks. But the mind was a slow adventurer’s feeling its way alone in the dark: an amateur’s, four hundred years too late for guidance: a tyro’s in such curious matters, and terrified
Wednesday
So we were up in the night again, silent among the night courses of the world. Gos was too sleepy, at half past one, to bate away when I went in. I took him out, after he had stepped obediently to the fist, into the bright moonlight where stratocumulus went fast across a full, pale moon in a north-westerly wind. King Charles’ wain was hiding behind a bank of clouds, but Cassiopeia faithfully presided over the north star, and one could faintly see a few pinpricks of the little bear as he hung by his tail. The ghosts of the lonely road to Silston, Adams and Tyrell, were abashed by the moonlight and did not trouble us. Brownie, my red setter, a blue-dark shade, sent Gos into a bate as she scampered through the quiet world in pursuit of rabbits. Evans, in the big house gone to seed, slept in a Welsh peace, dreaming perhaps of Owen Glendower. Chub Wheeler by the Black Pit slumbered deeply, guarded by slumbering dogs. The moon lay calm on the ruffled water. A nocturnal motor bicycle, probably a Silston poacher bent on some lawless errand miles away, just muttered in the silence as the breeze dropped. Standing in the thick grass, with slow heart beats soothed by the still night, I thoughtfully broke wind. The horns of elfland faintly blowing.