Blood Ties

by Crane, Ben;

  Eighteen to twenty hours after eating, all hawks produce a small pellet of undigestible matter (a casting) in the form of feather or fur. The casting is a clever evolutionary device that keeps the gullet clean by stripping excess fat from inside the stomach and throat. A casting will also benefit me in my approach to raising CC. Like the Pakistani falconers examining the mutes of their hawks before hunting, examining a cast pellet will help ascertain CC’s health. If he produces a tight and compact cast, he is healthy and digesting food correctly. If he produces a cast that is soft, mushy or discoloured, that smells or contains meat, it indicates possible illness. So into CC’s fabulous mixed-meat buffet I add small amounts of bone, chopped feather and a sprinkle of vitamin powder.

  If I hand-feed CC until he is a fully grown adult, then, potentially, he will become highly aggressive around food and constantly scream. In the wild, CC’s protective aggression and noise is the perfect mechanism to ensure that he will be fed by his parents over and above his siblings. At a later date, as he reaches adulthood, this aggression around food will also force a parent to cease feeding and push the youngster from the nest site. Such aggression is a deeply ingrained, primitive part of any goshawk’s psychology and it is almost impossible to eradicate completely. Nonetheless, a fully grown, hungry, protective two-pound goshawk in possession of steel-hard three-inch talons is a dangerous creature. Without the luxury of parental rejection, I will have to work through this aggression when it arrives. Until then, instead of hand-feeding and creating an unworkable food association, my only option is to place his food bowl next to him while he sleeps and to interact with him only after he has eaten.

  I watch as CC’s little white body lifts and drops as he breathes. He twitches and wiggles his head as if dreaming. Maybe because of the scent, maybe because of the noise I make, he wakes, scopes out the nest, notes the change in his surroundings and begins twittering with excitement. He gets uncertainly to his feet, wobbles and runs forward, falling face first into his bowl. Spreading little stumpy wings like a bat crawling up a cave wall, he twists about like an excited child, scrambles back up on to his feet and plunges his beak violently into the bowl. He has a voracious appetite and a ticking, beeping call emits deep from within his chest as he picks and jerks back chunks of meat with a passionate gulping. Some pieces of meat are too big and hang over the sides of his beak, so he flicks his head, drops it to the floor and tries again. His crop eventually fills to become the size of a small satsuma and his jerking, tense movements pass into a slow, sated, soft, delirious contentment. His tight, defined outline relaxes and he blurs to a rotund bubble of a hawk, shuffling about his nest. I reach in and pick him up and sit with him on my lap. I stroke him like a cat, and the dogs come over to investigate the meat-scented ball of fluff. Finding nothing of value, they head to CC’s vacated nest in search of left-overs. CC eventually ceases shuffling, fires a mute with accuracy down my leg and on to the floor then settles to sleep.

  To immerse CC totally in the world of humans, I carry him everywhere I go in a portable nest (a large basket ‘borrowed’ from a supermarket with leylandii branches in it). His wide, flat head with its blue eyes poke over the edge at the strange new worlds he encounters as we take to travelling. He comes with me to the bank to pay a council-tax bill, his charm quickly offset by the spurting white stripe he leaves across the carpet. In the local town park I lift him out of his nest and let him walk about in the grass. He makes for an unusual spectacle. We are quickly surrounded by an inquisitive group of adults and their children. Through CC, I find it easy to relate to the group, with their rapid-fire questions. I feel relaxed discussing his origins and future, the parameters of interaction safely set by the fluffy life form in front of us.

  On one or two warm late-summer evenings I walk through the fields with the dogs, CC tucked in a hawk papoose (a box tied with string around my neck) to a pub by the river. It is a popular location. The same reaction occurs: people pick him up, stroke and touch him. All ask questions. CC displays no form of distress, only a laid-back, placid acceptance of each situation. His mind is sucking up information, normalizing the human world, almost as if he were human himself. Quickly bored with the company, he waddles off under a wooden table and falls over. A group of bantam chickens see the shape of a hawk and scatter away down the bank to the river. Swifts and swallows come screaming in through the garden, check CC out and wheel up in a circling mass above our heads. A misguided lady leans down and attempts to feed him a chip; he grabs it from her hand and flicks it to the floor. I walk over and save him from eating his first (and only) vegetable and gently guide him away from further trouble.

  *

  A small goshawk chick will make an easy meal for a buzzard or sparrowhawk and cannot be left unattended on a lawn. At the cottage, as the days pass and as he grows, I place CC in a large square pen outside the front door. I watch him inside his pen while I paint, allowing him safe access to sunshine and fresh air. He readily hops out of his nest and stumbles across the AstroTurf exploring the extra space. As he develops strength, he begins branching out further from his nest, leans forward, stretches his wings and trips over his feet. As the days pass, each time he falls, he rebalances and stands up more and more confidently building up to the next key phase of his existence. After a week of continued collapsing, stumbles and learning, I observe a profoundly different type of movement.

  The one aspect of a hawk that fascinates me over and above all their other physical characteristics is their feathers. More so than hair, nails, scales and fur, a feather is the single most complex organism growing from the skin of any creature. Feathers have evolved not just for flight but to help in a multitude of other behaviours. They are plumes for camouflage, defence and sex. Feathers are to keep a bird cool or warm, confound or confuse a predator, make or muffle noise, improve hearing, line nests, carry water and ease digestion. Looked at under a magnifying glass, CC’s half-grown feathers are no less impressive. Designed for predation, they are intricate, indescribably complex and astoundingly beautiful. They grow in tight, straight lines, have whorls, tubes, barbs, flat, parallel strands, hooklets and asymmetrical veins. It is with these astonishingly evolved feathers that I watch CC, within his pen, rise above gravity for the first time. He jumps and lifts off the ground, half hovers then descends back to earth. His first flight may have been brief but it is met with elation by both of us. I smile and CC takes it upon himself to run and flap the full length of his pen, as if he has just scored in the World Cup.

  With all this growth, energy, exercise and a total lack of fear, CC becomes highly mobile and his explorations expand more and more. I have to run some errands in town, so I tuck him up in his nest, leaving him on his chair next to Flash and Etta. When I arrive home, the dogs are still asleep in the same position but CC is nowhere to be seen. I can hear him twittering, and Etta lifts her head and sighs. I look over her shoulder and find him nestled behind both dogs on the sofa. Finding the fur of the dogs more comfortable and certainly a lot warmer than leylandii, he has decided to relocate himself.

  I pick him up and put him back in his nest. He throws a violent tantrum, screams and wriggles in protest. Twenty seconds later, he launches up out over the top of his nest, makes a strategic bounce on the arm of the chair, a flying flap, then a soft thud back behind the dogs. It is one of the funniest things I have ever seen a hawk do.

  Scared he may be accidentally crushed, I force a compromise and give him his own cushion on the arm of the sofa, near but not on the dogs. At first, he takes to it with alacrity and remains in position. He then starts to push the boundaries, branching back out into the cottage. There is no compromise or warning, and he suddenly lifts up a few feet before dancing up and down on his cushion. Flapping harder, he rises higher and higher, then lands hard before running the full length of the sofa, hopping across and clawing the backs of the dogs then boomeranging back and footing his cushion as if it were a kill. The dogs huff and puff and move upstairs for respite.
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  When he has finished exercising, not wanting to sit, CC takes to climbing and flapping up a chair near the back window of the cottage. He spends a lot of his day contentedly looking through the glass, studying the wheat moving in the wind. He twists and turns his head almost upside down, a specific developmental movement of young hawks that builds the muscles of his iris, calibrating his pin-point eyesight by using the tops of the crops as a target.

  Whenever I sit down he immediately hops on to my lap and begins to nibble and play with the cloth of my shirt. He takes to using his extraordinarily long talons to climb and crawl his way up on to my shoulder. This is the best position to begin chewing my hair and pulling at it, as if I am the corpse of a bird.

  At night I take him upstairs and place him next to my bed. As the dawn arrives I hear him rustling about in his nest as the new day forces him into action and he becomes restless. On more than one occasion he wakes me by landing on the pillow and shuffling up next to my face. A burning sensation cuts across my lip or cheek as he rudely wakes me with a very sharp nip on the face.

  It is misguided to interpret this running, jumping, flapping, flicking, fighting and footing as simply the playful exuberance of a young hawk. His behaviour is quirky and charming and would be easy to anthropomorphize. None of it is for fun. All his actions are part of a deadly serious, evolved preparation of mind and muscle, for the battles he will face in adulthood.

  *

  I am alone in the garden, watching my son play. His capacity for imaginative performance is extensive. In each hand he has two spindly ‘T’-shaped pieces of plastic. He has constructed them using pieces from a Lego-like toy called K’nex. They are minimal; if I try hard, I can just see a human-like form, two arms and a central body. He balances along the brick edging of the driveway, flying each figure through the sky. He makes huge whooshing noises and I can hear small snippets of conversation. ‘Nooooo… that’s right… fight them.’ A battle, perhaps. There are more explosions as he heads up the garden and disappears around the corner. A few minutes later he returns, tiptoeing along the bricks and making odd bleeps, bangs, machine-gun noises and a wide range of other sound effects. He is so interesting I find it difficult to ignore him when he is in full flow. He spots me watching and becomes annoyed, self-conscious. Tells me angrily to stop looking at him and moves off again, away from prying eyes, back up the garden, blasting imaginary enemies out of the sky.

  When I was still in primary school I was left alone for large portions of the day throughout the long summer holidays. I loved it. This was when I was allowed the freedom to explore the countryside, but I also, for some odd reason, found cookery books fascinating. I have a memory of a thick book with a smiling woman on the front cover. I would pick a recipe and follow Delia Smith’s suggestions, baking and cooking different foods throughout the day. I also had a predilection for making my own imaginative creative operas and performances. I would endlessly play records from my parents’ vinyl collection, performing various scenes to the songs by running between different chairs wrapped in towels of different colours. I would draw and paint, read comic books and create weird and wonderful fantasy worlds reminiscent of the films of Ray Harryhausen.

  When my son was about three, I remember taking him to a junior playgroup. There were four of us: his nanny, my father, my son and me. The pressure to perform was immense. Midway through, the supervisor started telling me how to interact with my son to maximize his ‘developmental and social skills’. The nanny was sitting next to me and my father was poking a camera into our space, taking pictures. I reached in at the same time as the nanny. It was embarrassing. ‘You take him’; ‘No, you take him’; ‘No, you take him’… Click, click, click with the fucking camera. I hated the intrusion, was deeply self-conscious. I would have been happy just playing with him alone.

  My son comes back round the corner and I ask him if he remembers the playgroup.

  ‘No.’

  I watch him wander off, destroying some invisible planet on the other side of an imaginary universe as he goes. A universe that only my son knows exists.

  *

  As CC’s size increases, so does his appetite, almost tripling overnight. I find myself refilling his bowl three or four times a day. This is highly unusual and leaves me confused. After preparing yet another meal, I place the bowl in his nest and watch what happens through a crack in the kitchen door. CC ignores the bowl and Flash makes his move. Inching across the sofa, he begins nosing through the nest and eats all CC’s diced meat. CC stands no more than half an inch from his face, twists his head upside down and watches Flash intently. Thankfully, CC is not hungry on this occasion. If Flash attempts to do this when CC is on a kill out in the field, the situation will be very different.

  The cottage slowly becomes a mess of hawk mutes, fledgling fluff and feather dust. CC is slowly dominating the space we live in. I keep losing him and finding him in different places around the cottage: in the kitchen, tearing at a tea towel; upstairs in an open wardrobe; or chewing twigs, covered in soot, behind the log burner. When I take him outside so that I can clean, he screams repeatedly to be let back in. I have ten minutes to sweep and mop before he fires up out of his pen and re-enters the cottage, strutting and flapping, his ticking talons clicking across the wooden floor.

  This level of mobility means it is time to attach his equipment. Cutting two anklets and two jesses, I stand CC on the table with the bits of leather next to him. As I turn around to find the swivel, he leans over and down, picks up a piece of leather and swallows the whole jess. When I look back, all I can see is the knot hanging out of the side of his beak. I grab it and pull it out of his throat like a sword swallower removing a blade. He reacts to the removal of his ‘food’ with intense annoyance and begins screaming at me, flaps to the floor and rolls around in protest. I eventually attach all his equipment and take him out to a secure newly built caged pen in the garden. Inside is a curved bow perch. I tie his leash to the ring and he clambers up on to the rubberized surface and stands happily. Just in case his legs tire or he wants a nap, I place his nest next to the perch and leave him to it. Unable to see or hear me, he settles into this new routine without serious protest.

  With the summer season in full flow, I am asked to cut the lawns for a country estate. Driving to the estate takes ten minutes and on the journey CC perches happily on the back of the passenger seat, staring out of the window. When cutting the long driveway or the cricket pitch, I place his perch in the middle of the lawns and zoom around him with the mower. When not motionless and transfixed by the movement, he lies with his wings and tail fully spread out, sunbathing next to his perch as I whizz past. After a couple of hours we head home, passing crows, the odd pheasant, small birds and rabbits. His gaze locks on to them instantly, feathers tightening on instinct. He is close to adulthood. He needs no lessons on what to kill, his meaning and purpose is in the movement of fur and feather already out there in the fields.

  *

  On the hottest day since records began, my ankles are sweating even when I’m barefoot. CC is in shade, his beak slightly open, wings sprawled out, legs akimbo in the heat. He is clearly hot. I pick him up and walk to where Boy had his first wild bath. I step off the path, through the nettles and down to the little stream that arches and curves through the wood. Jumping down on to the gravel, I tie CC’s leash to my foot and open my glove. Looking at the silver bubbles, dappled shadows and leaves turning in the current, he comically clicks his beak together; if he had lips, he would be smacking them. He bobs his head, drops on to the gravel, flaps his wings and dips his bottom and tail on to the sand and stones a long way from the water. In his innocent eagerness, he is not experienced enough at bathing to realize he has to walk into the water. I put a hand on his shoulder and shove him into the current. He pauses, thinks about whether he likes it or not, decides he does and resumes his remarkable behaviour, spending the next few minutes rolling and splashing about like a toddler in a lido.

 
; *

  I am soaked in water and my son is in hysterics in a deep bath of water. I am sitting on the toilet, pretending to be a jazz musician, doing a speech to an imaginary crowd. I begin tapping out a little rhythm with some toys: a plastic tube and a small metal bus. Then I point to him, indicating that it’s his turn to make his stunning Charlie Parker-style solo. Instead, he makes the worst noise possible and rolls about laughing, splashing water all over the floor. It is a ridiculous game, but he loves it and I love it. It has become a routine, something we have developed together.

  Before I took my son home from the hospital we had to be shown how to wash him. This confused me. Coupled with my desire to leave the ward, instead of interpreting it as help I felt that it was being implied that I was in some way incapable, as if to wash a child would not be instinctual, that I would accidentally drown him or just not bother. I wondered if the demonstration was designed specifically for us, for me. I felt infantilized and the words and instructions fell with a sense of condescension. There was a tacit inference, I felt, that ‘He’s a man, he is bound to get it wrong.’ The situation was made even more confusing because I knew the nurse giving the demonstration. I had taught her children. She had five children of varying ages. They were a dedicated, loving family – good people. Yet, without exception, all came to school unwashed and with unclean, stained clothes. The memory of this remains vivid. For some reason, the difference between her private life and her public service position seemed significant at the time.