No Way But Gentlenesse

by Richard Hines

  I heard the ‘kikiki . . . kikiki’ of the young kestrels as John examined them at the top of the ladder in the moonlight. In a loud whisper he told me the kestrels were still covered in down, too young to take. So we made a plan to come back in a week or so, and carried the ladder back through Bell Ground Wood, across the fields, and into the building site where we’d found it.

  The delay in getting my kestrel worked out well. I’d got a cardboard box ready to keep the young hawk in for the first night, but I hadn’t had time to prepare the ‘mews’. We weren’t taught French at secondary modern school but from my reading I’d discovered mew means ‘to moult’, which, although I couldn’t pronounce it, originates from the French muer – to change the feathers. In the past the mews was where you put your hawk to moult – there used to be a royal mews at Charing Cross until 1534, when the mews were converted into stables. Today a mews simply means the place in which you keep your hawk.

  Standing in the doorway of our shed I gazed around in dismay at the chests of drawers, bikes and tools, wondering how I could turn the shed into a mews. I was considering moving all the clutter to one part of the shed and then partitioning off the remaining space, when I had an idea. I could ask Barry if I could use the Second World War air raid shelter at the bottom of his garden. Barry agreed and cleared out the shelter. It looked like a corrugated-iron tunnel. It was about ten feet long, around seven feet high; the back of the shelter had an arch-shaped brick wall, while its front brick wall had a door set in it. I sawed a window into the door, over which I fixed vertical wooden slats. In the wild, falcons stand on flat rock ledges so on the inside of the door, just below the slatted window, I fixed a shelf perch so the young hawk could enjoy the morning sun. At the far end of the mews, I also fixed up a perch wide enough for the kestrel to stand on without having to grip it with its claws.

  Almost two years earlier, after I’d read about the equipment needed to train a hawk in A Manual of Falconry, I’d only examined the dog leads and leather bootlaces on the display in the cobbler’s shop. Today, I placed a dog lead and a bootlace on the counter. Then I explained to Tommy, the cobbler, how, after I’d cut the swivel from the dog lead, I’d use it to fasten the end of the kestrel’s jesses, and thread the bootlace through it so I could carry my hawk on the glove without it flying away. Maybe Tommy couldn’t make head or tail of what I was trying to explain because he simply smiled. Like most shopkeepers in the village he knew his customers. He knew me, he knew my parents. Maybe it was this sense of being part of a community, along with his amusement at my youthful enthusiasm, that led to what came next. For when I reached into my pocket and asked, ‘How much is that?’, he replied, ‘Nothing’, as he put the two dog leads and the leather bootlace into a bag and handed them to me over the counter.

  That evening I sat at the kitchen table with my mother’s sewing kit. I’d already made the hawk’s jesses; my mother didn’t want to part with her best leather gloves, but she’d searched out an old pair for me to cut up. I was now making the lure, in the form of a small leather pad. I wasn’t very handy with a needle but I’d managed to sew up three sides of the lure, and was pouring in sand to give it weight, when someone knocked on the door. When I opened it I was surprised to find John standing on the doorstep, days before he was expected.

  ‘Are we going tonight?’ I asked.

  ‘I went last night.’

  ‘Why didn’t tha call round for me?’

  ‘I did – there was nobody in,’ said John, reaching inside his jacket and handing me a young kestrel.

  My heart racing with excitement, I thanked John, then, with my thumbs across her back and my fingers gently pinning her wings by her side, I carried the young kestrel into the house. Her head and back were reddish-brown with dashes of black. Wanting to get a better look, I tilted her slightly and saw her large brown eyes. What struck me most was the colour of her ‘cere’ – the bare patch at the top of her curved beak – and the colour of her legs and toes. They were as yellow as buttercups.

  ‘It’s not unlike a throstle,’ mother said, her eyes taking in the kestrel’s speckled buff and black breast feathers.

  A few weeks ago in early June, the hay meadow had been a pinkish haze of long grasses among which wildflowers bloomed: purple vetch, pink clover, buttercups. This evening swallows flew low, hunting insects over the freshly cut hay which had been raked into piles to dry. John’s unexpected delivery of the hawk meant that I hadn’t any food ready for her. It was legal to shoot sparrows in the 1960s and so, carrying my air rifle, I stalked the hedgerows. I wanted to give my kestrel the type of natural food she’d have been fed by her parents.

  The dead body of the sparrow I’d shot was still warm, and its head lolled around when I knelt on the lawn outside the mews in Barry’s garden, and placed it on an old bread board. To lessen the chances of anything sharp puncturing my young hawk’s crop, I cut off the sparrow’s sharp beak, then its lower legs, so she wouldn’t swallow its claws. Using a hammer I then smashed the sparrow’s thigh bones. Picking up my knife again I spread out the sparrow’s wings on the bread board, pressed the knife blade down hard and severed each one from the shoulder joint. I didn’t want her swallowing any large wing feathers. Plucking the sparrow carefully, I left some soft feathers attached to its breast so the young kestrel could regurgitate a pellet containing the feathers, along with any small bones that she did swallow. Finally, I cut open the sparrow’s breast and stomach to encourage my young hawk to eat the innards.

  I now needed help, so I fetched Barry from the house and we entered the mews. The young kestrel gasped and struck out at my hands as I reached into the cardboard box. Covering her back with a large white handkerchief to prevent damage to her feathers, I pinned her wings by her sides and then passed her to Barry to hold. Reaching into my pocket I took out the pair of jesses which I’d cut out from my mother’s gloves. I’d practised fitting the jesses around a pencil, and although the young hawk tried to grab me with her talons, fitting the first jess and tightening the loop of soft leather snugly around her leg was easy. As I fitted the second jess around the other leg I told Barry I was going to call my kestrel Kessy. Holding her in front of his chest as I gently tightened the jess around her leg, Barry suggested I shorten the name to Kes. I agreed that the shortened version was better. So Kes it was, and with her newly fitted jesses dangling from her legs, Barry released Kes on to the perch at the back of the mews, then quietly left, leaving me to try and get her to feed.

  Careful not to make any sudden movements that would spook the young hawk, I slowly reached into the falconer’s bag hanging by my side, a canvas bag with a shoulder strap which I’d bought from the Army Stores. The warm, soggy thing I could feel in my bag was the sparrow I’d shot and cut up.

  Sleek, her feathers held flat to her body in fear, Kes watched my hand move slowly towards her and place the opened-up sparrow on the perch. Nervously looking at me she showed no interest in it, so reaching out slowly I picked up the sparrow, entrails upwards, and held it in front of her feet. Shooting out a foot she grabbed it and watched me back away before she began to tear at the deep red meat with her curved beak, gulping down the sparrow’s heart, and swallowing its gullet as if it was a string of spaghetti. The stomach was still attached and swung like a pendulum before disappearing down her throat.

  Today, almost half a century later, I can order frozen hawk food on the internet and have it delivered to my door next day. Back then, in the 1960s, my decision to bring a wild young falcon into my life plunged me into a world where I had to become a provider of meat. As a result I spent large parts of my days searching the hedgerows for sparrows or starlings to shoot.

  As the days went by, when the birds saw me wandering the hedgerows of the meadows and crop fields with my air rifle, they cottoned on to what I was up to, and often flew away before I could get close enough to take a shot. Early one sunny morning, when a warm wind rippled across the seas of golden wheat, I did manage to get close enough t
o line up some sparrows perched in the hedgerow in my sights. But in the breeze they swayed so much that when I fired I missed. Hoping for better luck I climbed over a gate into a meadow where the farmer was turning over a pile of hay with a pitchfork, checking if it was dry. I knew the farmer. He smiled as I approached but I could see the air rifle under my arm made him feel uncomfortable. When I told him about my kestrel, he seemed interested. Particularly when I told him that, while her feathers were still growing, I needed to feed her three times a day on sparrows or starlings, as any shortage of natural food could temporarily stop proper feather growth and leave ‘hunger traces’, which looked like razor cuts across the feathers and made the feathers liable to break. I also told him that, as feathers and beaks were both made of keratin, a lack of natural food could even cause cracks in the hawk’s beak. I continued to stalk the hedgerows but didn’t manage to shoot a bird before going to work.

  At lunchtime I tried and failed again and had to feed Kes beef. Before returning to work I made myself a coffee and was sitting on the doorstep sipping it when my Auntie Gladys, my dad’s sister, and her husband, Uncle Francis, appeared around the corner of the house, having driven all the way from Mirfield in West Yorkshire. I told them I was sorry but my mother wasn’t in. Uncle Francis, with his moustache, sports jacket and tie, spotted my air rifle which I’d leaned against the wall beside me, and asked if I’d been shooting tin cans. I told him I was hoping to shoot a sparrow or starling for my young kestrel to eat. Uncle Francis went ‘white around the gills’, as my mother used to say.

  ‘You shouldn’t shoot birds,’ he said.

  I’d expected him to be interested in my kestrel and, taken aback, I said: ‘I’m not doing it for fun.’ To keep my hawk healthy, I added, I needed to feed her the kind of wild prey her parents would have fed her in the wild.

  ‘You could feed it on other meats,’ he said.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Rabbit.’

  I’d seen rabbits running across stubble or ploughed fields suddenly brought down by a blast from a 12-bore shotgun, rolling over and over screaming piteously. To me, shooting rabbits would have been even more upsetting than shooting birds, but I suspected if I said this Uncle Francis would reply: ‘If you feel like that, why did you get a hawk?’ I would have struggled to answer, so I stuck to the facts, and explained that rabbit meat wasn’t nutritious enough to sustain a young kestrel. Uncle Francis wasn’t having it, even though it’s true. Auntie Gladys, standing there in her flowered dress and cardigan, and not wanting to take sides with her husband against her brother’s son, remained silent.

  Uncle Francis and Auntie Gladys were two gentle, kind-hearted people, and I liked them, but as they now obviously saw me as a loutish, irresponsible youth, I brought the conversation to an abrupt end. Without inviting them in or offering them a cup of tea, I said I had to get back to work, locked the door and hurried up the path, leaving them standing in our backyard.

  That evening found me stalking the hedgerows again with my air rifle. Already I feared that Kes would develop hunger traces across her feathers, or that her growth would be impaired. I desperately wanted her third meal of the day to be natural and nutritious, but it was getting dark and it increasingly looked as if I’d have no choice but to feed her up on the extra butcher’s meat that I’d bought from the butcher’s in Hoyland. Then, in a hawthorn hedge I saw a dark, sparrow-sized shape, fired and hit the poor thing. I always retrieved the birds I’d shot for hawk food tenderly, but once they were dead I wasn’t squeamish about cutting them up. With a sense of relief at having managed to secure her a vitamin-rich last meal of the day, I put the sparrow’s carcass on the perch beside her. Kes grasped it in the talons of one foot, lowered her head and began pecking out and swallowing chunks of dark red breast meat.

  Two weeks or so later, at around eleven o’clock at night, I could just make out the rectangular bales of straw in the field. Under my boots I could feel the stiff, sharp stalks of stubble as I walked through the recently harvested wheat field. Opening a gate at the edge of the field I entered my brother’s garden. Untrained hawks are calmer in the dark and tonight I’d come to check if Kes’s feathers had stopped growing.

  When I shone my torch through the slatted window of the mews’ door, I saw Kes standing on a perch towards the back of the mews. I’d already made a couple of night visits and both times when I’d unlocked the door I’d been struck by the thought that the last people to have entered this air raid shelter at night would very likely have been anxiously listening to the German bombers flying overhead during the Second World War. One of their targets was a tank-building factory on the northern outskirts of Sheffield, a couple of miles or so from the crumbling stone ledge at Tankersley Old Hall, where Kes had hatched. Closing the air raid shelter door behind me, I slowly approached her.

  I switched on my torch, throwing shadows around the corrugated-iron walls of the mews. In the half-light my young kestrel remained calm, and carefully fanning out her tail I shone my torch on the bases of the feathers. A few nights earlier the shafts of the feathers had been soft and blue, still ‘in the blood’, but tonight I saw what I so desperately wanted to see: the shafts of the feathers were hard. She was ready to train.

  I switched off the torch and could just make out the baking scales I’d commandeered from my mother, which were standing on the floor in a corner of the mews. I stood the scales on the shelf perch I’d fixed behind the door, then, pulling on my ‘gauntlet’ – a gardening glove – I walked back to Kes standing on her perch, the dark making her as docile as if she’d been drugged. I touched the back of her legs. I’m not sure why, maybe the pressure on the back of the legs makes a hawk feel slightly unbalanced, but just as my falconry book had suggested Kes stepped back on to my glove. Carefully taking hold of her jesses in my gloved fingers I carried her across the mews, gently pressed the back of her legs against the wooden perch I’d fixed on to the baking scales, and persuaded her to step backwards on to the scales. I shone the torch on the dial and saw the pointer had stopped just short of nine ounces. I knew from my reading that by reducing her meals from three to one a day I’d need to bring her down to a ‘flying weight’ of around eight ounces, and at this weight, in the words of seventeenth-century falconer Symon Latham, she would ‘flie with spirit, courage and attention to the man’.

  TEN

  MANNING, manned, making a hawk tame by accustoming her to man’s presence.

  – J. E. Harting, Bibliotheca Accipitraria, 1891

  Most falconers blow a whistle to call their hawk, but football matches were played in the recreation ground a few fields away from where I flew my kestrel, and on match days I feared she’d disappear over the hedges and fly around the referee each time he blasted his whistle, so the whistle was out for me. In The Goshawk T. H. White had written ‘his soul felt too poetical’ to use a whistle and that his goshawk was ‘too beautiful to be shrilled at with a . . . mechanical note’. Instead he called his hawk by pursing his lips and whistling Psalm 23, ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’. I can’t whistle so I simply used her name to call her.

  ‘Come on, Kes,’ I called, standing in the meadow holding a small piece of beef between my gloved fingers as I raised my arm.

  Perched on a fence post, her breast looking creamy white in the evening sun, the black stripes beneath her eyes strikingly prominent, my young kestrel bobbed her head a few times, then launched herself into the air and flew fast towards me. Trailing behind her was a length of fishing line, a ‘creance’, to which I’d attached her jesses to ensure she wasn’t lost while being trained. To my horror, after flying about twenty yards she suddenly halted. Wings pumping furiously, eyes fixed on the meat on my raised glove, she was stationary in mid-air a few feet above the ground. The creance attached to her jesses had caught on a rigid stalk of rough grass.

  ‘Come on, Kes. Come on, girl,’ I urged.

  My hope was that if she kept flying the creance would come loose from the grass. It didn’t
, and despite her desperate wingbeats she remained at a standstill as if she was flying head first into a gale-force wind. Finally, confused and disheartened, she sheered away and pitched into the meadow.

  A week or so earlier, excited and hardly able to believe I was going to do what I’d dreamed of for so long, I’d begun Kes’s training. Calling her name and holding a morsel of meat, a ‘bechin’, in my gloved fingers, I’d tempted her to hop from her perch in the mews on to my glove. Later, after attaching a creance to her jesses, I’d flown her to the glove across the lawn in Barry’s garden, increasing the distances until she flew ten yards to me the moment I raised my glove. Today she was fit and lean and at her flying weight of just above eight ounces. I’d brought her into the meadow to fly twenty-five yards, but now she was standing in the grass looking bewildered. Crouching, so as not to loom over her, I approached her slowly, offering meat on my glove, but instead of hopping on to the glove she flew off and fluttered around at the end of the creance, until I pulled the creance through my fingers and reeled her in.

  Feathers sleek, looking around wildly, she now ‘bated’ off the glove and hung upside down at the end of her jesses flapping her wings and screaming with rage, ‘kikiki . . . kikiki . . .’ Placing my hand on her buff and black breast feathers I gently lifted her back on to my glove. In A Manual of Falconry, M. H. Woodford had reprinted a glossary of falconry terms from Harting’s 1891 Bibliotheca Accipitraria. I knew it off by heart, and ‘MAR-HAWK, one who spoils a hawk by clumsy handling’ came to mind, neatly expressing my fears. I should have left Kes in the mews, come to the meadow beforehand, trailed the creance to check where it might catch and cut any long, tough bits of grass with shears. I should also have persisted longer in trying to get her to hop on to the glove, rather than reeling her in, upsetting her, causing her to hurtle off the glove in a crazy bate. I might have set her training back by days.