No Way But Gentlenesse

by Richard Hines

  Now, with Kes standing on my glove, I unfastened the fishing line creance from her jesses, threaded the leather bootlace leash through the swivel and wrapped it around my glove. Suspecting my inept handling might have put her in too bad a mood to risk flying her again that evening, I decided to feed her up and take her back to the mews. But as I looked at her now, calmly standing on my glove, I wondered if my fears had arisen from remembering the raging mood swings of Gos, the crazy yellow-eyed hawk in T. H. White’s The Goshawk. Reminding myself I was training a falcon, which, according to what I’d read, was less temperamental than a goshawk, and noting her sudden calm, I changed my mind and decided to fly her free.

  I walked across the meadow, and when I’d reached the fence she’d flown from with the creance trailing behind her, I removed her leash and swivel, then tilted my glove and encouraged her to hop on to the fence. Standing there, her jesses hanging loose, her large brown eyes looking around the meadows and stubble fields, she was free. If she wished she could be off, her shallow wingbeats taking her over the hawthorn hedges and out of sight in seconds, never to be seen again by me. Heart racing, glancing over my shoulder, I walked away from her across the meadow. After twenty-five yards or so I turned and raised my glove.

  ‘Kes . . . Come on, Kes.’

  Without hesitation she launched herself off the fence. Eyes fixed on me, she flew a few feet above the recently cut meadow then curved upwards to land on my raised glove. Relieved, I let her tear off a couple of pieces of meat and swallow them. Then I carefully unpicked her talons from the piece of beef, pulled it through my gloved fingers, and concealing it in my hand put it in my falconer’s bag. I headed back across the meadow and let her hop from my glove to stand on the fence, her jesses hanging free. Again I called her: ‘Kes . . . Come on, Kes.’

  Again she flew three or four feet above the grass then swooped upwards on to my raised glove to take her reward of beef.

  The correct term for feeding a hawk is to ‘Feede hir up’, as George Turbervile explained in The Booke of Faulconrie or Hauking, published in 1575. ‘Feeding up’ my young kestrel on my glove, I walked across the meadow towards a group of bullocks standing at the other side of a five-bar gate. She stopped eating. I stood still watching her closely. Any hint that she was about to sleek her feathers to her body, which was a sign of fear, and I’d slowly move back, hoping to prevent a bate from the glove. There was no need, for after a momentary look at the young bulls peering over the gate she lowered her head and began tearing at the meat. Once again I slowly walked closer to the curious bullocks.

  This was ‘manning’, making her tame by accustoming her to humans and their activities. At the start of her training, when I’d begun her manning, any sudden movement, such as the instinctive brushing away of an insect from my face, spooked her. Later when I walked the country lanes with her on the glove, the sight of a miner cycling to work or a car’s sudden appearance around a bend would send her bating off the glove. Even a couple of evenings ago a bellowing cow running around in an adjacent field had sent her flying off the glove to hang upside down at the end of her jesses. But her daily manning was paying off. She was getting much tamer, and this glorious summer evening as she tore at the meat on my glove, she paid no attention to the young bulls looking over the gate. She didn’t even bate when I attempted to stroke one, causing it to hurriedly back off and then stretch its head forward to wrap its rasping tongue around my outstretched hand.

  Pleased her manning was coming on well, delighted she’d successfully flown free to the glove, I took a recently shot sparrow out of my falconer’s bag, held it between my gloved fingers, and let her pluck and cast away the sparrow’s breast feathers. As we headed back across the fields to the mews, she began tearing into the deep red breast meat.

  Each morning before work, or at weekends, I called at the mews to check on Kes. This morning, the gate into the garden from the field had been left open and a lovely black and white calf stood on the lawn. Skirting around the calf, trying not to spook it, I took a small lump of soil from a flower bed and threw it up at the bedroom window. Barry pulled back the curtain. For a moment he looked as if he thought I was the bearer of bad news, but when I pointed to the calf he smiled. Arms out by my side I steered the calf through the gate and back into the field, then unlocked the mews.

  Now she was being trained she needed to be secured to a perch with her leash, which allowed me to pick her up calmly, rather than be forced to chase her around in a flutter of wings if she decided to try and evade me. Unlike sparrowhawks and goshawks, which grip tree branches when perching, falcons have adapted to stand on flat surfaces such as rock ledges, and I’d made Kes a ‘screen perch’ – a flat four-inch-wide beam of wood with sacking hanging below. The sacking had a slit in it, through which I pushed her leash and fastened it to the perch. If she did bate off the perch, which she did very rarely, she was able to scramble back up the sacking. I loved opening the mews door in the mornings and seeing her standing contentedly on one leg on her screen perch, the other leg tucked into her buff and black breast feathers.

  Falcons also need an outdoor ‘block perch’, which is a piece of wood in the shape of an upside-down cone with a flat top, with a metal spike sticking out of the bottom to push into the ground. Trained falcons have perched on block perches for centuries. I didn’t know anyone who could make such a perch but I knew a lad who was doing metalwork with my old teacher, Wee Georgie, and I asked him to make me a metal one with a horizontal crosspiece for my kestrel to perch on, and a two-foot spike to stick into the lawn and tie her leash to. I have a photograph of Kes standing on that perch. For padding I have wrapped my dad’s blue-checked pit scarf around the crosspiece and wound string around it to hold it in place. On fine days I put Kes on this perch on the lawn to ‘weather’, to make sure she got plenty of natural light so that when she preened her feathers she’d ingest the vitamin D and keep her bones healthy. I don’t remember if I worried about my young kestrel standing on her metal perch, her claws grasping my dad’s pit scarf instead of being flat on a block perch as they should have been, but I remember I feared her leash would come loose.

  In The Goshawk, T. H. White describes how his hawk finally escaped from its outdoor perch into the surrounding woods, where, jesses entangled in a tree, his beloved Gos almost certainly ended up dead. Determined such a calamity wouldn’t befall Kes, I practised my knot-tying many times. Opening Woodford’s A Manual of Falconry I would place it on a dining chair and kneel down beside it. Then, with my left hand holding the end of the leash that would be attached to Kes’s jesses, I would glance at the illustration of the ‘falconer’s knot’ and, using only my right hand, practise tying the hawk’s leash to the chair leg. I practised so often that when I did kneel on the lawn with Kes on the glove of my left hand, tying her leash was easier than I’d anticipated. In the end I stopped worrying that it would come untied.

  My new fear was that she’d be attacked by a cat, or a dog leaping over the garden wall, or a fox sneaking in from the fields. So whenever I put her out to weather I stayed with her, sitting on the wall or the grass, only leaving her unattended while I made coffee in my brother’s kitchen and watched through the window for danger.

  One day a crow hopped across the lawn towards Kes as if intent on attacking her. I wasn’t too worried, thinking I’d be out of the kitchen before any damage could be done by the crow’s powerful beak. Then, to my surprise and horror, the crow, almost as if it was trying to liberate her, began pecking and pulling at the loop of the knot on Kes’s leash. Imagining her disappearing over hawthorn hedges, doomed to die hanging upside down, her leash and jesses entangled in a tree or electricity pylon, I rushed out of the house and down the garden path clapping my hands. But not only did this scare off the crow, it also sent Kes bating off her perch, to stand on the lawn at the end of her – still luckily attached – leash. That brought home to me just how easily a hawk can be lost.

  ELEVEN

  The wo
rd ‘stoop’ . . . and ‘swoop’ (Macbeth, ‘at one fell swoop’), signifies a rapid descent . . .

  – J. E. Harting, The Ornithology of Shakespeare, 1864

  Earlier in the summer, before I got Kes, I’d been on holiday to Colwyn Bay in Wales with the sole purpose of visiting the Welsh Mountain Zoo, the only place in Britain where I could see a falconry display. I’d never seen a falcon stooped to the lure and I desperately wanted to see how an experienced falconer did it. Excitement had surged through my body when I first spotted the falconer’s hat, with feathers in its headband, bobbing through the crowd. Yet when the falconer entered the large grass display area with a tawny eagle on his glove I was bitterly disappointed. I wouldn’t have gone there had I known all I would see was an eagle flying to the glove. Eagles of all species are magnificent birds, but I’d come all this way hoping to discover how falcons were flown to the lure. I already knew how to fly a bird of prey to the glove. This trip wasn’t all bad, though, for Towser, home from drama college, had come to Wales with me. It hadn’t worked out between him and Lynn, and while we were there we met two girls from Wrexham – Gwen and Pat – and had a great time, strolling through the amusement arcades and along the seafront with our new girlfriends, listening to Sonny and Cher’s ‘I Got You Babe’ repeatedly playing on one of the girls’ transistor radio.

  One night, after an evening out on our own, my girlfriend Pat and I returned to find her guest house locked. We decided she would stay with me, but then discovered that my own guest house had been locked up for the night. Gazing up at the bedroom windows and satisfied I’d located my room, I climbed a drainpipe and clambered on to the slates of the sloping roof of a large bay window. The bedroom window was open just wide enough for me to get my fingers into the gap. I slid the sash window upwards a foot or so, where it stuck. I managed to pull my head, shoulders and chest through into the dark bedroom when, to my amazement, a light was switched on, and there before me, sitting bolt upright in their separate beds, were two women in nighties. Seeing me, they started screaming. One was an old woman, the other her middle-aged daughter. The old woman continued to scream, but recognising me from the breakfast room, her daughter stopped screaming and shouted: ‘GET OUT’.

  With my head, shoulders, chest and arms inside the bedroom I couldn’t grip the windowsill with my hands and pull myself backwards.

  ‘It’s all right, Mother, it’s all right,’ said the daughter, before once again turning to me to shout: ‘GET OUT.’

  ‘I’m stuck.’

  ‘GET OUT.’

  By the time I managed to wriggle free I was in such a panic that I lost my footing and slid down the bay window’s sloping roof, dislodging slates. As I slid over the edge, trying to halt my fall, I grabbed the gutter but my weight pulled it loose and it crashed down beside me as I hit the ground. Lights were now flicking on in the bedrooms of the guest house. As I scrambled to my feet I saw Pat running full tilt down the road.

  Towser’s had been a holiday romance but I kept in touch with Pat, and, as neither of us had a telephone at home, we wrote to each other a couple of times a week. In her letters she joked about her shock on hearing the women screaming in the bedroom, then seeing me sliding down the bay window roof before crashing to earth alongside falling slates and the bay window gutter. She also delighted in reminding me that next day, when I’d tried to apologise, the daughter of the old woman had said to me: ‘I hope you realise you nearly killed my mother last night.’ And she loved to tease me about the guest house landlady’s response to my apology: ‘I’ve never housed a savage before.’ Yet she lived in Wales, and now that Towser was away at drama college for most of the year I needed to try and find other friends.

  One evening after I’d fed Kes up, I went with three youths from our village for a drink in the Rockingham Arms, a country pub in the nearby village of Wentworth. They began to talk about local lads they knew who had a reputation for fighting. Finding the subject boring and wanting to move it on, I said that when playing rugby at grammar school I’d been battered plenty of times, and on one occasion I had been knocked unconscious. I then told them that when I’d been in the second year at secondary modern school, an older, much bigger boy, had grabbed me by the lapels and repeatedly banged my head against a wall, and how, in a temper, I’d swung my arm and landed a lucky blow, which to my surprise had sent him running across the playground holding his nose. I added that that was the closest I’d ever been to having a proper fight, and that fighting in fact scared me. One of the youths latched on to this comment and goaded me throughout the evening, mocking my cowardice. Unlike the rest of us, this lad was middle-class, with a father who ran a business. For some reason, he seemed to think he’d been offered an opportunity to win respect by acting tough and he began repeatedly asking me to step outside for a fight. Eventually I got fed up, and to his surprise, agreed.

  It was still light, a lovely summer’s evening, as we stood on the bowling green facing each other in the shade of a copper beech tree. The lad looked bewildered, as if it had just dawned on him he’d no grudge against me, no reason to try and do me harm, and not fired up by anger he looked scared. I could see his plan the moment he thought about it. He swung his right arm, I raised my left arm and blocked it, then grabbed his shirt, put my foot behind him, and pushed him over backwards. After a bit of wrestling, I sat on his chest, and, holding both his wrists with my left hand, I pinned his arms to the ground, then threw a few pretend blows with my right fist, stopping them inches from his face, while telling him if I wanted to I could smash his face in. When I offered the lad my hand and pulled him to his feet, to my surprise he began to cry. In the end I put my arm around his shoulder and walked with him across the bowling green and back into the pub.

  Next day I popped out of the council housing department office and into the butcher’s shop across the road from the Town Hall to buy two ounces of lean beef for Kes. The butcher usually asked about my hawk, and I was going to tell him about the next stage in her training, ‘introducing’ her to the lure, when he turned from the chopping bench behind the counter and said: ‘I’m disappointed in you.’

  I looked at him, confused.

  ‘I saw you,’ he continued, ‘on the bowling green outside the Rockingham Arms – fighting.’

  The butcher had told me previously he enjoyed going to Wentworth for a quiet civilised drink. He must have spotted me sitting on the youth’s chest on the bowling green and thought that my pretend blows were real, because as he wrapped the lean beef for Kes in greaseproof paper he shook his head, and when he handed it across the counter and took my money he said: ‘Fighting – I thought you were better than that.’

  Embarrassed, I headed out of the butcher’s shop, past a queue of women who now looked at me disapprovingly.

  That evening I placed the sand-filled leather pad that was my lure on the shelf perch behind the mews’ door. When I’d made the lure I’d threaded pieces of string through it. Using these strings I tied on a pair of sparrow’s wings, which I’d saved from Kes’s last meal, and then ‘garnished’ the lure by tying on scraps of raw beef. Kes was on her outdoor perch on the lawn. When I threw the lure on to the grass in front of her, curious, she tilted her head to one side and looked at it. When I jiggled the line to move the lure around on the grass she flew off her perch and was on it in an instant, gripping it in her talons, devouring the scraps of beef. She’d been ‘introduced’ to the lure. That was easy. What flummoxed me was how to go about getting her to ‘stoop’ to the lure. A stoop is a headlong dive, but I couldn’t imagine how I would get Kes to do that.

  In A Manual of Falconry, M. H. Woodford seemed to skip over the details of how training a falcon to stoop was done. Instead, after emphasising it required great skill, he suggested the best way to learn was to watch an experienced falconer. I’d never met anyone who had trained a hawk, nor heard of any falconers who lived nearby, so all I could do was to try and puzzle out the technique from the unclear, poorly written instruc
tions Woodford did give: ‘. . . the lure is swung.’ Do I twirl it above my head like a lasso? I wondered. ‘. . . the falconer swings it to and fro.’ Do I keep my arm by my side, slowly swinging the lure backwards and forwards?

  Having never seen a hawk fly to a lure, these were the kinds of questions I asked myself. After much rereading I found a phrase which gave a glimmer of what was involved – ‘twitched it away from her at the last moment’. With that in mind, I took the lure I’d made into the backyard, to practise my lure swinging.

  The lure line is a long piece of string which is attached to the lure by a swivel, and is wrapped around a short ‘lure stick’ when the lure isn’t being used. Holding the lure stick in my left hand, I uncoiled a length of lure line. Holding the lure line in my right hand and not twirling it too fast, I swung the lure by my side as if marking out circles in the air. Then, aiming the lure at a small gap at the top of the coalplace door, I let the line slip through my fingers and lengthen, allowing the weight and momentum of the lure to send it speeding towards its target. At the last moment, pulling hard on the lure line, I twitched the lure away from the gap at the top of the door, as if keeping it out of reach of Kes’s grasping talons.

  I practised a lot. On my way across the fields to the mews I’d often stop beside a hedge, for instance, and aim the lure at a twig, or a leaf, or a berry. Just before it hit the target I’d twitch it away. At home I’d aim the lure at a vase on the sideboard, or at the clock on the mantelpiece, and not twitch it away until it was a fraction of an inch from sending them crashing to the floor.