After a while he rubbed his eyes. A tiny throb began at his temples, but slowly eased when he massaged it. His watch marked the passage of time. An unwelcome image flashed in his mind of discovering the falcon dead beneath her perch, and he thought he would have lost something of himself if that happened, though he was unsure why he should feel that way. At eleven he took a torch and went outside to the woodstore. It was bitterly cold and pitch-black, with no moon to light the way. He opened the door a fraction with trepidation in his heart. The falcon stood on her perch, feathers ruffled so that she seemed even bigger than normal, one foot raised and clenched in her breast. She blinked at him sleepily over a bulging crop stuffed with rabbit, and when he shone the torchlight to her perch he saw a few scraps of fur and nothing more remaining of what he’d left her.
As he went back to the house the moon appeared through misty cloud and the snow reflected back its pale grey light. The clearing was empty, fresh snow that had fallen during the evening made a smooth unblemished world; untouched, unspoiled. He poured a drink and stood on the porch in the darkness, then raised his glass in a silent toast as the breeze rattled the undergrowth among the hemlocks and poplars in the woods.
***
In her kitchen, sitting alone at the table, Susan was relieved she could no longer hear the sound of gunshots. Silent tears coursed down her face.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 14
February gave way to March. Two weeks had passed since Michael first brought the falcon home. During that time he confined her to the woodstore while she recovered from the shock and stress of her injury. After that first evening when she began eating she gained weight quickly and Michael’s time was spent keeping her supplied with fresh food. When he wasn’t roaming the woods with a rifle he was often in the woodstore, sitting quietly by the door to get her used to his presence.
He contacted Frank Carter, the man Tom Waters told him about who kept hawks. Carter was about to go away on a business trip but told Michael he was welcome to come over when he got back and he would give Michael what help he could.
He asked for Michael’s address, and two days later a package arrived containing two books and a handwritten note. One of the books was a slim, tattered paperback called The Goshawk by T. H. White, and the other was a hardback written by Frank himself, which was effectively a manual explaining how to keep and train a hawk or falcon. Also in the package was a pair of leather thongs, a swivel and a two-foot long length of nylon cord with a thick knot tied at one end. Frank’s note explained that Michael would understand their purpose when he read his book.
He read The Goshawk over the course of an evening. It turned out to be a true story written by an English author who was a schoolteacher in the years before the Second World War. He gave up his profession and retreated to an English rural cottage, where he dedicated himself to training a goshawk sent to him from Scandinavia. The novel was first published in 1951, and it described an England that Michael was certain no longer existed. Though the novel concerned the relationship between man and bird, it was as much about a lost era, when rural life followed the rhythms of nature. Fields were flanked by hedgerows of rosehip and blackberry bordering narrow lanes where what little traffic passed was as often as not a bicycle.
The author read about and described the ancient sport of falconry, which was practiced more than three thousand years ago in Egypt where birds of prey were trained for hunting. As a sport it flourished through the ages and across the world, but declined in the twentieth century. A paper marker - Michael assumed Frank had inserted it between the pages for his benefit - had just a single large exclamation mark on it, and when he read the passage he understood why.
During the middle ages in England it was decreed that a person’s rank determined the kind of hawk or falcon he might keep. It was determined that a lowly knave might keep a kestrel, where a yeoman might keep a goshawk, and so the ranking continued until it was said only a king might own a peregrine falcon. At the very pinnacle however, the gyr falcon was reserved for an emperor. They were highly prized for being the largest and swiftest of all the falcons. He read an obscure fact; that the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea off the north-western coast of England was once leased from the crown, the annual rent being two gyr falcons.
In the story of The Goshawk, things ended badly. The author had never trained a hawk before and he failed to understand some of the crucial elements of the art, which ultimately resulted in his hawk flying off with leather thongs that were called jesses, and a leash still attached to her legs. The likely outcome, though the author never saw his hawk again, was that the leash would have become tangled in a tree somewhere, condemning the hawk to an unpleasant death. This knowledge plagued the author with remorse and guilt.
The leather thongs that Frank included in the package were jesses for the gyr falcon. In the second part of T. H. White’s novel, the author successfully trained another hawk, which he called Cully, and Michael decided to name the gyr after her. He wasn’t planning on becoming a falconer himself, because his motive in training Cully lay in his desire to release her back to the wild, but to accomplish that he needed to learn the skills of the sport. So Cully became fitted with jesses. They were about eight inches long and joined to a swivel at their remote ends. The knotted cord was a leash which passed through the other side of the swivel, the knot preventing it from simply falling right through.
Fitting the jesses was a nerve-wracking experience. Following the instructions in Frank’s manual, he approached Cully carefully, moving a little closer each day while she watched him with fierce suspicion. She would move to the far end of her perch, the brail that incapacitated her injured wing the only thing preventing her from flying to the top of the woodpile stacked at the extreme end of the store. He spoke softly to get her used to his voice, and made sure he didn’t make any sudden movements that would startle her. Eventually she tolerated him stroking her toes with a feather. It seemed a huge step backwards to abuse her trust when it was so patiently won, but there was no alternative, and after twelve days of getting her used to him he smoothly drew a piece of sheet he’d cut in preparation around her, effectively pinioning her good wing and dangerous feet. He’d practiced the maneuver repeatedly using a vase as a substitute falcon, and it all went off smoothly in the end. Once she was helpless he worked quickly to attach the jesses to her ankles.
To his surprise she didn’t hold it against him. He left her alone for an hour and when he came back she was no more wary of him than she had been before.
Several days later he followed the directions to the house where Frank lived. It was a neat two-storey frame place about an hour from Little River. A stream ran past the property, flowing down from the hills a mile away. Snow had fallen almost daily over the last week and strong winds had gusted from the east bringing freezing conditions. As Michael pulled up outside the house a man came out and raised a hand in greeting. He was wearing jeans and boots and a heavy check shirt beneath his parka. When they shook hands his grip felt callused and tough.
‘So this is your gyr?’ Frank said, peering through the windows of Michael’s car.
Cully stood on the perch he’d rigged up, tethered by her leash which gave her freedom to walk back and forth. During the journey she’d used her one good wing to balance herself awkwardly, and now that they’d stopped she looked much more at ease.
Frank asked how Michael managed getting the jesses around her legs and nodded approvingly when he said he followed the advice in Frank’s manual.
‘Just make sure whenever you take her out you get a tight hold on that leash. It’s best to wrap it around your fingers. She’s not going anywhere with her wing bound up like that, but as soon as you take the brail off you’re going to find she’s not quite so placid. If she gets away before you’ve got her trained you’ve lost her.’
‘That’s why you sent me The Goshawk, isn’t it?’ Michael said. ‘To make sure I got the point.’
‘Partly,’
Frank agreed. ‘But it’s also a pretty good book. She’s beautiful,’ he mused. ‘I’ve never seen a wild one before. I’ve seen one or two kept by falconers but they were captive bred birds.’
‘Fit for an emperor?’
Frank grinned. ‘Yeah, something like that I guess.’
‘Leave her here,’ he said. ‘I want to introduce you to Florence.’
Michael followed him around the house, thinking Frank was referring to his wife. Out back there was a wooden outbuilding with a long open front and a kind of awning running its length from the roof to about three feet from the ground. It was propped open with poles, but it was hinged at the top so the front could be completely closed if required. Inside, a long wooden beam ran the length of the building and standing on this, watching their approach, was some kind of hawk.
‘This is Florence,’ Frank said.
He went inside and re-emerged with the hawk on his fist which was now protected by a leather gauntlet. The hawk had bright orange eyes and a ridged brow that gave it a perpetual glare like a bad-tempered despot. Its overall appearance was totally different from Cully. It was perhaps slightly less than two feet in length and its plumage was a deep russet.
‘Florence here’s a harris hawk,’ Frank told him. He explained that unlike falcons, hawks have short broad wings and long tails. ‘She’s like T.H. White’s goshawk. These birds are designed for soaring and low-level hunting, maneuvering among trees. Falcons like your gyr generally hunt by stooping down from above and striking their prey in mid-air. That’s why they have long pointed wings and shorter tails. They’re designed for speed.’
He started to unthread the leash attached to Florence’s swivel and jesses. The jesses were different to the kind Michael had fitted to Cully. They had a knot at one end which passed through a brass eyelet that joined leather anklets on her legs, and once removed only the anklets remained, which were no more obtrusive or a hindrance than marker rings.
‘These jesses are what most people use these days,’ Frank explained. ‘If she decided to take off somewhere there’s nothing that’s going to snarl up and hang her from a tree or something, so long as you take the leash off anyway. Before you go we’ll swap the ones I sent you for your falcon for this type. I didn’t send these right away because you need a tool to fix the brass eyelets in place and the job’s easier done with two people.’
He took a small piece of raw meat from a bag he had in his pocket and offered it to Florence. She seized it eagerly and swallowed it, then Frank raised his fist and she opened her wings and launched herself into the air. She flew fifty yards across the ground, flying low, her wing tips brushing the snow, then swooped up into a tree.
She was an impressive sight up so close.
‘She’ll wait there for a minute until I call her down,’ Frank said. ‘Or until she gets bored and decides to go off and look for some food.’
He took another piece of meat and held it in his gloved fist, and as he raised it and called Florence’s name she came down out of the tree, her great wings flicking several times before she settled into a glide. Just at the right moment she fanned her tail and threw back her wings. Her feet reached forward to grab the fist and she landed with an audible smack against the leather and devoured the meat.
‘I wanted to show you this because this is one of the most important lessons you need to learn about training any bird of prey,’ Frank said. ‘You see Florence and I have a partnership going. The way it works is that she tolerates me so long as I feed her and show her plenty of respect, and that’s why she stays. If she wasn’t hungry I could have stood here all day calling her and she would’ve ignored me. So rule number one is you never fly a bird that isn’t hungry unless you want to lose her.’
Michael had absorbed this lesson from The Goshawk. T. H. White had lost his bird partly because when it escaped it wasn’t hungry. If it had been he would’ve been able to coax it back before he lost it entirely. It was one thing to read about it in a book however, something else to see a practical demonstration.
‘One thing I don’t understand though,’ Michael said. ‘She could catch her own food if she wanted to, right? So why doesn’t she just take off?’
‘She could,’ Frank agreed. ‘The thing is these birds are basically lazy, but they’re not stupid. She knows she has it good with me. So long as she stays here she doesn’t have to hunt every day, which for a hawk takes a lot of effort and uses up a lot of energy. She knows I’ll feed her and she’s got a dry warm place to live. She’ll hunt rabbits with me and she’ll let me take them off her after she’s had the best parts. But she only lets me do that because she knows that’s the deal. It’s her decision though. Every time I fly her there’s nothing stopping her from leaving if that’s what she wants to do.’
‘How long have you had her?’ Michael asked.
‘About four years. I’ve had falcons as well as hawks, but falcons are more trouble to keep. They have to be trained and flown differently. Florence here just comes to my fist, and when we’re hunting I either carry her until we see something she can catch, or else if there’re trees around I’ll let her follow me around from branch to branch until I scare something out. Falcons often take birds on the wing, flying high and fast, so you have to train them to fly to a lure instead of the fist. That’s how you’re going to get that wing strong again.’
Michael had read about these different training methods. He had to train Cully to repeatedly dive at a lure he swung through the air on a length of rope, simulating what would happen in the wild. It sounded like it would be difficult and he wasn’t sure he could do it.
‘Let me ask you something,’ he said. ‘I’ve never done this before. Can I train a wild gyr falcon?’
‘Sure. If you know how, it’s not hard. Like I said, they’re intelligent birds. All you need is patience and to respect them. They’re never going to be pets, like a dog, say. They’re a wild animal and always will be. You can’t force her to do what you want,’ Frank went on. ‘You have to teach her that food is the reward. She’ll die before she’ll submit to mistreatment. Your main problem is going to be the wing. How’s it healing?’
‘It’s hard to say. The vet said she has a fractured ulna.’
‘That can be bad. Sometimes they don’t heal properly, the bone gets infected. You can give them antibiotics but they don’t always work.’
‘How will I know that?’ Michael asked.
‘You’ll be able to tell when she’s flying free after a lure. That puts a lot of stress on the wing.’
‘What happens if the injury doesn’t heal?’
‘With a wing fracture, where the bone’s infected, there’s only one thing you can do and that’s amputate. If it was me though, I can’t see how that’s going to do her any favors. Better to just do the right thing.’
‘You mean put her down?’
Frank nodded. ‘It’s hard, but it’s right. That’s my belief anyway.’
He put Florence’s jesses back on and took her back to her perch. ‘Now let’s get your falcon fitted with some new jesses.’
Michael spent the rest of the afternoon with Frank, leaving as it was beginning to get dark. By then he had a much better understanding of what he’d let himself in for. Frank answered his questions and gave him some of the things he was going to need to train Cully, and showed him how to make others.
‘Good luck,’ Frank said when they parted. ‘Call me anytime.’
‘I will, thanks.’
As he drove home he thought about how it would feel to have Cully fly to his fist the way Frank’s hawk had. At first she’d be tethered to a line, but there would come a day when the line would be removed and she’d be flying free. If that worked out the next step would be to get her flying to a lure. He glanced at her in the mirror, trying to picture her skimming over the snow. It stirred feelings that were hard to define but it was partly to do with the sense he was embarking on something worthwhile. Ultimately it would return Cully to freedom but perh
aps it would also return something he had lost.
***
A couple of days later Michael bought a set of balancing scales which he found in a junk shop. When he got home he removed the measuring pan and replaced it with a perch made from a piece of wood. The scales would enable him to weigh Cully, and by doing this he would eventually be able to maintain her at an optimum level for her fitness. Over the following few days he began keeping a record, noting her weight every morning along with the amount of food she ate. He also began the first stage of her training, and by noting how hungry she was he soon established that within a few ounces of three and a half pounds she was attentive and quick to learn, but if he allowed her weight to increase beyond that threshold she was disinterested and slow to respond.
She learnt to eat while standing on his gloved fist, balancing square-footed and tearing at a rabbit leg held firmly beneath her talons. When he wasn’t feeding her he walked with her, getting her used to his fist. He spent long hours in the woods along the riverbank. To begin with she carried herself stiffly erect, arching herself away from him, shifting uncertainly on her feet, constantly throwing out her good wing for balance. He talked all the time to get her used to his voice. He soon ran out of anything meaningful to say so he’d recite lines of poetry or snatches of song lyrics. She heard the words to the Cowboy Junkies’ track, ‘Bea’s Song’, over and over. It was a sad tale of a woman reflecting on her life and the things she let go and its theme of regret touched a chord with him.
He learnt from his reading that in the wild she killed with her feet, primarily with her long back toes which were used like bayonets at impact, piercing her victim and often breaking the neck.
As she became used to him she relaxed her posture. She missed nothing and took an avid interest in everything. She would watch a beetle crawling across the bark of a tree trunk with the same keen intent that she observed squirrels dashing across the uppermost limbs of grey winter trees. In the forest, where the smell of pine resin sharpened the air and the snow lay unevenly in drifts, she watched small birds flitting in the half light.
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