To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so you come to understand its moods. Then you gain the ability to predict what it will do next. This is the sixth sense of the practised animal trainer. Eventually you don’t see the hawk’s body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels. Notice what it notices. The hawk’s apprehension becomes your own. You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to ‘tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment’.1 Such a feat of imaginative recreation has always come easily to me. Too easily. It’s part of being a watcher, forgetting who you are and putting yourself in the thing you are watching. That is why the girl who was me when I was small loved watching birds. She made herself disappear, and then in the birds she watched, took flight. It was happening now. I had put myself in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her, and as the days passed in the darkened room my humanity was burning away.
Three tentative raps on the front door. ‘Hang on,’ I call. A small voice inside me, resentful and savage, hisses, Go away. It is Christina with two takeaway coffees and the Sunday papers. ‘So,’ she says, settling herself in a chair by the fireplace. ‘How’s it going? Is the hawk OK?’ I nod. I raise my eyebrows. I am vaguely aware this isn’t enough to make a conversation. ‘Mmm,’ I say. The voice is not entirely mine. She hugs her knees and looks at me curiously. I must try harder, I think. So I talk about the hawk for a while, and then I can’t speak any more. I stare at my paper cup.
I’m pleased to see her. She shouldn’t be here. This coffee is good. We should be alone. These resentful thoughts surprise me. Manning the hawk is all about showing it new things. Christina is a new thing. ‘I’m going to try something,’ I tell her. ‘Ignore the hawk. Just keep reading the papers.’ I fetch a fresh piece of beef from the kitchen, sit with the hawk on the sofa, reach up and remove her hood. There’s a moment of fast-beating incomprehension and the air in the room turns to ice. Tight-feathered, in savage irresolution, eyes like porcelain saucers, the hawk stares. My heart sinks. She is going to bate. But the moment stretches, and she does not. After a deal of cautious observation she decides that a human turning newspaper pages is something entirely fascinating.
An hour later all is calm and companionable. We’re watching television. The hawk balances evenly on the balls of her feet, mesmerised by the flickering screen. Tiny white wisps of down still attached to the finials of her scapular feathers wave in the draught from the hall. Then, without warning, she bursts from my fist in a whirlwind of a bate. Papers fly. Christina flinches. Shit, I think. I should hood her, let her rest. This is too much. But I am wrong. Fear did not engender this bate. Frustration did. She picks at her jesses in displaced fury, then tears at the meat beneath her toes. She is hungry. The food is a wonderful discovery. She is a delicate, decisive gastronome. She picks, and bites, and swallows, and squeaks in happiness, and bites and swallows again. I am thrilled. But also indignant. This moment was to have been born of solitude and meditative darkness. Not this. Not daylight with another person in the room and ’Allo ’Allo! on the television. Not in the presence of comedy Nazis and a soundtrack about giant sausages and the occupation of France. She narrows her eyes with pleasure, bristles around the nose, and her feathers soften into loose falls of ochre and cream. ‘Has she done that before?’ asks Christina. ‘No,’ I say. ‘This is the first time.’ Laughter from the television audience as an SS officer dressed as a woman hoves into view and the hawk finishes eating, lifts herself into a vast, frothy mop of feathers, holds them there for an instant and shakes them all back into place. A rouse. It is a sign of contentment. She has not roused before.