‘Yes. You’re a woman, and she’s female. Of course you get on,’ he says.
He seems deadly serious. I stare at his curled hand on the doorframe and heat rises in my face. This is mockery. For the first time in weeks, the hawk disappears from my mind as some part of me bunches up into one firm and unspoken sentence: What an asshole.
He’s saying because I’m training a female hawk, there’s some bond of sisterhood between us? What the hell? We’re different species, for God’s sake. ‘I don’t think that’s a factor in my hawk’s behaviour,’ I say, and smile. It’s a thin smile. The smile of the placator. It is a smile that is a veneer on murder. I rage my way home, heart bating wildly. Back in the house, hawk on her perch, I collect myself. My anger has gone: now I am fascinated. I pull all the falconry books off the shelves and pile them up on the floor. Then I sit cross-legged next to the hawk. ‘Right, Mabel,’ I say, ‘Goshawks are boys’ birds, are they? Let’s see what the boys have said about you.’ I pick up Humphrey ap Evans’ Falconry for You, and read. ‘She purrs and chirps to her master, rubbing her head against him. But she is proud and wild and beautiful: her anger is terrible to behold. She can be moody and sulky.’1
Hmm.
Now I open Gilbert Blaine, and there I read of her ‘peculiar and somewhat sulky disposition’.2 ‘She will set her mind on making herself as disagreeable as she can,’ he explained; ‘will exasperate you to such a degree that you will long to wring her neck.’ Then to Frank Illingworth’s Falcons and Falconry: ‘Never was there a more contrary bird than the gos! Her sole purpose in life seems to be to aggravate her owner.’3 ‘Mabel, this is very dubious,’ I say. Then I start on the Victorian falconers. Charles Hawkins Fisher did ‘not like her or her kin’,4 and Freeman and Salvin considered it ‘a thousand pities that the temper of this bird is so very far from amiable; it is, in fact, sulky’.5
‘Sulky. Oh my God, Mabel. You know what you are? You’re a woman. You’re a hormonal woman!’ It made such ghastly sense. It was why these falconers never wondered if their own behaviour had anything to do with why their goshawks took stand in trees, or flew into fits of nerves, or rage, or attacked their dogs, or decided to fly away. It wasn’t their fault. Like women, Goshawks were inexplicable. Sulky. Flighty and hysterical. Their moods were pathological. They were beyond all reason.
But reading further back I find that in the seventeenth century goshawks weren’t vile at all. They were ‘sociable and familiar’, though by nature ‘altogether shye and fearfull’ wrote Simon Latham in 1615. They ‘take exception’ at ‘rough and harsh behaviour from the man’, but if treated with kindness and consideration, are ‘as loving and fond of her Keeper as any other Hawke whatsoever’. These hawks, too, were talked about as if they were women. They were things to win, to court, to love. But they were not hysterical monsters. They were real, contradictory, self-willed beings, ‘stately and brave’,6 but also ‘shye and fearfull’. If they behaved in ways that irritated the falconer it was because he had not treated them well, had not demonstrated ‘continuall loving and curteous behaviour towards them’. The falconer’s role, wrote Edmund Bert, was to provide for all his hawk’s needs so that she might have ‘joye in her selfe’. ‘I am her friend,’ he wrote of his goshawk, ‘and shee my playfellow.’7
A more cynical eye might have seen these Elizabethan and Jacobean men as boasting about their hawk-training skills; old-school pick-up artists in a bar talking up their seduction routines. But I wasn’t cynical. They had won me over, these long-dead men who loved their hawks. They were reconciled to their otherness, sought to please them and be their friends. I wasn’t under any illusion that women were better off in early-modern England, and assumed it was a fear of female emancipation that had made goshawks so terribly frightening to later falconers – but even so I knew which kind of relationship I preferred.