He waves the glove again. The jointed rabbit leg waggles. Come on, Gos! Come on! He casts the hymn’s sad notes once more into the evening air. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Is the hawk looking at him? Surely he is. Why does he not come? He must be patient. The hawk will come.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. For an hour he stands there, sometimes giving up and lying down in the pasture among the cows, then getting up again and waiting for the hawk to fly to him. The hawk does not fly to him. He walks back to six yards from the well, holds out his fist and whistles again. Gos stares at him. He does not know what he is expected to do. The man does not know how to teach him. The minutes stretch. Now the waiting is too much to bear. He takes hold of the creance; tugs it. Then he pulls on it, dragging Gos forcibly from his perch. The hawk crashes to the ground, sits there for a few seconds and flies back up onto the railing. White pulls him down again. And again. And again. On the fourth time, the hawk, defeated, starts wandering about through the thistles towards him. White retreats. The hawk, confused, uncertain, follows. White retreats faster, waving the rabbit leg, and Gos starts to run. ‘Skipping and leaping, fluffed full, a horrible toad, he bounded in my train,’1 White wrote; and ‘the last two yards of the twenty-four were flown to the fist’. Later that evening he rewarded the hawk with a crop of rabbit. The day had been a success, he supposed, of a sort. He is beginning to understand how to bring his hawk into condition.
The condition of a hawk, White wrote, ‘was evidently a matter of exquisite assessment which could only be judged by the austringer who knew his hawk, whose subconscious mind was in minutely contact with the subconscious mind of the bird.’2 It was a hard-won revelation, and it was a truth. Looking at Mabel I can see she’s reached her flying weight: it is as obvious to me as a change in the weather. Agitation, nervousness, a tendency to bate from her perch when she was bored: all these are gone at two pounds and one and a half ounces, are replaced by a glassy calm, a flow of perfect attention as if everything inside her were exactly aligned.
You won’t read the words ‘flying weight’ in antiquarian falconry books because the old falconers didn’t use scales. They assessed the condition of their hawks by feeling their muscles and breastbones and observing their behaviour with sharp and experienced eyes. This is not an easy thing to do, and it is almost impossible for a novice falconer to grasp the subtleties involved in bringing a hawk into flying condition. White had no weighing machine and no mentor to teach him: he had to learn the old methods the hard way. I know that in one sense the weighing of hawks is a falling-off, a brute measure compared to the intuitive understanding that comes from really knowing your hawk. Still, I would not train a hawk without a set of scales. When I used to fly merlins, tiny falcons with needle talons and frames so voracious and delicate they resemble heated Meissen porcelain, I weighed them three times a day. I fussed interminably over the relative calorific value of quail and chicken and mouse; I could tell you how much weight my hawk would lose in an hour, in two hours, in three. Even an eighth of an ounce would make a difference to how my merlins flew. It is a grosser calculation with a goshawk, because Mabel is huge compared to a merlin. But still it is not easy to judge how much food, and of what kind, will bring her into perfect flying condition. Scraps of paper litter the kitchen table, jotted with weights and question marks. I am convinced I have these calculations pat, and I am out to prove it. At four o’clock we set off for my college cricket pitch and her first calling-off lessons. ‘It’ll be fine, Mabel. It’s the long vacation. The place will be deserted. No dogs, no cows, no people. No one will bother us there.’