Concentrate on why you’re here, I tell myself. You have a hawk to fly. Ever since my father died I’d had these bouts of derealisation, strange episodes where the world became unrecognisable. It will pass. But I am spooked by what’s just happened. My fingers shake as I thread the end of the creance through the swivel at the end of her jesses and tie it there with two miniature falconer’s knots. I pull on them and they hold. Knots and lines. Material reassurances. I play out fifteen feet more creance and stow the rest of it deep in a zipped-up pocket of my hawking waistcoat to keep it secure. Then I pull her leash free from the swivel and tuck it into another pocket. Hawking waistcoats, like those of fishermen or photographers, are hardly clothes at all, just pockets hung in rows. The one at my right hip is lined in vinyl, and inside it are three dead day-old chicks, each skinned and torn roughly in half.
‘Sit there – on you go.’ The hawk hops onto the rail of the wooden veranda and turns to face me in a low boxer’s crouch. I step back six feet, put half a chick in my glove, extend my arm and whistle. There is no hesitation. There is a scratch of talons on wood, a flowering of feathers, one deep downstroke, the brief, heavy swing of talons brought up and into play and the dull thud as she hits my glove. When she has finished eating we do it again, and this time I stand a little further away. Eight feet: three wingbeats, another reward. For a creature with the tactical intelligence of a goshawk this game is child’s play. The third time I put her on the railing she is already airborne as I turn my back: a skip of my heart, a hastily extended glove and she is at my side, wolfing down the rest of her food, crest raised, wings dropped, eyes blazing, a thing of perfect triumph. I thread her leash back through the swivel and untie the creance. That will do for today. She flew perfectly. And I’m so pleased with how the lesson has gone I start singing on the way home. I serenade my hawk with ‘My Favourite Things’, with whiskers and kittens and brown paper packages tied up with string. It strikes me that this must be happiness. That I have remembered what it is, and how it can be done. But watching television from the sofa later that evening I notice tears running from my eyes and dropping into my mug of tea. Odd, I think. I put it down to tiredness. Perhaps I am getting a cold. Perhaps I am allergic to something. I wipe the tears away and go to make more tea in the kitchen, where a dead white rabbit is defrosting like a soft toy in an evidence bag, and the striplight flickers ominously, undecided whether to illuminate the room or cease working entirely.
These calling-off lessons teach the hawk to fly immediately to an upraised glove and a whistle. Rapid response is the key to success. If the hawk doesn’t come straight away there’s no point in waiting minutes on end, whistling and calling; it’s better to end the training session and try again later. White did not know this, and it is one of the reasons why his first attempt to call Gos is so painful to read. But what upset me most about that sorry episode wasn’t the wait that taught the hawk nothing, nor the sadistic tug on the creance that pitched poor Gos to the ground. It wasn’t even that he’d taken so long to reward the hawk that it had no understanding that the food it was given was a reward at all. It was this: that once the hawk decided to walk towards him, White had run away.
But he returns and tries again. Two days later Gos is back on the railings and White is forty yards away, whistling and waving two ounces of butcher’s steak in his hand. He pleads. He calls. He tries every voice he knows: his tone is commanding, pandering, urgent, mad, soft, desperate, cross. ‘Now, now,’3 he remonstrates. ‘Don’t be silly, come-along, be-a-good-Gos, Gossy-gossy-gos.’ After ten minutes, Gos decides to fly. But the falconer’s joy turns fast to horror, for what is approaching him is hardly a hawk at all. It is a ‘hump-backed aviating Richard III’,4 a ghastly aerial toad, and its glowing headlamp eyes are not focused on his outstretched fist, my God, but on his exposed and unprotected face. He begins to panic. Gos had hurt him a few minutes before, had jumped up to his shoulder and buried a foot in his neck. There was blood. There was a great deal of pain. He remembers the force of that blow, the agony of it, the reserves of patience it required for him not to dash the hawk to the ground and kill it, to wait, just to wait for the hawk to let go. Closer. Now it is five paces. It is almost upon him. Those great eyes are fixed on his. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. He cannot bear it. His nerve breaks. He shuts his eyes and ducks. Gos, vastly confused, veers off into the branches of a tree, misses his footing, drops awkwardly into a hedge.
White collects himself, retrieves the hawk, walks back to the railings and tries the whole lesson again. This time he will be brave. This time. As the hawk flies to him he holds his breath and tries to stand his ground: