We do it again. And again. The next day brings heavy rain so we fly her loose between us in the front room of my house, back and forth from fist to fist, over the rug, past the mirror, under the light, wings sending up draughts that leave the lampshade swinging wildly. By the fourth day the hawk is flying twenty-five yards to me, will come without hesitation from the ground, from Christina’s fist, from tree branches, from the roof of the pavilion. ‘Thank you so much for your help,’ I tell her as we walk from the field. ‘You know, I think we’re nearly there. Once she flies a full fifty yards I’ll let her loose.’ The thought brings a squirmy, high-pitched joy. I mustn’t rush. I cannot wait.
I had called so many hawks before, but calling Mabel was different. I stood there, raised my arm, and whistled the whistle that meant, Please come. This is where you want to be. Fly to me. Ignore the towering clouds, the wind that pushes the trees behind you. Fix yourself on me and fly between where you are and where I am. And I’d hear my heart beating. And I’d see the hawk crouch and fly. I’d see her drop from the perch, speed towards me, and my heart would be in my mouth. Though she was still on the creance, I feared the faltering. I feared the veering off, the sudden fright, the hawk flying away. But the beating wings brought her straight to me, and the thump of her gripping talons on the glove was a miracle. It was always a miracle. I choose to be here, it meant. I eschew the air, the woods, the fields. There was nothing that was such a salve to my grieving heart as the hawk returning. But it was hard, now, to distinguish between my heart and the hawk at all. When she sat twenty yards across the pitch part of me sat there too, as if someone had taken my heart and moved it that little distance. It reminded me of Philip Pullman’s children’s fantasy series His Dark Materials, in which each person has a daemon, an animal that is a visible manifestation of their soul and accompanies them everywhere. When people are separated from their daemons they feel pain. This was a universe very close to mine. I felt incomplete unless the hawk was sitting on my hand: we were parts of each other. Grief and the hawk had conspired to this strangeness. I trusted she would fly to me as simply and completely as I trusted gravity would make things fall. And so entrenched was this sense that the hawk flying to me was part of the workings of the world that when things went wrong, the world went wrong with it.
She’d left Christina’s fist with all the joy and certainty in the world. I watched her approach and waited with happy anticipation for the solid thwack of her landing on my glove. But it did not come. Instead, she snatched at the food in my fist with one down-dropped taloned foot, and kept flying, fast, out and away from me. I could feel the failure in her, the sense that she hadn’t got what she wanted, and I could feel, too, that what had just happened had spooked her, and that now she was flying away from it, and me, as fast as possible. I grabbed hold of the creance and ran with her, putting resistance on the line until she was brought to earth, crest raised, wings spread wide, feet planted in the turf, beak open, panting in fury. I held out my fist and she flew straight up onto it as if nothing had happened at all.
‘She must have been scared by something,’ I said. ‘Let’s try it again.’
And again the hawk came, low and fast, and again she snatched at the glove and kept flying. Again I brought her to earth.
‘Why is she doing it?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
This had never happened before. Over the years I’d had hawks that ignored me. Hawks that turned their back on me. Hawks that flew reluctantly, flew badly, or didn’t fly at all. It never worried me. These hawks weren’t at their flying weight, that was all, and this was easily fixed. But this was different. This was a hawk desperately eager to fly to me, but with a last-second terror of landing on my glove. It was incomprehensible. I telephoned Stuart. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. Does she need more manning? Is she too high in weight?’
I was as bewildered as a child.
‘What should I do?’
There was a long pause, and then a longer sigh.
‘Are you feeding her chicks?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Stop feeding her chicks! They’re too rich for her at this stage. She’ll be fine, she’s nearly there. Just feed her rabbit. It won’t hurt her, but it’ll stop this problem.’