All the trust I had left in the world rested in the fact that the hawk wanted to fly to me. Now she was scared to land on my fist – she didn’t trust me – and I could not explain to Stuart how awful this felt. I thanked him. I had asked for advice, and he had given it, simply and precisely. This is the problem. This is how you fix it. But I didn’t believe him. It can’t just be the food. I have done something bad, I thought miserably. Something terrible.
The next day a plague of moorhens had come out of the messy copse behind the pavilion and were running all over the pitch like a flock of feathered black mice. Moorhens! Birds that can neither fly well nor run fast, they are such easy prey for goshawks that falconers avoid flying them out of a sense of sporting fair play. Mabel had never seen them before, but she looked upon them now as if they had been designed by a kindly deity for her personal delectation. I wasn’t surprised; I’d already discovered that all sorts of predatory taxonomies are buried in a baby goshawk’s brain. A few days earlier I’d seen her looking at a small drawing of partridges in a book I’d left open on the floor. Intrigued, I picked up the book and held it in front of her. She kept her eyes fixed on the picture, even when I moved the book about in the air. No way! I thought. The drawing was in ink; it was stylised and sparse: it caught the feel and form of partridges, but there was no colour or detail to it. I flipped through the book, showed her other drawings: finches, seabirds, thrushes. She ignored them all. Then I showed her a drawing of a pheasant. Her black pupils dilated; she leaned forward and stared down her beak at it, as fascinated as she had been with the partridges. I was amazed. Amazed that she could understand two-dimensional images, and even more amazed that something deep in her brain saw these sparse inked curves as fitting the category gamebirds and had pronounced them worthy of interest.
Right on cue I hear a soft clucking noise, and a thin peeping, and Mabel’s head swings round, and mine too, and we see – just there, just ten feet away – a hen pheasant and a line of cheeping, half-feathered poults squeezing themselves under a railing on their way towards the grass. The pheasant sees Mabel and stops dead. She has never seen a goshawk before, but instantly perceives the danger she is in. She crouches to fly, realises this would leave her chicks behind, then considers sitting down and pretending to be a rock, and when she realises the futility of this manouevre – her lacy beige back does not match the sunlit grass, and the hawk has already seen her – all hell breaks loose. She stretches her neck high, puffs out her cheek feathers, beak open in panic, and runs pell-mell out across the pitch. Her chicks follow her desperately, six ungainly clockwork dinosaurs. I am bewildered – there is no safety out there, nowhere to hide, unless the pheasant thinks that putting her chicks amongst the distant moorhens would give them a faint, statistical chance of escape.
Mabel. Oh God, Mabel. Mabel is bating at them, bating so hard, wings beating so furiously, that she hangs horizontally in the air. The breeze is cold in my face, my fist pulled towards the fleeing pheasants. She bounces back onto my hand, beak open with exertion, fixes me with a white-hot, angry eye, then bates towards them again. Not here, not now! Mabel! I can’t. I can’t let you catch one. It is against the laws of God and Man and . . . College.