‘BLOODY HELL, SHE’S calm, Helen,’ Stuart says. ‘I can feel her heartbeat. She’s not bothered at all.’ His head is bowed low over the table, fingers spread wide over the closed wings of my hooded hawk. He holds her upon a kitchen cushion as firmly and as gently as if she were made of glass. ‘Good,’ I say, shifting her covert feathers carefully aside to reveal the base of her tail. Here, just before the long feathers join her body, the quills are hollow and translucent, and I’m about to glue and tie a bell the size and shape of an acorn onto the topmost pair. It doesn’t take long. I tug on it gently to check it is secured, then take the hawk back onto my fist. She rouses and the bell sounds loud in the bright room. It does not seem to concern her at all.
Bells are among the most ancient of falconry technologies. For years I’d bought bells from Pakistan, hand-hammered from brass to a design of immense antiquity, but the one Mabel wears is American; modern, small and light, handmade from nickel silver. When she flies free it will tell me where she is. Bells were traditionally attached to hawks’ legs on tiny leather straps called bewits, but a tail-mounted bell is much better for a goshawk, for they have an invariable habit of shaking their tails when they land. You can stand with your back to a tree with a gos in it and trace its movements from branch to branch behind you through sound alone.
But bells aren’t foolproof: their sound is dulled by wind and distance, and a motionless hawk is silent, so when Mabel flies free she’ll also wear a tiny radiotransmitter, and I’ll carry the receiver that picks up its signal over my back in a black cloth case. Even with these double precautions the thought of taking her off the creance fills me with dread. I had never lost a hawk. I’d never expected to. But once she is free, I’m convinced that Mabel will rocket away from me and disappear for ever. I’m even more certain of this when I fly her a few hours later. This time she doesn’t even snatch at the food in my glove, just flies straight past me until she’s brought down to earth.
Disconsolate, I carry her back to the edge of the village playing fields. Stuart watches me approach, looks critically at the hawk. He rubs the back of his neck with one hand. His face, tanned and lined by years of sun and wind, is thoughtful and grave.
‘It might be the bell, do you think?’ I say. ‘Freaked her out a bit?’
He frowns. ‘It’s a new place, too. But she’s not ready yet, Helen. Not yet.’ He feels her breastbone speculatively. ‘She needs to come down more. She’s still too fat. You’re feeding her rabbit? Just rabbit?’
I nod miserably.
He looks at me, considering. ‘Tell you what, Helen, come out on the hill with me tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I’ll be going up there to fly the tiercel. We’ll get her out into the fields, away from streets and houses. She needs space.’
‘That would be brilliant, Stuart.’
‘I’ll pick you up at five.’
‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’
‘She needs to come down a bit more, Helen.’
He was offering to help, and I was unprepared for how this made me feel. I’d flown scores of hawks. I’d taught falconry to beginners. I’d written papers on it, had lectured on its venerable history. But now I bowed my head before Stuart. He knew what to do. He knew about goshawks and I did not. I felt weak with relief at not having to be an expert any more. There he was, rolling a cigarette, reassuringly calm and kind, a proper, generous friend; and it was there, standing on the edge of a village playing field, that I gratefully stepped into novicehood again, as if I had never seen a hawk in my life.
‘Need to excel in order to be loved,’ White had written in his dream diary. But there is an unspoken coda to that sentence. What happens if you excel at something and discover you are still unloved? White was triumphant: Gos had come a whole hundred yards on the creance, was ready to fly free: he could say truthfully now that he had trained a hawk. But something terrible was caught up in his triumph. For the first time since the hawk arrived White felt exposed. Being a novice is safe. When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe any more. Being an expert opens you up to judgement. In his hawking day-book White began writing about critics and how he might ‘avoid the kicks which frighten me’. He felt it necessary to explain that his self-satisfaction was not egotism, but ‘actually a horrible surprise at being good at anything after having been so bad at living for 30 years’. And all the authoritarian figures in his life under whom he had lived in fear coalesced in his imagination into an elderly falconer with a waxed moustache who would read his book and consider him a fool. He knew he must explain to that man that what he had written was only the book of a learner. The words in his day-book read very like a prayer.
May I hope that this book will receive the oblivion of those austringers on the one hand, and of those critics on the other, who realise that indifference and a supposition of non-existence sometimes are the most killing weapons. May I hope that some will realise that I am only a man.1