‘Maybe he was tired of his hawk,’ she said, the hand with the cloth in it now pressed to the sink.
This made no sense at all.
‘But how could he be tired of a hawk?’
And now she saw I was upset, and she put down the cloth and drew me into a hug.
‘I don’t know, Helen. Perhaps he was a silly man.’
Gos’s small feral head, tipped and streaked and patterned like a cat’s, looks about in puzzlement. This is not what normally happens. His sharp black beak opens and closes. He is hungry. He hops along the railing around the well, gripping it tight with toes and claws. Flakes of rust fall. Hungry. He hops further, looking down the long line of the creance and still not finding the man at the end of it where he always is. Where was he? Gos needed vantage to see. So he flew across to the nearest tree. There was a branch just above him. He flew up to it. Hawks hate to sit on a lower perch when a higher one is offered, and so he hopped and scrambled onto the one above him, and then onto another, and another, laddering up the tree, pulling the creance behind him. Soon he sat at the very top of the unclimbable oak, the world offering itself to him; the skies fletched with pigeons, the fields sinking towards Stowe, the roof of the palace and its glittering lakes and all its obelisks and temples and classical avenues, all the lines of sight cut into the landscape by men two hundred years ago, with his small hawkish face looking down upon it as if this view, this perfect view, was the reason it was made.
White had only left Gos on the railings for a minute. He’d heard the farmer’s car and ran across the field to tell Mrs Wheeler about his new wireless set. When he got back Gos was not on the well but on top of a tree, a shadow against the sky, and the twigs and branches below him woven and tangled with twine. He whistled, waved food, but the hawk didn’t move. He panicked and pulled on the creance and it made Gos bate and the twine more tangled than ever. He started to worry the creance would snap. ‘It had hardly any breaking strain,’ he wrote. ‘It had already been broken twice.’2 The hawk was held tight; powerless, White called for someone to help him. But the arrival of the farmer’s son in a white shirt carrying a ladder made the hawk bate even more. Soon Gos was hanging upside down in a cocoon of fraying string, feathers breaking in his struggle to free himself, before finally he hung unmoving, exhausted, immobilised, a feathered fly in a tarred and knotted web. It was an hour and a half before White entangled his jesses with a screwhook fastened to the end of a salmon rod, dragged him down to the ground and got him back on his fist. You bloody little sod, White hissed at Gos. The hawk, he wrote, looked at him angrily, ‘as if it had all been my fault’.3