Time passes. It’s now getting on for a thick, gloamy evening. Smoke is everywhere on the horizon. A yellow crescent moon tilts, out of focus, up there in something that looks like a plate of agar. Swimmy dusk. Bats flit. Trees gather darkness to themselves. Mabel’s swivel and leash are in my pocket, I have swapped her jesses for thin flying jesses that will not catch on twigs or branches, and I grip them tightly between my gloved fingers. I have walked, under Stuart’s instructions, to a triangle of rough ground just one side of a copse of trees. It is a thick patch of thistles and dry seedheads, and we trudge through it. I am mute with stress, enraged by what is happening and powerless to stop it. It is dark. What the hell am I doing? The hawk’s pupils are huge. Her eyes are almost completely black. I cannot believe how stupid this is. I want to go home. I want to go home. And Stuart starts beating up towards me, mushing the thistles and grasses with a stick to push any hidden rabbits or pheasants towards us so Mabel can see them. This is ridiculous. I don’t want to be here, and I don’t know why I’m letting this happen. I shouldn’t be loosing this hawk. I should just – there is a movement behind me and to my right, and the hawk peers, seeing something running, and then bates at the spot. Oh! And I let her go. And immediately I wish I had not. Suddenly my hawk is free. She flies powerfully for a few seconds, dips at whatever it was, which has gone, and then starts to fly in circles, sailing like a moth, a giant hawkmoth. She gains height. There is a terrible crepuscular hush. I can see her long head turning to look at me, and her tail fanning and flexing as she turns. I’m in some kind of fugue state. The gap between me and the hawk is something I feel like a wound. She is circling, and looking at me, and seems uncertain about coming back. Stuart is standing here. Christina is standing there. I am standing right here, shouting and whistling at the hawk. The dark, that she can fly in circles, that everything’s unclear: these things are discoveries for her. She’s trying to work out what to do. The new ground. The angle of incidence between up here and down there, where Helen’s hand and heart are.
She finally pitches with her back to me on the apex of a young beech tree; the crown bends almost double under her weight. All I can see is her shape, all angles and shoulders, and I feel the confusion that animates her entirely. I call her. She leaps from her awkward perch and comes through dusk towards my upraised fist. All is too strange. She bounces off the glove, cutting it merely, and starts circling again. She ends up deeper in the wood, perched again – but, happily, facing my way. Through the gloom and the flocked leaves I can see her yellow nose, and something of her accipitrine crouch. I know her eyes are on me. So out goes the fist. I pile one chick, two chicks, three chicks on it. Whistle. Call. ‘Come on, Mabel!’, slapping my gloved hand in animate will.
At this point, space-time is folded and scrunched into direct relations. Trigonometry. Goshawk glide-path to my fist, and Goshawk intentionality, which I am sure is also derivable in mathematical terms. My beating, horrified heart, and my soul feeling like water at four degrees; heavier than ice, falling to the bottom of the ocean.
And suddenly, she is back on the glove, I feel soaked in iced water, and I cannot believe she’s not lost. I feel like White: a tyro, a fool, a beginner. An idiot. ‘Never mind,’ says Stuart. He knows I am in pieces. I catch the flash of his grin in the darkness. ‘She’s too high, and it’s getting dark. But you got her back, right? That’s always a good end to the day.’ I can barely speak. I croak a reply. The adrenalin fits and fizzes in my veins as I walk back to the car, and I’m still not sure how I managed to drive home.
The air is dark and full of water. He is soaked to the skin. Gos is nowhere to be seen. He is tying pieces of rabbit to all the places where the hawk had been. They are like prayers, like the tattered ribbons pagans tie to winter twigs. His hands are very white against the coruscating green of the wind-blown bark of empty oaks. He has run out of rabbit. He has no lure. He has no meat but liver. He’ll ask Mrs Wheeler to buy some steak for him in Buckingham. Standing by the farmhouse door he listens. ‘Rooks observed to be mobbing, or a solitary crow sitting on the dead branch of some tree, cawing or jerking about uneasily, are an almost certain sign that the lost hawk is not far away,’1 he’d read in Blaine. Nothing. Then a single caw, loudly repeated. There. A couple of hundred yards away is a crow, circling the top of a tree, cursing at the bird beneath it. On the topmost branch sits Gos, tiny at that distance, his familiar blunt-shouldered form hunched against the gale. White runs to the tree and stands under it waving a piece of liver and a handkerchief as a lure while flashes of water spread on the further fields. The rain falls on the glades, avenues, and all the temples and obelisks of Stowe, and Gos sits there, imperious, indecisive, and horribly soaked, for White’s constant stroking had taken the waterproofing oil from his feathers. The gale buffets his perch. It is not comfortable here. It is not comfortable at all. He opens his wings, intending to fly down to the man with the food in his hand. He leaves the tree, turns in mid-air, starts to descend. White’s heart, beating. The hawk approaching. Then the wind fills his wings and pushes, and the hawk, who has no skill and does not know how to fly in a gale like this, is sucked away downwind and is gone.