The next day out on the hill Mabel learns, I suppose, what she is for. She chases a pheasant. It crashes into the brambles beneath a tall hedge. She lands on top of the hedge, peering down, her plumage bright against the dark earth of the further slope. I start running. I think I remember where the pheasant has gone. I convince myself it was never there at all. I know it is there. Clay sticks to my heels and slows me down. I’m in a world of slowly freezing mud, and even the air seems to be getting harder to run through. Mabel is waiting for me to flush the pheasant, if only I knew where it was. Now I am at the hedge, trying to find it, constructing what will happen next scenarios in my head, and at this point they’re narrowing fast, towards point zero, when the pheasant will fly. I cannot see Stuart and Mandy any more, though I know they must be there. I’m crashing through brambles and sticks, dimly aware of the catch and rip of thorns in my flesh. Now I cannot see the hawk because I am searching for the pheasant, so I have to work out what she is doing by putting myself in her mind – and so I become both the hawk in the branches above and the human below. The strangeness of this splitting makes me feel I am walking under myself, and sometimes away from myself. Then for a moment everything becomes dotted lines, and the hawk, the pheasant and I merely elements in a trigonometry exercise, each of us labelled with soft italic letters. And now I am so invested in the hawk and the pheasant’s relative positions that my consciousness cuts loose entirely, splits into one or the other, first the hawk looking down, second the pheasant in the brambles looking up, and I move over the ground as if I couldn’t possibly affect anything in the world. There is no way I can flush this pheasant. I’m not here. Time stretches and slows. There’s a sense of panic at this point, a little buffet of fear that’s about annihilation and my place in the world. But then the pheasant is flushed, a pale and burring chunk of muscle and feathers, and the hawk crashes from the hedge towards it. And all the lines that connect heart and head and future possibilities, those lines that also connect me with the hawk and the pheasant and with life and death, suddenly become safe, become tied together in a small muddle of feathers and gripping talons that stand in mud in the middle of a small field in the middle of a small county in a small country on the edge of winter.
I stare at the hawk as she grips the dead pheasant, and her mad eyes stare right back at me. I’m amazed. I don’t know what I expected to feel. Bloodlust? Brutality? No. Nothing like that. There are thorn-scratches all over me from where I dived through the hedge, and an ache in my heart I can’t place. There’s a sheeny fog in the air. Dry. Like talc. I look at the hawk, the pheasant, the hawk. And everything changes. The hawk stops being a thing of violent death. She becomes a child. It shakes me to the core. She is a child. A baby hawk that’s just worked out who she is. What she’s for. I reach down and start, unconsciously as a mother helping a child with her dinner, plucking the pheasant with the hawk. For the hawk. And when she starts eating, I sit on my heels and watch, watch her eat. Feathers lift, blow down the hedge, and catch in spiders’ webs and thorn branches. The bright blood on her toes coagulates and dries. Time passes. Benison of sunlight. A wind shifts the thistle stalks and is gone. And I start crying, soundlessly. Tears roll down my face. For the pheasant, for the hawk, for Dad and for all his patience, for that little girl who stood by a fence and waited for the hawks to come.
20
Hiding
WHITE RUSHES FROM the house. The postman brought him news of agitated rooks in nearby woods. Breathless, he runs to the trees. Gos is not there. Of course he is not. He cannot find the sparrowhawks either. He thinks he hears them sometimes, but perhaps the calls are owls. He exists, now, in a landscape of hearsay; there are rumours of hawks like rumours of war. He stares at the sky. He litters the country with traps. He sits for days on end in the woods, from dawn until dark, cramped and shivering in his hide. Nothing. He buys a gamekeeper’s pole trap with jagged metal jaws. He files away the teeth designed to break hawks’ legs and pads its spring-shut jaws with felt. Then he makes another trap, a falconer’s trap from a description in a book: a noose of running twine around a ring of upturned feathers, and in the centre of the ring a tethered blackbird. He’ll hide with one end of the twine in his hand, and when the hawk takes the bird, he’ll pull, so the twine slips over the feathers and catches the hawk by its legs. It might work, if he can trap a blackbird to use as bait. He cannot trap a blackbird. He despairs. He starts a letter. Dear Herr Waller, it begins. He writes in English because his German is poor. He asks the man who’d sent him Gos for another hawk. He knows it might be too late in the year to get a young one, and passage hawks – those trapped when already on the wing – are few and far between. But he ends the letter with hope, takes it to Buckingham and posts it to Berlin. He waits for a reply, he waits for the hawks, he waits in penance and suffers for his sins. Nothing comes and there is no answer.