I run towards the spot. I can’t see her anywhere. Where is she? There are nettles everywhere, but it’s only regrowth, a mere three inches high. Where is my hawk? I hold my breath. Silence. And then I hear muffled, muffled bells. And finally I spot her head, snaking up out of the nettles. What the– She looks like she’s broken, crushed, as if gravity had suddenly increased tenfold; her wings fanned, feathers bent upwards along their vanes from the pressure. Ah: I see now. Her wings are spread to brace herself against the ground, because she has hold of the rabbit, and the rabbit is down the hole, and she’s holding on and bracing with all her might to stop herself being pulled underground. Her beak is open with the effort. I reach down the hole, feel my way along her impossibly long shins and encounter a rabbit foot. She has it, but only just. I grab the leg, and try to work out how to extract the rabbit from the hole. I pull a little, and the rabbit kicks. Goshawk squeaks. I change the angle, and slowly, like an evil, rural conjuror, pull the rabbit out of the hole, and toss it onto the grass. Mabel stamps and dances, changes her hold from hind leg to head, and the rabbit is still. She is in such a rage that she stamps up and down on the rabbit for ages, once it’s dead, and then starts plucking it. She plucks for minutes and soon we are surrounded by a deep circle of soft grey fur.
The conversation of death. The sentence kept coming to mind. I’d think of it at odd moments – while taking a bath, scratching my nose, leaning to grab a mug of hot tea. My subconscious was trying to tell me something and though it was shouting very loudly indeed, I didn’t hear what it was saying. Things were going wrong. Very wrong. One afternoon Mabel leapt up from her perch to my fist, lashed out with one foot and buried four talons in my bare right arm. I froze. Blood was dripping on the kitchen floor. I could do nothing. Her grip was too powerful. I had to wait until she decided to let go. The pressure was immense, but the pain, though agonising, was happening to someone else. Why has she footed me? I thought wildly, after she released her grip and continued as if nothing had happened at all. She has never been aggressive before. I was sure I’d done nothing to provoke her. Is she overkeen? Is the weighing machine broken? I spent a good quarter of an hour fussing about with piles of tuppences, trying to calibrate it. There was nothing wrong with it at all. But something was wrong with me. It wasn’t just a hawk-inflicted injury. I was becoming vastly anxious. I jumped in panic when the postman knocked on the door; recoiled from the ringing phone. I stopped seeing people. Cancelled my gallery talk. Deadlocked the front door. Out on the hill I fled from walkers, dodged behind hedges when farm vehicles drove up the track. Some days I lay in bed in so much mysterious pain I began to believe the only explanation was a terminal disease.
You could explain what it was like by running to books and papers. You could read Freud, you could read Klein. You could read any number of theories about attachment and loss and grief. But those kinds of explanations come from a world the hawk wasn’t in. They aren’t any help. They are like explaining how it feels to be in love by waving an MRI scan of a lovestruck brain. You have to look in different places.
The anthropologist Rane Willerslev once lived for a year in a Yukaghir community in north-eastern Siberia and became fascinated by how their hunters saw the relationship between humans and animals. The hunters, he wrote, think ‘humans and animals can turn into each other by temporarily taking on one another’s bodies’.1 If you want to hunt elk, you dress in elkskins, walk like an elk, take on an elk’s alien consciousness. If you do this, elk will recognise you as one of their own and walk towards you. But, Willerslev explained, Yukaghir hunters consider these transformations very dangerous, because they can make you lose sight of your ‘original species identity and undergo an invisible metamorphosis’. Turning into an animal can imperil the human soul. Willerslev included the story of a hunter who’d been tracking reindeer for many hours and ended up in an unfamiliar camp, where women he did not know gave him lichen to eat and he started forgetting things. He remembered his wife but could not remember her name. Confused, he fell asleep, and it was only when he dreamed he was surrounded by reindeer urging him to leave that he saw what he had done.