I find her in the hedge bottom, holding onto a rabbit. ‘Mabel,’ I say, ‘you are behaving like a wild hawk. Shocking.’ This is nerve-racking falconry, but a wonderful thing. I am testing the lines between us that the old falconers would have called love. They have not broken; they do not look likely to break. Maybe they will. I raise her weight even more, and slowly the world widens. But I’m pushing my luck, and I know it.
She’s not in condition, I tell myself all the way there in the car. You’ll lose her. It is two days later, and I can hear the voice of reason telling me to go back home. I keep driving. Rain spots the windscreen and spines the nearside windows. Will the rabbits be lying out, in this weather? Maybe. I park on the muddy verge against the wet fence at the far side of the field. She’s not in yarak, but she’s looking about. Whatever, I think; I change her jesses and let her go. She chases a rabbit to its hole and swings up into an oak tree. I whistle. She doesn’t seem to hear me. The rain starts falling in earnest. At this point, I realise something has changed about the space between the goshawk and me. Usually it’s taut with attention. When she flies into a tree all my attention is turned to the hawk, and the hawk turns all her attention to me. Not any more. She ignores me.
There is something religious about the activity of looking up at a hawk in a tall tree. Sir Thomas Sherley wrote in the seventeenth century that flying falcons turns one’s eyes to the heavens, which is why falconry is a moral activity. This seems more akin to falling to my knees begging redemption from an indifferent deity. Mabel flies on, deeper into the trees. I follow her. She’s still ignoring me. Look at me, hawk, I’m willing up at the treetops – and she doesn’t. I find myself on someone’s lawn; I’ve trailed dark footfalls across the blue grass. The hawk is thirty feet above me and I’m shouting and whistling like a madwoman. Rain blows everywhere. I caper about. I chuck chick corpses high in the air. They fall with a thump to the grass and she doesn’t even turn her head to track their sad parabolae. I whistle some more. Wave my arms. ‘Mabel!’ I shout. ‘Come on!’
A sash window grates – an upstairs window of the huge Georgian house I’ve been pretending isn’t there. A maid leans out. Black dress, white pinafore, white hat. Nothing about this strikes me as strange. I have followed my hawk and walked backwards in time. It’s 1923. Any minute now Poirot will wander towards me across the lawn. Only later do I realise I had probably interrupted some erotic afternoon adventure.
‘Are you all right?’ she calls.
‘I’m really sorry!’ I shout back. ‘I’ve lost my hawk.’ I point vaguely up at the tree. ‘I’m trying to get her back. I’m so sorry to trespass on your lawn; I’ll be gone soon. Just desperate to get her back.’
‘Oh?’
She thinks about it for a second, looks up at the tree. Then she looks down at me. ‘That’s . . . fine,’ she says. ‘I only wanted to see if you were all right.’ She slams the window. The window slams hard, and the hawk moves. She flies from tree to tree, taking me away from the lawn towards the edge of the wood. The trees here are taller: now my hawk is the size of a thumbnail. Light shines dully from her spangled front. And out of nowhere, her half-size copy, a miniature doppelg?nger, appears. The female sparrowhawk stoops at her, turns, and stoops again. It’s like Peter Pan being mobbed by his own shadow. My hawk flies to the next tree. By now I’ve no discernible thoughts. I know she won’t come down. I must just follow her, stumbling through bushes in a quixotic delirium.