Snowberries, I think, as the white nubs brush against my hawking waistcoat. Didn’t Victorian gamekeepers plant them as cover for pheasants? Oh. Oh no. As soon as the thought is made, I see her twist out of the treetop, swerve to avoid a branch, and then stoop at a fifty-degree angle, wings almost entirely closed. It’s exciting enough to make me hold my breath, but I haven’t time: I’m already running. I duck under an electric fence, and my heart sinks. She’s stooped into a city of pheasants. They are everywhere. We shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t be here. I can hear her bell ringing. Where is she? Over the muddy ditch, and I’m in the wood. It is silent with leaves and fear. Then I hear pheasants running. I see one, two, three crouching in mortal terror. And then a blue-rumped cock pheasant burning copper against the leaves kicked up behind him, running hell for leather along the ground thirty feet away. Mabel comes up behind him like a gust of wind carrying the angel of death. I can’t stop this. Nothing can. She’s moving faster than seems plausible, powering down on a glide-slope that ends abruptly: she binds to the pheasant with both feet just as he sticks his head into a pile of brushwood. And then all hell breaks loose. Leaves fly, feathers fly, pheasant wings batter, and I’m running.
I’m nearly passing out with stress, crouching, dirty, covered in mud and sweat, pulsing with adrenalin. The goshawk is full of adrenalin too. She’s killing the pheasant more, even though it’s dead. Stamp stamp, gripe, stamp, foot, clutch, stamp. Leaves continue to fly as she dances about on it. Her eyes burn with an unholy light, her beak is open. She looks terrifying. Slowly she calms down. I keep looking back behind me. No one is in sight. I feed her all the food in my waistcoat, and give her the whole head and neck of the pheasant. I sneak the pheasant itself into the capacious back pocket of the waistcoat, breaking its long tail feathers in half so no tell-tale ends poke out of the zip, and guiltily heap leaves all over the scene of the crime. And then we sneak back to the car.
I am undone. From the four corners of the field I’m crossing, from all sides, every single cock pheasant in the neighbourhood begins to crow simultaneously. It’s a terrible, echoing, barrelling sound, like an echo-effects pedal on long sustain, rolling backwards and forwards through the air. It swells into the most terrifying, sustained cacophony, more like an artillery bombardment than calling birds. It is a vast alarum of accusation. I am guilty. I’ve poached a pheasant from someone’s shoot. I didn’t mean to, I almost say out loud. It was an accident. I’m relieved when the calls die away. And then, as I round the corner to the car, the barrage starts again. Chastened and slightly unnerved, I drive away, the pheasants gone but conscience ringing in my ears.
The landscape is changing before my eyes. What I see is not just winter moving onwards to spring; it is a land filling slowly with spots and lines of beauty. There’s brittle sun out on the hill this lunchtime, and a fresh westerly wind. Mabel’s pupils shrink to opiated pinpricks as I unhood her, both of her eyes narrow with happiness. It is exceptionally clear. The red flag over the range cracks with the wind and the sound of distant rifles; the radio mast on the horizon looks like an ink-drawing over a wash of shadows and lines and bolts of land rippling up to the chalk hills before me. We walk up the track. From the top I can look down and see the whole of Cambridge. The light today is beguiling. The rooftops and spires seem within a hand’s grasp; a chess-set town glittering among bare trees, as if I could pick up the brute tower of the university library and move it six places north, set it down somewhere else.
From here, the city is mild and small, and looks all of a piece with the landscape around it. The beauty of a vantage like this is that it obscures the roads and walls with trees, makes Cambridge a miniature playset of forest-set blocks and spires. These days, when I go into town, I’m increasingly finding excuses to park my car in the multi-storey car park, because from the open-air fourth floor I can stare at these fields. They run like a backbone across the horizon, scratched with copse-lines and damped with cloud-shadow. A strange complication arises when I look at them. Something of a doubling. Leaning out over the car-park rail, I feel myself standing on the distant hill. There’s a terrible strength to this intuition. It’s almost as if my soul really is up there, several miles away, standing on thistly clay watching my soul-less self standing in the car park, with diesel and concrete in her nose and anti-skid asphalt under her feet. With the car-park self thinking if she looked very, very hard, perhaps through binoculars, she might see herself up there.