Читать книгу The Godstone and the Blackymor - T. H. White - Страница 5

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Fraoch was a shooting lodge which had belonged to a whisky baron. For fifty pounds a month whoever rented it was monarch of about ten thousand acres which claimed to be a grouse moor, and of several pools in a preserved salmon river. The salmon were there. You could see them leaping, leaping, from the low, warm, crystal water—like interplanetary rockets—and toppling back into it with a heart-thumping, sidelong swash. But they were impossible to catch, because of the golden weather. We basked by the river in a cloud of midges, tormented by the insects and by the unattainable fish. As for the famous grouse, at a generous estimate there may have been a hundred in all those thousands of acres. Several guns, ranging the mountains industriously all day behind a passable setter, might end with three or four brace. This made Fraoch a first-rate place for hawking.

If you are on one of the lordly Yorkshire grouse moors, where you can hardly walk ten paces without tripping over a pack of birds, it is redundant to use a setter. You find more grouse than you would ever carry, simply by walking forward. So you sit in a butt with a bottle of champagne, while the birds are driven over in bullet-paced streams. If you are on the starved tops of Mayo, however, you need a wide-ranging dog to find a shot at all. The same sort of thing applies to falconry. Different terrains suit different kinds of activity. It is no use flying merlins in strong heather or peregrines in woodland, because in each case the quarry can hide itself from the pursuer too easily to give a chance of catching it. Merlins need downland like Salisbury Plain, and peregrines need the moor. On the other hand, a peregrine on a well-stocked moor would not be interesting. She would have killed her maximum in half an hour or less, too easily, and it would be time to go home.

At Fraoch, where the rare, crafty and ancient grouse used to hobble about on crutches or sit before their heather cottages smoking broken clay pipes, with steel-rimmed spectacles over their rheumy eyes, spitting in the turf ashes and exchanging folklore about Niall of the Nine Hostages, it needed strong thighs to march the mountains and a high heart to circumvent them.

The Lodge stood at the end of a two mile drive or side road, in a bower of rhododendrons and fuchsias, looking out between their thick leaves across a dozen miles of bog to Crossmolina. No tree or house was visible from the overgrown lawn.

It was a charming, gimcrack house—shabbily, sparsely, comfortably furnished. It even had a working bathroom which worked with a roar, on some kind of geyser understood by the cook and the housemaids. Perhaps it was worked by Calor gas. The old-fashioned, broken-springed, second-hand, chintz-covered, welcoming armchairs had been brought somehow or other all the way from Dublin. As usual in Ireland, the ugly furniture was leavened here and there by a fine eighteenth-century piece, or by a cut-glass decanter. On the wall of the sitting room there was an amateur tracing of the outline of a fifteen-pound salmon. On a side table lay the game book with its few entries. The wash-hand-stands of the bedrooms were of the nineteenth century, and the old beds were deep and comfortable.

Surrounded by a sort of circular ambulatory or tunnel through the shiny leaves, which took twenty minutes or so to get round the lodge, Fraoch had two unsurpassable beauties.

On the mountain behind it, outside the shaded grounds in the sunshine, there was a minute waterfall or glide of water. The soft, tart, ale-coloured stream slid over the smooth stones from step to step, cool and glistering in the late August heat. And the bogland plain which stretched to Crossmolina was held in a horseshoe of barren mountains which rose to about 2,500 feet. Behind us, Slieve Fyagh, Benmore and Maumakeogh nourished the grouse. Opposite the dining-room windows, Corslieve and the Nephin Beg range carried a loving eye to the distant sugar loaf of Nephin, 2,646 feet, whose summit I had once reached in solitude, carrying a peregrine tiercel panting in the sunlight.

Several of these heights had cairns on them. On Corslieve there was a laborious pile of stones called Leaghtdauhybaun—Fair David's Cairn—which was either in memory of a King Dathi who had been killed there by lightning in the year 427 or else of a blond robber called David, also slain there but by the military some thirteen hundred years later. Probably it was a prehistoric erection, taken over by the king and by the robber in their turns. It stood aloof, incredibly old and distant, against the lonely skyline.

It was an ancient landscape, which had few contacts with modern history. Away to the north-east, near Sligo, was the Rath where Eoghan Bel had been buried, killed in battle by the Ulstermen, fourteen hundred years before. He had been buried upright, standing with his spear in hand. After that, the Ulstermen had always been defeated when they reached his tumulus—until they had the presence of mind to dig him up again, and bury him upside down.

I liked to think that Slieve Fyagh, on which the lodge stood, was the place where Aillilbannda King of Connaught had fallen in the sixth century, at the battle of Cuilconaire. It was just possible to think so, for half the place names of Carra were interchangeable with those of Erris.

'As touching Ailillbannda, King of Connaught,' said the Book of Leinster about this monarch, 'the matter whereby he had the Lord's peace was this: the battle of Cuilconaire it was, which he fought against Clann Fiachrach and in which he was defeated, when he said to his charioteer: "Cast now, I pray thee, a look to the rear, and discover whether the killing be great and the slayers near us." The driver looked behind him and replied: "The slaughter that is made of the people is intolerable!" "Not their own guilt, but my pride and unrighteousness it is that comes against them," said the king: "wherefore turn we now the chariot to face the pursuers; for if I be slain, it will be the redemption of many." Then Ailill did earnest act of penance, and by his foemen fell. "That man therefore," said Columcille, "attained to the Lord's peace."'

At twice the distance of Nephin from us to the eastward, there was a different Corslieve in the Curlew Mountains. It also had a cairn, near which Young Donn had been killed in the year 1230, fighting against the foreigners. 'Donn Og, being then alone, was proclaimed and recognized; and many soldiers took aim, and five arrows were lodged in him; and one horseman came up with him afterwards; and though he had no weapon but an axe, he did not allow the horseman to close with him; and the horseman would drive his lance into him occasionally. The other soldiers surrounded him from the east and west, and he fell by the superior power that overtook him there.'

For a view like this, which shared the Lord's peace with the derring-do of Ailill King of Connaught, fifty pounds a month did not seem too much. The Lodges which I sometimes rented were incidental to life in the West, not essential to it. But they were nice incidents.

'How many of these creatures have you trained?' Bunny asked, munching a sandwich in the high, bright air, as we rested for lunch.

'It depends what you mean by trained.'

I counted them on my fingers.

'If you include owls, and the ones I failed with, I have had thirteen. The most distinguished was a gyr-falcon. But I was only her owner on paper. I only saw her once. A sister of hers was flown to Germany as a present for General Goering, in one of those corrugated aeroplanes. He received her with pomp and circumstance.'

'Was she one of the ones which Ernest Vesey collected in Iceland?'

'I might have guessed you would know all about it.'

Bunny was the kindest, most educated, most formidable person I knew. Whenever I began to explain something to him, it was discouraging to find that he knew it already, and generally knew more than I did. Perhaps his dynasty was the last we shall see in literature, of altruistic, scholarly gentlemen of genius, who for generations had sought out the struggling authors like D. H. Lawrence, and selflessly assisted them.

He smiled with asymmetrical, frightening eyes—his grey hair fluffing in a slight movement of the hill breeze.

'One of the many things I know nothing about is falconry. You must explain it to me.'

'It would take six months.'

'Then tell me about the ones you had.'

He was always able to give me a feeling of pleasure and importance.

'Oh, Bunny, don't ask. If I start talking about hawks I go on for ever.'

He fixed me with the eye of Balor.

'Very well. The one I started with was a kestrel. It belonged to a friend. You couldn't train it for much, except catching mice. It had a high voice—kee, kee, kee—and its talons were like needles. We loosed it when it was grown up. Then I got involved with two goshawks from Germany—who taught me a lot. They were enormous, short-winged hawks and you flew them from the glove. After them, I had a pair of merlins—absolute darlings. They were tiny creatures, hardly as big as a pigeon. They were half-way between hawks and falcons. They flew from the fist like hawks, but the chase generally went into the sky, like the old-fashioned chase of peregrines after herons. By, they were glorious! I tried to call them Balin and Balan. But they were identical to look at, so I had to give one of them red jesses and the other one black ones. The result was that in the end they got called Red and Black. You fly them at larks. The lark goes straight up, singing, like a helicopter. The merlin swings away in sweeping circles like a spitfire, often in the opposite direction, to gain height. Do you remember the question in Hamlet? "Why do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you would drive me into a toil?" A merlin has to get upwind of the lark and above it. It's a tremendous aerial combat. They go so high that they are just dots. It ends with a downward streak like a meteor, when they both dive. I made a success with the merlins. They taught me twice as much as the goshawks. One of the nice things about merlins is that you have to loose them before the winter. They are the friendliest hawks. You like setting them free. After that I thought I was ready to start on peregrines. I have lost three of them so far—by stupidity. Now we have Cressida and the tiercel.

'Bunny, listen. What I learnt from the merlins was this. May I tell you about it? Am I boring you? It was a sort of illumination—you know, a sort of Pentecost. The atmosphere became phosphorescent when it dawned on me, like finding the Holy Grail.

'You see, with merlins, you loose the young ones in a barn to begin with. You take in their chopped-up food on a board. After a few days they feed in front of you and will even fly down to the board, while you are chopping the food. Then you capture them, and tie them to their perches out of doors on a leash.

'When you take out their food on the board, they still fly towards it. The next step is to offer the food in your hand.

'But, when I did this, they flew in the opposite direction, as if they were terrified. I tried again and again and again and again. I was in despair. Then the Holy Ghost descended. I thought—it was an effort of thought, like giving birth to something—I thought: They associate food with board, not with hand. How can I make my hand like a board? So I held the hand flat, palm downwards, and laid the food on the back of it. They understood instantly, and came.

'You see, in training a hawk—which has an absolutely different brain structure from yours—you are stringing together a series of conditioned reflexes. Food—Board—Flat Hand—Hand—Me. Eventually they must come to the trainer, even when loose, because they associate him with food. But the gaps between the reflexes must not be too wide. They couldn't bridge the gap from board to hand. So I had to put in a half-way step—the flat hand.

'Do you know, training hawks and training setters are the two most fascinating things in the world? You have to control setters at a distance too. A fool in a fog could train retrievers. But setters! But falcons!'

'How did you lose the peregrines?'

'I miscalculated their age when I got them. I put them out to hack too late and they just cleared off. I am only a learner, Bunny. I am terrified about Cressida and the tiercel.'

A few yards away from us, with his back turned, the keeper Joyce was eating his own sandwiches. He was a noble retainer, one of the old-fashioned kind who believed in being polite to his laird. He was eating separately by his own choice, not by ours. Beside him was the cadge which he carried, with the two peregrines seated on it motionless, extinguished by their hoods.

'The terrifying thing about Cressida is that sooner or later she is going to have to "wait on". You don't fly peregrines from the glove. You just throw them away into the air, and they go up and up. Five hundred feet, perhaps? Quite loose. Then they circle above you, almost out of sight, and you go forward with the setter, searching for a pack of grouse. When you find a pack, you put them up, and the peregrine dives like a thunderbolt.

'The trouble is, Cressida had her first training with a friend of mine. I have not had her from the beginning. I don't know her properly. But the dreadful moment has to come when I toss her away, with no quarry in sight, and leave her to climb to heaven. Suppose she is not ready to wait-on? Suppose she just clears off like those three eyasses? Suppose it takes us a long time to find a pack of grouse, and she gets bored, and goes? That's why I have been fiddling about all morning, carrying her on the cadge, looking for a good set. If only Brownie would give us a firm point, I would throw her off, wait till she was up, and spring the birds. But Brownie is being wild today, as you saw. She's running in. I daren't trust Cressida to hang about the sky. I don't know what to do. When you have lost three eyasses, it is apt to shake your nerve.'

'Well, what's the answer?'

'Oh, God! I wonder if I could try flying her from the fist? I shall have to think up something. Suppose I carried her like a merlin, with the hood off, and then, if Brownie runs in on the set, I could let her try to overtake from ground level? What do you think?'

'I don't know anything about it.'

'God!'

I put my head in my hands and stared between my knees at a small carnivorous plant, which catches flies on the mountain bog and digests them.

Cressida was a peregrine falcon, at least two years old, who had been trained by one of the greatest of falconers. This gentleman was breaking up his family of hawks and dogs, and had given her to me. She was a crafty old devil, with a distinct character of her own—partly ill-tempered, partly pussy-like if in a good humour, and at times you could almost swear that she had a distorted sense of fun. The trouble was that I did not understand her. I had no means of knowing how thoroughly she had been trained, and she had been spending the winter and spring without work. She had been on holiday in the mews. This was her first day's work for me on a war footing, and I did not know how much she remembered of her previous education. I did not know how much she accepted my control, or whether she was rightly in condition to fly. In any case I was an ignoramus about peregrines.

Falconry is not a hobby or an amusement: it is a rage. You eat it and drink it, sleep it and think it. You tremble to write of it, even in recollection. It is, as King James the First remarked, an extreme stirrer up of passions. Every falconer who reads this book will write angry and contemptuous letters to me, calculated to laud his own abilities and to decry mine. It will be cruelly reviewed in an exclusive little magazine called The Falconer, by somebody who has scarcely troubled to read it—if he can read—but who wishes to establish that he is a better falconer than I am—not a difficult thing to establish. In the review, each of my mistakes, which I have carefully pointed out, will be as carefully and tauntingly brought to my attention. So I had better explain at once that what I was going to do was ridiculous.

I ought to have waited till I was sure that Cressida remembered her training and was sharp-set. I ought to have let the setter settle down for a day or two, until I could rely on a steady point. She was a young bitch. Then, on a firm set, I ought to have cast her off until she had reached her altitude, put up the birds as quickly as possible, and enjoyed our triumph.

But I was a learner and no pundit. I had been shaken by the recent loss of the eyasses. I had only been successful with merlins, so I tried to fly her like a merlin. I am not boasting about this, kind falconers, I am confessing it.

'Let's go.'

We moved up wind in the roasting sunshine, stumbling, sweating, angry and bothered, on the tussocky hill. I took off Cressida's hood, and she was as pettish as we were. She was perfectly trained, though I had no means of knowing it. She expected to be thrown off as usual. Instead, she was held to the glove by her jesses, which she could not understand. She bated in the hot air, panting with rage, her beak open, frowning upon me with her burnt-umber eye.

The humans began to quarrel among themselves, upbraiding each other on assorted topics. We accused each other of going too fast, or going too slow, or being clumsy, or annoying the hawk, or forgetting where the wind was, or anything else which proved handy. The setter, as wild as everybody else, quartered in front of us, out of contact. She had already sent away three packs of grouse that morning, by running in before we could catch up with her. She had also chased a hare. It was the kind of day on which peppery colonels will shout at dogs and thrash them and dance up and down on the mountainside, shaking their fists at heaven. Sometimes, if the dog is far enough away, they discharge their guns upon it.

We were scarcely a mile from Fraoch when Brownie got her set.

She held it.

We hurried.

She was hundreds of yards ahead. She looked over her shoulder at us. I began fatally to yell, 'Steady, steady!' Cressida recognized the point and wanted to take the air, but I checked her. She bated in fury.

Brownie looked over her shoulder a second time, and took one pace.

'Steady, steady!'

She began to snake forward, low to the ground, head and tail in a straight line, slowly, then less slowly, then faster. 'Steady, steady!' Encouraged by the uproar and stampede behind her, she dashed in.

They were off, flickering and whickering, close to the heather.

Cressida flew, half checked by me in a last second of indecision, stumbled in the air and was away. Perhaps they had a hundred yards start of her. She had no altitude and was out of training, because of her long holiday and moult.

Everybody seemed to be running or flying or barking or cursing as the grouse vanished in the distance.

And Cressida, defeated, threw up into the cobalt sky.

I swung the lure round and round my head at intervals till sunset. I blew the whistle. I went over in my mind all the things I ought to have done or ought not to have done. I sulked, with my tail between my legs, and could not encounter Bunny's eye. I tried to invent reasons why it was his fault, or Joyce's, or the dog's. There was nothing to be seen of Cressida—nothing in the wide world.

Before we went to dinner, I left some meat tied to the falcon's block, in case she should grow hungry and come home for it. I also constructed a special trap out of feathers and fishing line, which I had once before used successfully on her. It was not her first escape.

Dinner was a gloomy meal, though everybody tried to talk of something else. Bunny and Ray and their two children were experts at not blaming people for mischances, and they were also sensitive to feelings.

The sun set behind Slieve Fyagh, and a bright star lit itself beyond the shoulder of Corslieve, before I went bitterly to bed.

In the morning, the meat which was tied to the block had not been touched. The tiercel sat on his own block, alone, sometimes cocking his head sideways to gaze at the sky—a fact which I ought to have noticed. Everything felt loose or abandoned, like a tug-of-war in which the other team has let go the rope. I wandered about the garden after breakfast, feeling pointless.

But there must have been something at the back of my mind—an unconscious recollection of a trick I had once read about. I did not remember the trick consciously until I had played it. It developed by itself.

'Well, Joyce, we've lost her. We had better go and shoot some grouse for dinner. In any case, I want Brownie to settle down. Mr Garnett says he is going to try the river.'

'Very good, sir.'

Brownie had been wild because we were wild—anxiety is catching—and because she was confused by the falcons. She had been asked to work with no guns visible—which had muddled her—and it was the beginning of the season, and she was young, and Fraoch was a new place. Now that we were carrying guns instead of hawks and the place was more familiar, she began to behave. She found us a nice set in the flat bog below the Lodge and held it.

We caught up with her, gently patting the rigid rump to urge it very slowly forward, pace by pace. The birds did not want to fly—and I ought to have noticed that too. Trembling, on tiptoe almost, the tail straight and one front paw in the air, she crept with us right among them.

Then they were off. At the first bang, she dropped like a veteran. I chose the second bird and massacred that too.

Is it possible—for it seems so in retrospect—that Cressida struck the second bird before it touched the ground?

When a peregrine stoops from her pitch, you can actually hear the wind in her feathers—a sort of FFFFRP as she hurtles by. When she strikes a flying grouse, she bowls it over in a cloud of feathers, head over heels, exactly as if it had been shot. You can hear the thump. Then she sweeps upward in a stall turn and binds to the body.

So there she was—my beautiful, my crazy Cressida—clutching the dead bird in the heather and glaring at us with an expression I could not decypher. She mantled over the quarry, shielding it with greedy wings as if to keep us away. She began to pluck and toss away the feathers, starting at the head—for she had been superbly educated by the falconer who gave her to me, Gilbert Elaine. A peregrine is allowed the head for a reward, but the body goes to the kitchen.

I began to tremble like Brownie. I motioned to Joyce, to stay where he was and hold the bitch.

It was important not to approach too quickly. I waited till she was well into the brains and settling down to them. Then I walked to her slowly, rather circuitously, stood for a few moments, squatted, held out my glove. I lifted her, grouse and all—she not making the faintest protest—and with agonized fingers felt for the jesses which, once held, would bring her into my possession once again.

Joyce and I sighed simultaneously, deeply. I straightened up. We smiled warmly upon one another. God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

She had been there since we started—out of human sight in the dazzling sky above our heads and beautifully waiting-on. I remembered at last that this was a recognized way of reclaiming a lost falcon—to shoot a grouse for her, in case she was in the offing.

Joyce and I began talking quickly, both at once, telling each other all about it.

We detached the carcase from her talons when she had eaten the head, praising her and helping her to feed meanwhile. It was odd to see that the heather tops in the dead bird's crop were new and undigested.

Joyce collected the other bird and brought it back, after patting Brownie very much. He showed me something which I had not known before—that you can tell the age of a grouse by letting its weight hang from the lower jaw. If it is a young bird, the beak will break.

That evening, after the roast grouse and beautiful claret, with the same star beaming over Corslieve and the cairn of dead King David, I wrote these verses.

This sooty grouse, yet tawny and touched with red,

Weighs handsome on my hand, although he's dead.

One whig reflects the sky. A steely light

Gleams from the primaries he oiled last night,

The twelve bright swords on which he wove his flight.

His crop of heather, which my falcon split

In footing him, spills on my hand. Each bit

Is cleaner than cook's salad, fresh and green

With lilac buds surprising to be seen.

Such was his simple craft, to snip all day and seek

His livelihood of leaves with agricultural beak.

Joyce says: 'An old cock?' But some tint I see.

Reminding me of youth, I disagree.

'I think he's this year's bird.' Joyce takes him, dumb,

Opens the bleeding beak, inserts a thumb,

And weighs him by the lower jaw—which breaks.

'Quite right: this year's.' 'Why so?' 'Well, sir, it takes

An old bird to stand this. He's got more pate.

The young bird's jaw will break with his own weight.'

How did Man find this out? Who first took heart

To lift his grouse by that unlikely part

And go on lifting till he learned the art?

Seeing how stupid Man is, it's unnerving

To think how long he must have been observing.