Читать книгу The Goshawk - T. H. White - Страница 10

Table of Contents

A solitary and self-supporting austringer had little time in which to live a life of his own, could not, in fact, live at all except in so far as his life was his work. In this respect he resembled the agricultural labourer of the last century. For every holiday which he took away from the hawk, the hawk would go back in its training twice as fast as he could hope to make it go forward. Theoretically he ought to have carried the creature with him wherever he went, from dawn till dark, and ought only to have visited the places which suited the hawk. He was manning it now, introducing it successively to one shock after another. Its excursions were to be planned on this basis, so that it met a stranger standing still, a stranger walking and running, two strangers, children, groups, a bicyclist, a motor car, traffic, and so on. All the time it ought to have lived, and had to eat, on the glove alone. It had got to learn to regard that glove as its natural home and perch, so that, when the great and distant day arrived for flying it free, it would return to the glove automatically, having no life outside it. The quickest way to train a goshawk would have been to get up at six o’clock and to carry the bird about for twelve hours every day, for a month or two, without intermission.^[2] So that even a retainered austringer would have been a busy man.

I got up again at noon, for now the problem of food was becoming pressing. There was not only the ideal of carrying Gos all day, but also the necessity of killing his food and dressing my own. This brings in the next picture, not that of endurance by night nor of the ceaseless daily hardihood implicit in this kind of colonist’s existence, but the picture of the weather and the season. Nothing was more woven into the stuff of falconry than the sun and the wind. Being so much out in the open gave a tone to the whole thing, a background to life very different from any local background of tree or house. The same field or hawk was changed in rain, the same circumstances were happy or sorrowful as the sun shone. When I had been about the business for a month or two, farmers would ask me whether it was going to be fine on the morrow in much the same way as one is supposed to ask a mariner. They reposed but little confidence in my judgment, it is true, but occasionally they would take the trouble to ask and to reflect upon the answer; for they knew that my eye was in the sky as much as theirs. I was wrong about as often as they were; which was generally.

So there should be given a picture of the weather as we started. It was at the end of July, and, though the spring and summer had been miserable in England, just then we had a few fine moments. This cast a happy tone over the first days with Gos, so that they remember themselves as days of long walking. In the afternoons mainly I used to go out for his food, for it was preferable that he should be given fresh food every day. There were long tours, very contented to be alone at last, with the gun-barrel warm in the sun: there was the busy life of the summer hedges, with the wide stalks, and the quite untroubled murder of rabbits sitting. One was shooting not in the least for sport, but for the pot, and it was necessary to get back to the hawk as quickly as possible. The necessity of wasting no time and of killing with certainty had a terrible effect upon the shooting, making one poke out of anxiety, and I wondered what would happen when the next World War had reduced us to savagery and hunting for ourselves. The art of shooting flying would fall into abeyance then, with the looted cartridges scarce and the food so precious. When the cartridges had run right out the goshawk would be a real blessing. The French called him cuisinier, the caterer for the mess.

Then there was the queerly savage picture of the sun-broiled man, after he had crept upon the rabbit and assassinated it, knocking it quickly on the head, throwing it upon its back, and immediately beginning to draw the sharp blade of his knife across the skin of the stomach. The leisurely gentility with which the shooting man harls the dead body, and slings it over the hasp of a gate as something no longer interesting, were gone. I supposed a concealed watcher would have thought one quite animal again, like an aborigine or a fox, or even like the hawk itself. The sunny picture was first one of creeping movement, split up into sudden activity by the loud bang, the rush, the coup de grâce: and then again it was static, a little huddle of small movements mantling over the prey. It was necessary to eviscerate these rabbits as quickly as possible, because it kept them fresh.

It was on this day that I saw what I then thought was a pair of sparrow-hawks. Most shooting people in England notice one kind of hawk, the kestrel, and will shoot any hawk on the supposition that the species is antipathetic to the rearing of game. But now that one was suddenly plunged for the first time into the hawk world, stepping as it were on to another stratum of life or layer in the air, one began noticing hawks wherever one went, so that it was astonishing to see how many there were, previously unsuspected, in just a small circuit of a few miles. It was their wariness which made them escape observation, unless they were being looked for.

I was beginning to be accustomed to the type of cry given by hawks. Gos had several varieties, from his shrieks to his tiny child notes of irritation, whichipipee, eekipip, chip-chip; and each variety of predatory bird, including the little owl, had a special note which distinguished him from his fellows: yet the generic type remained constant among all of them, a beakiness of music which did not come from the throat. So I noticed that there was something hawkish going on, the moment I slipped into Three Parks Wood. Mew cried one voice, and mew answered another. Then, as it seemed, from all over the wood, the little voices cried and replied. Cui-cui-cui-cui-cui. It must have been a family, the parents and two or three eyases already well grown but not yet driven out. I was lucky enough to see two of them close. They came, chasing each other in furious play, darting between the branches until they were almost upon us: then they swung round the bole of a tree, showing their barred underparts in two perfect vertical banks, as if they were rounding a pylon at Hatfield, and vanished in the dim leafiness of the full summer wood.

[2]	See Postscript.