Читать книгу The Goshawk - T. H. White - Страница 12

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Gos had on the whole a pessimistic and apprehensive expression, a characteristic of most predatory creatures. We are pugnacious through our inferiority complexes. Even the pike’s ironic mouth has a hint of depression in it.

The day was probably typical of training a goshawk, only most austringers had better tempers. It was now nearly a week since I had devoted most of my time and all my thought to him, it was several days since he had begun stepping fairly regularly to the glove, and that morning he had been carried for four hours. So it was not rewarding when the extraordinary creature bated away the moment I entered at two-fifteen. I sat down for ten minutes about a yard from his perch, talking and whistling to him, holding out a piece of liver. He only bated absent-mindedly, so I went to pick him up. Now he bated in earnest, as if he had never seen me before. We had a scene in which at least the master behaved well, and at last we were able to sit down with him on the glove, trying to make him feed. He would not feed. No stroking, offering, nor teasing had any effect. I thought: well, we will go for a walk instead and feed when we get back. The moment the man stood up, with infinite caution and joint by joint, the bird started to behave like a lunatic. And a lunatic he verily was: probably not certifiable, and normally sane enough to outward appearances, yet a sufferer from intermittent delusional insanity. For the next five minutes, inside and outside the mews (the weather had broken again and there was a tempestuous wind blowing, a nuisance which he seemed to attribute to myself) for the next five minutes there was pandemonium. He screamed once, as he had used to do in his first days: it was the scream of a tortured maniac.

Now I too began to lose my temper. The week of ceaseless work, the fears which had always been there lest he should get ill—with the cramp that had killed that boy’s eyas spar-hawk, or the keks, or the vertigo, or any other terrible and curiously named ailment which the books spoke about—the culmination also of nervous strain in three nights’ watching: it was too much. Probably my unfathomable mind had been initially tending toward ill-humour that day, and this, indeed, may have been the cause of temper in Gos. Hawks were psychic, like red setters, and rage was contagious between unconscious hearts. Anyway, my self-control began to go. I lost it so far as anyone who might remotely dream of calling himself an austringer would dare to lose it: that is to say, ceased to help him back to the glove in the middle of a bate.

When the hawk flies off, in danger of being left to hang upside down, you can induce him back to the glove with a slight flick of the wrist while he is still beating his wings. I did not give this flip. Raging in my heart, I thought: Well then, bate you filthy bugger. Gos climbed back up his jesses, in a worse temper than before; but only to bate again. Now came the sin against the Holy Ghost. After half a dozen more bates—the flurry was almost continuous—I inclined my hand against his efforts to climb up the jess. Sometimes a hawk will fall off and hang passively, his head cocked sideways to observe the floor as he twists slowly round and round, and then it is reasonable to leave him hanging for a moment, while you collect yourself, straighten out the leash or jesses, and give him time to calm down. This was not a case of that. Gos was trying to get back, and capable of doing so, when I definitely thwarted him by twisting my hand against the leathers. Both our worlds were quite black.

In a second the fit was over. Gos, with mouth open and protruding tongue, was panting with amazement and staring at me in a high temperature, and I, with an equal temperature (exacerbated by a sense of guilt, for I had been in danger of setting back all my own work in a moment, in the mad urge to cut off my nose and spite my face) stood dumbstruck also, mobbed by most of the deadly sins.

Well, I thought, you had better go on the bow perch in the garden while I collect myself. We are obviously not fit for each other’s society today.

A bow perch looked exactly like the bow which won the battle of Agincourt, so like that it seemed impossible that the one should not have developed from the other. Somebody with a taste for archery as well as hawking must have stuck his bow into the ground for his hawk to sit on.

I took him to the perch, in a fury of scenes all the way, and went back to the mews with a saw, to make an alteration in the portable indoor perch which I had erected so that his sleeping quarters could be carried into the kitchen when he was being watched. This perch, which had evolved itself spontaneously, was a perch made out of a tea chest. It looked like this:

Two of the sides of the thing were cut away, so that if he was sitting on the perch his tail feathers could not fall foul of them. The other two sides were too far apart to interfere. There was a heavy stone in the middle to prevent the affair from capsizing when he bated away from it. It was probably an inefficient perch; but it was portable and I had invented it myself. Another merit was that it was highly suitable for people who happened to have tea chests.

By the time the alterations had been completed I had regained the official mastery of my soul, and could think in a direct line once more. I was happy because I had invented a nice perch. I felt that I could face Gos again, and went back to him on the lawn in a good temper, as heaven was my destination. I had recovered my manhood, my equanimous nature, my philanthropic and affable attitude towards the inefficient products of evolution which surrounded me. Gos had not.

He bated when I arrived and while he was being picked up: he bated all the way back to the mews: he bated in the mews, till I popped a bloody kidney into his mouth as he opened it to curse. In twenty minutes, without further transition, he had eaten a whole rabbit’s liver and leg, ravenously, as if he had been wanting to eat all the time, together with two or three small pieces of my forefinger and thumb which had been turning the red and greasy shreds for him to get a better purchase on them. Good, I was pleased with this triumph of patience, and erroneously thought that Gos was pleased too. His beak was decorated with small scraps of fur and sinew, and it was my office to clean them off. I lifted my hand to do so, as had been done without protest a score of times since the previous Wednesday. He bated. I tried again, gently. He bated. Again, cautiously. Bate, a worse one. I stood up. He tried to fly to his perch, which was out of range. I raised my hand. He tightened his feathers, stuck out his crop, dilated his eyes, opened his beak, panted a hot and smelly breath, and bated. I got warm and moved too quickly. In a minute it was a dog fight.

This time I was injudicious: but did nothing discreditable to humanity. In the heat and battle of the wings, with which he was striking me on the nose, knocking cigarettes out of my mouth, and for which one was continuously in the terrible fear of broken feathers, I kept repeating a sentence out of one of my books: ‘A hawk should never be disturbed after feeding.’ But also I was compelled to think that the beak must be cleaned, the authority established, the perseverance not now flouted lest it should be thought of as weak thereafter. I feared to give in lest the hawk should slip back.

After five minutes the beak was clean but Gos was in such a temper that his eyes were starting out of his head. He was a choleric beast. When he was like this it was possible to calm him down by slipping the bare hand over his crop, down his breast and under his stomach. Then, with four fingers between his legs, one could hold up the beating heart which seemed to fill the whole of his body. I did this now, and for two or three minutes Gos leaned forward on the hand exhausted: then, shutting his beak, giving his head a sudden twist, closing his wings, rousing and settling his feathers, taking an easier stance upon the fist, the unaccountable creature began to beam all over his face. He cocked an eye as if none of this had ever happened, and finished the rest of that day in a blaze of vernal confidence.