outside. Man her in the streets.’ I know he is right. It’s time for the next stage of training.
Carriage is what falconers call walking with a hawk to tame it, and all my books insisted it was the key to a well-trained gos. ‘The key to her management is to carry, carry, carry,’ 3 wrote Gilbert Blaine. It was ‘the grand secret of discipline’ 4 to Edward Michell. Back in the seventeenth century Edward Bert had explained that when you walk with a hawk ‘her eye doth still behold change of objects’, which is why carriage works – and why you can’t tame a hawk by keeping her indoors. Such a hawk ‘will endure nothing, because shee hath not beene made acquainted with any thing’, 5 he says. Oh, Edmund Bert , I think. I wish it was still the seventeenth century. There’d have been fewer things out there to frighten my hawk .
But I knew that wasn’t true. There’d have been carts and horses and crowds and dogs and they’d have been just as frightening for a half-manned goshawk as buses and mopeds and students on bikes. The difference was that in 1615 no one would have paid me the slightest attention. Hawks on the streets of Cambridge would have been as unremarkable a sight as dogs on leads today. Walking with my hawk will be an open invitation for everyone to come up and stare, and enquire, and quiz me about the hawk, and what she is, and who I am, and why. And beneath my disinclination to engage in conversation there is a much simpler terror: people. Just people. I don’t want to see people at all. After the door is closed I look at it for a long while, rubbing my cheek where the cushion had left a deep, indented scar.
Later that afternoon I take Mabel into the walled garden of my college house. Above us is a deep field of fast-moving cumulus. Branches lift in the breeze; leaves shift with a collapsing, papery flicker. The air is thick with sun and dust and dandelion seeds. There’s too much light, too much contrast. Too much noise and movement. I flinch at the hurry of it all. But the hawk? The hawk is unperturbed. She tips her head sideways to look up at the moving clouds – in daylight her irises are flat and shiny and slightly blurred, with pupils that dilate and contract like a camera lens as she focuses – zip-zip-zip – up to track a passing Cessna – and then she turns her head upside down to watch a fly, and then tracks another fly, and pulls abstractedly at the meat I hold in the glove, and watches other things way, way beyond my poor human vision.
The world she lives in is not mine. Life is faster for her; time runs slower. Her eyes can follow the wingbeats of a bee as easily as ours follow the wingbeats of a bird. What is she seeing? I wonder, and my brain does backflips trying to imagine it, because I can’t. I have three different receptor-sensitivities in my eyes: red, green and blue. Hawks, like other birds, have four. This hawk can see colours I cannot, right into the ultraviolet spectrum. She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth. The light falling into her deep black pupils is registered with such frightening precision that she can see with fierce clarity things I can’t possibly resolve from the generalised blur. The claws on the toes of the house martins overhead. The veins on the wings of the white butterfly hunting its wavering course over the mustards at the end of the garden. I’m standing there, my sorry human eyes overwhelmed by light and detail, while the hawk watches everything with the greedy intensity of a child filling in a colouring book, scribbling joyously, blocking in colour, making the pages its own. And all I can think is, I want to go back inside .
11
Leaving home
KEYS IN POCKET, hawk on fist, and off we go. Leaving the house that evening is frightening. Somewhere in my mind ropes uncoil and fall. It feels like an unmooring, as if
Carriage is what falconers call walking with a hawk to tame it, and all my books insisted it was the key to a well-trained gos. ‘The key to her management is to carry, carry, carry,’ 3 wrote Gilbert Blaine. It was ‘the grand secret of discipline’ 4 to Edward Michell. Back in the seventeenth century Edward Bert had explained that when you walk with a hawk ‘her eye doth still behold change of objects’, which is why carriage works – and why you can’t tame a hawk by keeping her indoors. Such a hawk ‘will endure nothing, because shee hath not beene made acquainted with any thing’, 5 he says. Oh, Edmund Bert , I think. I wish it was still the seventeenth century. There’d have been fewer things out there to frighten my hawk .
But I knew that wasn’t true. There’d have been carts and horses and crowds and dogs and they’d have been just as frightening for a half-manned goshawk as buses and mopeds and students on bikes. The difference was that in 1615 no one would have paid me the slightest attention. Hawks on the streets of Cambridge would have been as unremarkable a sight as dogs on leads today. Walking with my hawk will be an open invitation for everyone to come up and stare, and enquire, and quiz me about the hawk, and what she is, and who I am, and why. And beneath my disinclination to engage in conversation there is a much simpler terror: people. Just people. I don’t want to see people at all. After the door is closed I look at it for a long while, rubbing my cheek where the cushion had left a deep, indented scar.
Later that afternoon I take Mabel into the walled garden of my college house. Above us is a deep field of fast-moving cumulus. Branches lift in the breeze; leaves shift with a collapsing, papery flicker. The air is thick with sun and dust and dandelion seeds. There’s too much light, too much contrast. Too much noise and movement. I flinch at the hurry of it all. But the hawk? The hawk is unperturbed. She tips her head sideways to look up at the moving clouds – in daylight her irises are flat and shiny and slightly blurred, with pupils that dilate and contract like a camera lens as she focuses – zip-zip-zip – up to track a passing Cessna – and then she turns her head upside down to watch a fly, and then tracks another fly, and pulls abstractedly at the meat I hold in the glove, and watches other things way, way beyond my poor human vision.
The world she lives in is not mine. Life is faster for her; time runs slower. Her eyes can follow the wingbeats of a bee as easily as ours follow the wingbeats of a bird. What is she seeing? I wonder, and my brain does backflips trying to imagine it, because I can’t. I have three different receptor-sensitivities in my eyes: red, green and blue. Hawks, like other birds, have four. This hawk can see colours I cannot, right into the ultraviolet spectrum. She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth. The light falling into her deep black pupils is registered with such frightening precision that she can see with fierce clarity things I can’t possibly resolve from the generalised blur. The claws on the toes of the house martins overhead. The veins on the wings of the white butterfly hunting its wavering course over the mustards at the end of the garden. I’m standing there, my sorry human eyes overwhelmed by light and detail, while the hawk watches everything with the greedy intensity of a child filling in a colouring book, scribbling joyously, blocking in colour, making the pages its own. And all I can think is, I want to go back inside .
11
Leaving home
KEYS IN POCKET, hawk on fist, and off we go. Leaving the house that evening is frightening. Somewhere in my mind ropes uncoil and fall. It feels like an unmooring, as if
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