The Goshawk by T.H. White Page A

leash immediately for his evening meal, and ate the rabbit’s hind leg in its entirety, finishing bones, claws and all. It gave him something very like hiccups.
    Sitting on the night perch of his mews he looked up at the ceiling, wriggled his head and neck like an eel or snake dancer from Ind, attempted to thrust down those three enormous bones into his interior with a kind of shimmy, regarded me, hiccupping, with glassy eye.
    Reluctant to say good night I stood at the door, observing this astonishing and vaguely disquieting spectacle (would he be able to digest such a mouthful?) and thought about the morrow. It had been a splendid day. He would go back. He was sure to. Goshawks, and this was the second thing I had learned from experience, went back two paces every time they went forward one. ‘There is no short cut,’ said the good book, ‘to the training of a Gos.’
Tuesday
    I supposed that what I was going to write eventually would be the kind of book which would madden every accomplished falconer, and I was sorry that it should be so. I could imagine an aged austringer sitting at the very top of the tree which I was now so laboriously climbing. He had a pettish and know-all expression, soured by years of contact with intractable goshawks. So much of his patience had been absorbed by these creatures that he had none left for his fellow mortals. In appearance slightly crochetty — he would be wearing a twa-snooted-bonnet, and his long white moustachios would be waxed at the ends — he sat at the top of the ladder and proclaimed that he had been manning hawks for sixty years. What right had a cowardly recluse who fled from his fellow men, said he, to write about these almost fabulous creatures? Fools, he remarked in a very pouncy way, rushed in where angels feared to tread.
    But I was sure of one thing that I still loved, and that was learning. I had learned always, insatiably, looking for something which I wanted to know. Of all things which I had begun to learn or thrown aside almost at once, the most wildly yet tranquilly and enduringly happy had been the mystery of the divine salmon and his exquisite fly. Perhaps, in the end, giving up all other attempts, I should grow middle-aged and acquiesce in my second-hand destiny, which would be to lie beside a highland ripple in which my monster dwelled. Meanwhile the search continued, and with it the necessity of earning a living. It was easier to combine the two: to learn and then to write about it, thus making money out of what one loved. I determined to tell my aged austringer to come down out of his tree (an American idiom) because mine was not a falconer’s book at all. It would be a learner’s book only: in the last resort, a writer’s book, by one who might have tried in vain to be a falconer.
    I was proud of Gos. He flew to the fist quickly, though not far, for a small tit-bit, when taken up in the morning. He ate, coming a yard or two, much of the flesh off a large rabbit’s leg, given in small repeated offerings before noon. He was carried without unusual scenes from one o’clock till six, except for a small interval when I had to go off and shoot a rabbit, and then I decided to try him on the creance.
    A creance is a long length of twine, strong string or fishing line, not too heavy for the hawk to carry in flight. Usually, I believed, some assistant would carry the hawk while the master called it, tied by the creance, from the assistant’s fist to his own. But I had no assistant, and preferred not to have one.
    I set Gos down on a quiet railing and tied the creance to his leash. As a fisherman I was fond of knots, could indeed occasionally entertain myself by tying the blood knot, which Chaytor made romantic and famous as well as beautiful (which it had been all along), on odd bits of string. But now the knot had become a thing to fear as well as to love. At the other end of it there was a bird momently more valuable