Landmarks (14 page)

~

The Peregrine
is not a book about watching a falcon but a book about becoming a falcon. In the opening pages, Baker sets out his manifesto of pursuit:

Wherever he goes
, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.

There, in four eldritch sentences, is the book’s chill heart. Baker hopes that, through a prolonged and ‘purified’ concentration upon the peregrine, he might be able to escape his ‘human shape’ and abscond into the ‘brilliant’ wildness of the bird.

He begins his ‘hunting life’ by learning to track his predatory prey. Peregrines can often fly so fast, and at such altitude, that to the human eye – especially the myopic human eye – they are invisible from the ground. But Baker discovers that they can be located by the disturbance they create among other birds, almost as the position of an invisible plane can be told from its contrail:
‘Evanescent as flame
,’ he writes on 7 October, ‘peregrines sear across the cold sky and are gone, leaving no sign in the blue haze above. But in the lower air a wake of birds trails back, and rises upward through the white helix of the gulls.’

As he improves his tracking skills, so Baker draws closer to the bird, and he begins to seek contact with it, through ritual mimicry of its behaviour and habits (a method that has affinities with those of revolutionary mid-twentieth-century ethologists such as Frank Fraser Darling and Konrad Lorenz). One November day he rests his hand on the grass where a peregrine has recently come to ground, and experiences
‘a strong feeling of proximity, identification’
. By December he has gone fully feral. Crossing a field one afternoon, he sees feathers blowing in the wind:

The body of a woodpigeon
lay breast upward on a mass of soft white feathers. The head had been eaten … The bones were still dark red, the blood still wet.

I found myself crouching over the kill, like a mantling hawk. My eyes turned quickly about, alert for the walking heads of men. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becoming the thing he hunts … We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun men.

The pronouns tell the story – ‘I’ turns into ‘we’; repetition becomes ritual; human dissolves into falcon. Allsop understood this drive for transformation to be the book’s central psychodrama:
‘The [book’s] strange and awful grip
,’ he wrote, ‘is in the author’s wrestling to be rid of his humanness, to enter the hawk’s feathers, skin and spirit.’

Why might a man want to become a bird? Baker’s illness, and the pained discomfort of his daily life, bear upon this question. The peregrines – in their speed and freedom of manoeuvre, with their fabulous vision – idealized the physical abilities of which the earthbound, joint-crabbed, eye-dimmed Baker had been deprived. One can hear a hint of envy when, one November, Baker notes seeing a
peregrine moving with
‘his usual loose-limbed panache’
. The falcons embody all that is unavailable to him, and so they become first his prosthesis and then his totem:
‘the hunter becoming the thing he hunts’
.

Baker was also suffering from intense species shame. The peregrines of Europe and North America were, at the time he wrote, suffering severe population decline. In 1962 Rachel Carson had alerted the world to the calamitous effects of pesticides on bird populations in
Silent Spring
. A year later
a British raptor specialist called Derek Ratcliffe had published a landmark paper
revealing the terrible impact of agrichemicals upon peregrine numbers in Britain. Pesticide use, notably DDT, was leading to an aggregation of toxins in raptor prey species, which in turn was causing eggshell thinning and nesting failure in the falcons. Their breeding success rate plummeted, with chicks typically dying in the egg. In 1939, Ratcliffe noted, there were 700 pairs of peregrines in Britain. A 1962 survey showed a decline to under half of this number, with only 68 pairs appearing to have reared chicks successfully. Baker was aware of both Ratcliffe and Carson’s work; as was J. G. Ballard, whose work Baker admired, and whose story ‘Storm-bird, Storm-dreamer’ (1966) imagines a future in which pesticide overuse has caused massive growth in the bird species of the country, who then begin coordinated attacks on the English crop-fields in an attempt to feed their vast hungers. The south-east English coastline becomes a militarized zone, with anti-aircraft guns mounted on barges, there to resist aerial attacks not by Heinkels but by hawks.

In the mid 1960s, as he laboured over his drafts of
The Peregrine
, it must have seemed likely to Baker that the peregrine would vanish from southern England, extinguished by what he called
‘the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals’
. Over a decade he had
watched the dwindling of peregrine numbers:
‘Few winter in England
now, fewer nest here … the ancient eyries are dying.’ Thus the atmosphere of requiem that prevails in
The Peregrine
: a sadness that things should be this way, mixed with a disbelief that they might be changed. Occasionally, the elegiac tone flares into anger. Out walking on 24 December, a day of cusps and little light, Baker finds a near-dead heron lying in a stubble field. Its wings are frozen to the ground, but in a ghastly thwarted escape, it tries to fly off:

As I approached I could see
its whole body craving into flight. But it could not fly. I gave it peace, and saw the agonised sunlight of its eyes slowly heal with cloud.

No pain, no death, is more terrible to a wild creature than its fear of man … A poisoned crow, gaping and helplessly floundering in the grass, bright yellow foam bubbling from its throat, will dash itself up again and again on to the descending wall of air, if you try to catch it. A rabbit, inflated and foul with myxomatosis … will feel the vibration of your footstep and will look for you with bulging, sightless eyes.

We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.

‘We stink of death. We carry it with us.’ By this point in
The Peregrine
, we understand these to be the words of a man who feels himself stricken with disease – and of a man appalled to belong to his own kind. He wants to resign his humanity, and to partake of both the far-sight and the guiltless murders of the falcon.

~

Towards the end of the afternoon in the archive, I took Baker’s telescopes and binoculars one by one to the window. There was a view of beech trees, concrete buildings, and a lecture hall with a curved zinc roof. I tried out each instrument in turn. When I extended the Steward scope, there was an ominous rattle from its interior. I held it to my eye and stared into milk. The eyepiece was misty, glaucous. I tried the other telescope, brass and heavy. But it was missing its front lens, and there was only blackness to be seen, with a tiny circle of light at its centre.

Both pairs of binoculars, though, were scratched but functioning. Through the Mirakels I tracked wood pigeons on their
clap-clap-glide
crossings of the campus sky, passing over the green-gold of late-season oaks. Through the Mirandas I watched a wagtail figure-eighting for flies above the zinc of the lecture hall.

Binocular vision is a peculiarly exclusive form of looking. It draws a circle around the focused-on object and shuts out the world’s generous remainder. What binoculars grant you in focus and reach, they deny you in periphery. To view an object through them is to see it in crisp isolation, encircled by blackness – as though at the end of a tunnel. They permit a lucidity of view but enforce a denial of context, and as such they seemed to me then the perfect emblem of Baker’s own intense, and intensely limited, vision. I thought of him out in the field towards the end of his decade of hedge-haunting and hawk-hunting; how difficult it must have become to hold the binoculars, as his finger joints thickened and fused, and his tendons tightened.

The Peregrine
, a record of obsession, has itself in turn provoked obsessions. It is a book which sets the mind aloft and holds it there. In the archive I found scores of admiring letters written to Baker by readers. Some wished to acquire his supernatural abilities as a
tracker:
‘I hope to have the good fortune
to see Peregrine somewhere in the [Blackwater] estuary on Thursday Feb 9th or Friday Feb 10th,’ wrote one – as if Baker the magus might magic these wild birds up to order. A student of mine was so inspired by
The Peregrine
’s vision of human irresponsibility that she became an eco-activist, paddling kayaks up rivers to gain illegal access to coal-fired power stations. Several years ago I came to know a young musician living a marginal life in a south London squat and performing as the front man for a hardcore punk-rock band. He was a talented and troubled person, for whom ‘nature’ as conventionally experienced was irrelevant, tending to incomprehensible. But he had found his way to
The Peregrine
, and the book’s dark fury spoke to him. He read it repeatedly, and began to mimic Baker’s mimicry of the falcons: once, on a London street outside a club, he demonstrated the action of ‘mantling’ – when a peregrine spreads its wings, fans its tail and arches over its prey to hide it from other predators. He and I collaborated on a project one summer and made plans to work together again. Then that December he died of a heroin overdose, aged twenty-three. He was lowered into the cold hard earth of a Cornish field a few days before Christmas, with the cars of his friends pulled up around the grave, their stereos blasting out his music in tribute. Buried with him was a copy of the book he revered above all others.

I am another of those obsessives, differently stricken, unable to free myself from
The Peregrine
’s grip. As Nan changed the way I see mountains, so Baker changed the way I see coasts and skies. I have written often about the book, and followed Baker’s own wanderings through Essex as best I have been able to reconstruct them: hunting the hunter’s huntings. The opening sentences of a book of mine called
The Wild Places
knowingly invoke the opening sentences of
The Peregrine
; Baker is present through the whole work, his style stooped into its prose.

When I have seen peregrines I have seen them, or I remember them, at least partly in Baker’s language. A falcon up at the Mare’s Tail waterfall in the Scottish Borders,
riding along the rim of the sky in a tremendous serration of rebounding dives and ascensions
, then dipping down in hooping dive to its nest on the cliffs of the cataract. A breeding pair high above a crag in misty sunlight on the side of long Loch Ericht in the Central Highlands, heard first, giving
high, husky muffled calls, keerk, keerk, keerk, keerk, keerk, sharp-edged and barbarous
, then appearing as
dark crossbow shapes
. And then the peregrine that morning, before leaving for the archive, first
a tremor at the edge of vision
, then at last
sculling away with quick wing flicks
.

The month I finished writing this chapter, eight months after I had been to the archive, a pair of peregrines took up residence on the great brown brick tower of the university library in Cambridge. They made their nest on a ledge high on the tower’s south side, in front of one of the small windows that let light into the dim miles of book-stacks. A friend told me one afternoon that they had arrived, and gave me directions to the window: South Front Floor 6, Case Number 42. I went the next morning, rising up the tower in a cranky lift, and approaching the window cautiously. I could see feather fluff and guano; then, tucked in tight to the retaining tiles, a clutch of three eggs, brick-red and black-flecked. And suddenly I stepped back, because she was there also,
scything in and up
to the edge of the ledge and perching, the feathers of her piebald breast
rippled by the wind
, her yellow feet gripping the ledge,
the ridged knuckles tense, and big with muscle
, and her great
black eyes looking into mine
, or rather through me,
as though they see something beyond me from which they cannot look away
.