The Snow Falcon (18 page)

The story told of the struggle between man and bird, and the bond that the man felt with his captive, but the novel also gave a background on the sport of falconry. The training of birds of prey for hunting, Michael learned, went back more than three thousand years. There are pictures in Egypt that show men carrying birds on their fists. As a sport, falconry flourished throughout the ages and across the world, but it declined in the twentieth century. A paper marker, which Michael assumed Frank had inserted between the pages for his benefit, had just a single large exclamation mark on it, and when Michael read the passage, he understood why.

During the Middle Ages, the marked place explained, English society decreed that a person’s rank determined the kind of hawk or falcon that he might keep. At the bottom of the list, a lowly knave might keep a kestrel, whereas a yeoman might keep a goshawk, and

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so on up to the king, who might own a peregrine falcon. At the very pinnacle, however, only an emperor could own a gyr falcon. They were highly prized for being the largest and swiftest of all falcons. Michael read an obscure fact: that the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea off the northern coast of England, was once leased from the crown, the annual rent being two gyr falcons. It caused him a wry smile when he read it. He wondered what the people of those days would think of him, not long released from prison, sitting in his woodshed with a flashlight to read by while a gyr falcon stood on her perch ten feet away in the gloom and watched him.

In The Goshawk, things ended badly. The author had never trained a hawk before, and he failed to understand some of the crucial elements of the art, which ultimately resulted in his hawk flying off with leather thongs, called jesses, and a leash still attached to her legs. (The leather thongs that Frank had sent were jesses for the gyr falcon.) The likely outcome, though the author never saw his hawk again, was that the leash tangled in a tree somewhere and the hawk then hung upside down, helplessly, until it died. It was a grim fate and one that plagued the author with remorse and guilt.

In the second part of T. . White’s novel, the author successfully trained another hawk, which he called Cully, and Michael decided to name the gyr after her because he’d enjoyed reading the book and because it was the first account of falconry that he’d seen. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t planning on becoming a falconer himself, but because his motive in training Cully lay in his desire to release her back to the wild, he needed to learn the skills of the sport. So Cully had to be fitted with jesses. They were about eight inches long and joined to one side of a swivel at their remote ends; the knotted cord was a leash that passed through the other side of the swivel, the swivel then preventing leash and jesses from becoming twisted.

Fitting the jesses had been a nerve-racking experience. He’d had to approach Cully carefully, getting closer each day and spending time simply sitting in her proximity while she watched him suspiciously. She would skitter to the far end of her perch, the brail that immobilized her injured wing preventing her from flying to the top of the woodpile stacked at the extreme end of the shed. He would talk softly to her, being sure to make no sudden movements that would startle her, and eventually she would tolerate him stroking her toes. It seemed a huge step backward to abuse her trust when it had been

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so patiently won, but there was no alternative: After twelve days of getting her used to him, he smoothly drew around her a piece of sheet he’d cut, effectively pinioning her good wing and dangerous feet. He’d practiced the maneuver repeatedly, using a vase in the house as a substitute falcon, and it all went off smoothly, though he did get bitten painfully when he neglected to be wary of Cully’s powerful beak. He’d quickly withdrawn his hand, surprised at the sharp pain and the fast-welling globule of dark blood that grew until it became a trickle running back across his wrist. After that he’d been more careful, and he’d worked quickly to attach the jesses to her ankles, then had released her and gone back to the shed’s farthest wall to see what she would do.

To his surprise, she didn’t seem to hold the procedure against him, and when he came back after leaving her to recover in solitude for an hour, she was no more wary of him than she had been before.

Several days later, he drove past Williams Lake and, taking a country road, followed the directions Frank had given him to his house. Frank lived half a mile off the road and several miles from the nearest village. Michael turned down a track and followed it across a flat plain toward a clump of trees, beyond which he glimpsed the roof of Frank’s neat two-story frame house. A stream ran past the property, flowing down from the hills that rose a mile away. Snow had fallen almost daily over the last week, and strong winds had gusted from the east, bringing freezing conditions. Without the forests that grew around Little River, the land here seemed empty, a vast white undulating scene marked occasionally by dark rocky promontories in the hills or clumps of winter trees.

As Michael pulled up in front of the house, a man came out and raised a hand in greeting. He was wearing jeans and boots and a heavy checked shirt beneath his parka. When they shook hands, his grip felt callused and tough.

“Frank Dobson? I’m Michael Somers.”

“Call me Frank. ‘Mike’ okay with you?”

“Fine,” Michael said, and as Frank’s gaze traveled to the back of the Nissan, Michael realized that this was the first person he’d met recently who hadn’t reacted to his name. To this man, he thought, he was just somebody who shared an interest.

“So this is your gyr, huh?” Frank went around the car, peering in through the windows.

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“Cully,” Michael said.

Frank looked at him a moment, then grinned and nodded. “I guess you liked the book, then? I was in England once, and I met a guy there who kept falcons and he gave me that book. He said he’d read it when he was at school—as part of the curriculum, I guess—and ever since then he’d been a falconer himself.”

Michael had worked out that Frank’s motive in lending him the novel went further than simply its value as a story. He thought it was about impressing upon him the privileged task he was undertaking in training a gyr falcon. And he imagined that Frank hoped he’d absorbed the cautionary aspect of the tale.

Cully sat on the perch Michael had rigged up in the back of the Nissan, tethered by her leash, which gave her freedom to walk back and forth. During the journey she’d used her one good wing to balance herself awkwardly, and now that they’d stopped, she looked much more at ease.

“How was it getting her in there?” Frank asked.

“Easier than I’d thought,” Michael said truthfully. He’d read how a falcon will plunge headlong from the falconer’s fist, her wings thrashing furiously until she became used to being carried that way. The thrashing was called bating. “I simply wore a glove and pressed against the back of her legs. She looked uncomfortable about it, but she stepped backward and stood there okay while I carried her out to the car.”

“What about the leash? Did you wrap it around your fingers?”

“Just like the book says,” Michael said.

Frank nodded approvingly. “With her wing bound up like that, she’s not going anywhere, but as soon as that brail is taken off, you’re going to find she’s not quite so placid. You have to make sure you’ve got a tight hold on that leash at all times; otherwise she’s going take off when you’re not expecting it, dangling those jesses and leash behind her.”

“Like in The Goshawk,” Michael said to show he’d got the point.

“That’s right,” Frank said. “I guess I’m not being too subtle, am I?”

“I can understand that. I don’t want to make any mistakes. I want to see her back safely where she belongs.”

“She’s beautiful,” Frank mused. “I’ve never seen a wild one before. I’ve seen one or two kept by falconers, but they were captive bred birds.”

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“Fit for an emperor?” Michael said.

Frank grinned approvingly. “Yeah, something like that, I guess.” Michael had the feeling he’d just passed his first test with flying colors.

FRANK LED THE way around the back of the house. “Leave your falcon there,” he said. “Let me introduce you to Florence.”

Michael thought that Frank must mean his wife, but when they came around the back, he saw a wooden outbuilding with a long open front, and no sign of anybody else. The building had a kind of awning running its length from the roof to about three feet from the ground. At the moment, the awning was propped open with poles at either end and one in the middle, but it was hinged at the top so that it could be lowered to cover the front.

Inside, a long wooden beam ran the length of the building. Standing on this, watching their approach, was some kind of hawk.

“This is Florence,” Frank said. “Just wait here a second and I’ll bring her out.” He went through a door and soon reemerged with the hawk on his fist, which was now protected by a leather gauntlet. The hawk had the look of an eagle, only smaller; it was perhaps slightly under two feet in length, a few inches short of Cully’s size. Next to her its plumage was almost dowdy, a deep russet, and instead of Cully’s almost black intelligent eyes it had bright orange pupils beneath heavily pronounced brows that gave it a perpetual glare, like a bad-tempered despot.

“Florence here’s a Harris hawk,” Frank told him. “She’s a whole lot different to your gyr.”

Michael started quoting the differences he could remember reading about between hawks and falcons. “She has the hawk’s characteristic orange eyes, which sometimes are yellow, and she has broad rounded wings and a long tail that are designed for soaring and for low-level hunting—maneuvering among trees, for instance.”

Frank gave an approving nod. “Falcons generally hunt by striking in the air, stooping down from above. That’s why they have long pointed wings and shorter tails. There are other differences, too—like the notching in the beak, for instance. But essentially it’s their hunting methods and the way they’ve adapted to them that separate them.”

Frank started to unthread the leash attached to Florence’s swivel

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and jesses. The jesses were different from the kind Michael had fitted to Cully. They had a knot at one end that passed through a brass eyelet that joined leather anklets on her legs, and once removed, only the anklets remained, no more obtrusive or a hindrance than marker rings.

“These jesses are what most people use these days,” Frank explained. “If she decided to take off somewhere, there’s nothing that’s going to snarl up and hang her from a tree or something. Before you go we’ll swap the ones I sent you for this type. I didn’t send these right away, because you need a tool to fix the brass eyelets in place, and it’s easier for you and your bird if there’s two people doing the job.”

He took a small piece of raw meat from a bag he had in his pocket and offered it to Florence; she seized it eagerly and swallowed it. Then Frank raised his fist, and the hawk opened her wings and launched herself into the air. She flew fifty yards across the ground, staying low, her wing tips brushing the snow, then swooped up into a tree.

She was an impressive sight up so close, slightly awe-inspiring.

“She’ll wait there for a minute until I call her down,” Frank said. “Or until she gets bored and decides to go off and look for some food.”

He took another piece of meat and held it in his gloved fist. Raising his hand, he called Florence’s name, and she came down out of the tree, her great wings flicking several times before she settled into a glide. Just at the right moment she fanned her tail and threw back her wings, her taloned feet reaching forward to grab the fist, and she landed with an audible smack against the leather. Her wings hung open for a second while she regained her balance, then she settled and seized the piece of meat.

“I wanted to show you this because it’s one of the most important lessons you need to learn about training any bird of prey,” Frank said. “You see, Florence and I have, I guess, what you might call a partnership going. The way it works is that she tolerates me so long as I feed her and show her plenty of respect, and that’s why she stays. If she hadn’t been hungry just then, I could have stood here all day calling her and she would likely as not have just ignored me. So rule number one is: Never fly a bird that isn’t hungry unless you want to lose her.”

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Michael had absorbed this lesson from The Goshawk. T. . White had lost his bird partly because he’d flown it when it wasn’t hungry. However, it was one thing to read about it in a book, something else to see a practical demonstration.

“One thing I don’t understand, though,” Michael said. “She could catch her own food if she wanted to, right? So why doesn’t she just take off?”

“She could,” Frank agreed. “The thing is, these birds are basically lazy but they’re not stupid. She knows she has it good with me. So long as she stays here, she doesn’t have to hunt every day, which for a hawk takes a lot of effort and uses up a lot of energy. She knows I’ll feed her, and she’s got a dry warm place to live. She’ll hunt rabbits with me, and she’ll let me take them from her after she’s eaten the brains, but she lets me do that only because she knows that’s the deal. Plus, it’s her decision. Every time I fly her, there’s nothing stopping her just leaving if that’s what she wants to do.”

“How long have you had her?” Michael asked.

“About four years. I’ve had falcons as well as hawks, but falcons are more trouble to keep.”

“In what way?”

“Because of the way they hunt, they have to be trained and flown differently. Florence here just comes to my fist, and when we’re hunting, I either carry her until we see something she can catch, or else if there’re trees around, I’ll let her just follow me around from branch to branch until I scare something out. Falcons often take birds on the wing, flying high and fast, and you have to train them to fly to a lure instead of the fist.”