Authors: Helen Macdonald
Tags: #Birdwatching Guides, #Animals, #Personal Memoirs, #Nature, #Biography & Autobiography, #Birds
I don’t own this land. I’ve only got permission to fly here. But in walking it over and over again and paying it the greatest attention I’ve made it mine. I know where its animals live, and how they move about it. Know that the larks sleep on the top of the hill, but on sunny mornings they move to warm themselves on eastward slopes. That when the weather is wet but the rain has stopped, the rabbits in the warrens near the ditches move eastward onto the drier fields to graze. This sense of where the animals are is the coincidence of long experience with unconsciously noted clues. The incidence of sunlight on a stubblefield, and the pressure of wind on the same. The precise colour of the ground. I move towards the larks as if I could see them.
But the biggest field – one planted with oilseed rape – is not like the others. It is a mystery. Walking it with Mabel is like playing natural-historical battleships. Anything could be living in those thick-packed bluish leaves. Pheasants, partridges, hares – even a jack snipe, whirring up with snappy wingbeats from a muddy patch near the hedge. It seems ludicrous that anything could be invisible in a bare two inches of herbage. But everything is. There is a sense of creation about it: when the hare leapt up from our feet today it was as if it had been made by the field
ex nihilo
. The hare had an ally: a strong north-easterly. Mabel tried twice to grab it, and both times it jinked across the wind and she missed. It is very strange watching a hawk chase a land animal in a high wind. The hare has purchase: its claws and furry pads dig into leaves and mud, and it uses the ground to propel itself against. But the hawk moves in air alone. It is like watching one element against another. One world verses another, like a gannet diving into the sea for fish. I am glad she did not catch the hare.
There is the tree Mabel dived from to cosh me on the head. There’s the invisible line in the air along which for the very first time she followed a cock pheasant to cover. There’s the hedge where she clung, tail fanned wide, wings pressed against twigs, looking for a pigeon already gone. There is the bramble bush that tripped me and pitched me into a flooded ditch. The hawk and I have a shared history of these fields. There are ghosts here, but they are not long-dead falconers. They are ghosts of things that happened.
It’s a child’s world, full of separate places. Give me a paper and pencil now and ask me to draw a map of the fields I roamed about when I was small, and I cannot do it. But change the question, and ask me to list what was there and I can fill pages. The wood ants’ nest. The newt pond. The oak covered in marble galls. The birches by the motorway fence with fly agarics at their feet. These things were the waypoints of my world. And other places became magic through happenstance. When I found a huge red underwing moth behind the electricity junction box at the end of my road, that box became a magic place. I needed to check behind it every time I walked past, though nothing was ever there. I’d run to check the place where once I’d caught a grass snake, look up at the tree that one afternoon had held a roosting owl. These places had a magical importance, a pull on me that other places did not, however devoid of life they were in all the visits since.
And now I’m giving Mabel her head, and letting her fly where she wants, I’ve discovered something rather wonderful. She is building a landscape of magical places too. She makes detours to check particular spots in case the rabbit or the pheasant that was there last week might be there again. It is wild superstition, it is an instinctive heuristic of the hunting mind, and it works. She is learning a particular way of navigating the world, and her map is coincident with mine. Memory and love and magic. What happened over the years of my expeditions as a child was a slow transformation of my landscape over time into what naturalists call a local patch, glowing with memory and meaning. Mabel is doing the same. She is making the hill her own. Mine. Ours.
26
The flight of time
IT’S TURNED COLD:
cold so that saucers of ice lie in the mud, blank and crazed as antique porcelain. Cold so the hedges are alive with Baltic blackbirds; so cold that each breath hangs like parcelled seafog in the air. The blue sky rings with it, and the bell on Mabel’s tail leg is dimmed with condensation. Cold, cold, cold. My feet crack the ice in the mud as I trudge uphill. And because the squeaks and grinding harmonics of fracturing ice sound to Mabel like a wounded animal, every step I take is met with a convulsive clench of her toes. Where the world isn’t white with frost, it’s striped green and brown in strong sunlight, so the land is particoloured and snapping backwards to dawn and forwards to dusk. The days, now, are a bare six hours long.
It’s my first day out with Mabel for a week. I’ve been interviewing students for my old college. For four days I’ve sat in front of frightened faces, asking them searching questions while trying to put them at ease. It was hard work. It felt like those first days with Mabel all over again. Now the interviews are over, and today I’ve been seduced by the weather. It is such a beautiful, fiery day, burning with ice and fine prospects, that I cannot imagine not being on the hill. I know my hawk is too high. I also know that after four days of enforced rest, she will be wanting to hunt very much indeed. What’s more, I’ve run out of chicks; Mabel has been eating nothing but quail for a week, and it’s made her a hot-tempered, choleric, Hotspur-on-coke, revenge-tragedy-protagonist goshawk. She is full of giddy nowhere-to-go desire. She foots her perch. She gets cross. She jumps in the bath and out again, and then in again. She glares. ‘Feed bloody food but three times a week,’ say the old books. Too much rich food and this is what happens.
Already I can see the mood she’s in, and I suspect if I let her go here, she’ll fly straight to the nearest tree and ignore me. So I take her to the top field. There are no trees up there. If she leaves the fist there’ll be no close perch to fly to – she’ll swing about in mid-air and come back to me. And she does, for a while, but then she starts eyeing the far hedge. I can’t see beyond it. Mabel knows there are pheasants in there; woodpigeons, too, and rabbit-holes along the ditch. She starts that curious autocue parallax-bobbing of her head and makes as if to go. And I let her go. It is stupid of me, but I do.
She flips her wings, glides away and disappears behind the hedge. I am strangely calm. I don’t even run. I amble in a leisurely manner towards it then realise, heart thumping, that I have no idea where she is. The hedge before me is an eight-foot wall of blackthorn needles. It’s impassable. I run up and down looking for passage.
There
. A gap the size of a porthole between two sturdy branches. I squirm through it, pretending I’m an eel. I’m not. There’s blood on my hands from the thorns on the ground, and the shoulder-strap of my hawking waistcoat hooks around a stubby branch. I’m caught. I try with all my might to keep going. There’s no time to turn and see where it’s snagged. Just brute force to try to release me. The branch snaps, and I ping forwards through the gap to land on my knees and the heels of my hands deep in a wet field of sprouting wheat. Mabel is nowhere to be seen.
I run into the middle of the field and look about. The wheat is pale and rich in the spectacular glare of the winter sun. Downhill is another hedge, and behind that another, and beyond that half an acre of pasture and a pale horse. No Mabel. I stand and listen, hard. No bells. Nothing. I whistle and call. Nothing. I get out the telemetry receiver for the first time.
Blip, blip, blip
. The signal is strong in all directions. Radiowaves propagate and bounce and confuse. I run around for ages with the aerial trying to get a fix, and eventually conclude that she’s sort of in that direction. I run. Down by the horse field, the ground is still frosted. White dust on hard black earth. Mabel is lost. I feel giddily, terribly alone. It’s not that I am worried about her. She’ll be fine. She’ll rocket around this landscape in high spirits, could live here for years. And just as I think this, a shotgun retort echoes from not far away.
Oh Christ
, I think.
She wouldn’t live long at all. Please don’t let her be shot. Don’t let that noise be someone shooting her
. I stand, stricken, and it is then, in the silence that follows the shot, that I hear crows. Angry crows. Thank God. And I follow the noise, and of course, there is Mabel. She’s sitting sun-washed on top of a hedge at the crest of the next hill. She’s blazing with intent. She’s chased something into cover; had seen a pheasant on the next rise and followed it here. I run across the field towards her and peer through the hedge to see where she’s looking. My heart sinks. It’s a jungle of saplings as tall as my shoulders woven together with briars and brambles. Thorns, thorns, thorns. There is no way I can flush the pheasant out of that. She makes little prospecting flights out over the brush, sallies that are slow to the point of stalling, before she returns to her branch, craning her neck behind her.
It’s in there,
she’s thinking.
I can find it.
I stand, panting, watching her for a while. We have to leave. This field, and the one beyond it, are not on our land. Even if I could flush that pheasant for her it would be poaching. And we’ve done enough inadvertent poaching to last a lifetime.
I call her. She ignores me. So I wait. And slowly, as the minutes pass, her predatory fire cools. Now she has returned to the world I am in. She can see me again.
There
, she thinks.
And she has a whole quail in her fist
. From her sunlit perch she descends to the hand I hold out in the shade of a hedge and I feel a surge of indescribable relief. I start shivering, cold and hot all at once.
The day-book that records White’s long, lost battle with Gos is not simply about his hawk. Underneath it all is history, and sexuality, and childhood, and landscape, and mastery, and medievalism, and war, and teaching and learning and love. All those things were going to be in the book he was writing about the hawk. When the hawk was lost he abandoned the attempt. But not entirely, because the book, in a different form, was still being finished, and the hawk would not be lost for ever.
At the beginning of
The Sword in the Stone
Sir Ector’s son Kay takes the Wart out hawking. He picks up Cully the goshawk from the castle mews – an unwise thing to do, for the hawk is deep in the moult and wildly out of condition. After a half-hearted sally at a rabbit the hawk takes stand on a high branch and ignores their calls. They follow it from tree to tree, whistling and luring, but the hawk is in no mood to return. Kay flies into a temper and storms home, but the Wart stays with the hawk, because he cannot bear it to be lost. He follows it into the deep wildwood, and there he is afraid.
Reading
The Sword in the Stone
after reading
The Goshawk
is a deeply curious thing. You start to confuse which forest is which. One is the tangled wildwood of Arthur’s Britain, a refuge for outlaws, hawks and wicked men. The other is the tangled forest around Stowe. It too is a refuge for outlaws, hawks and wicked men, the place White hoped would give him the freedom to be who he was. Like the forest in
Sir Orfeo
, the forests of White’s imagination exist in two worlds at once, and it is into these strange, doubled woods that the lost hawk leads the Wart. In following it, the boy is drawn to his destiny, just as White had been drawn to his own by looking for Gos.
Night falls. The Wart sleeps under a tree, and the next morning he comes across a high-gabled stone cottage in a clearing in the wood. Outside it, drawing water from a well, is a tall elderly man with spectacles and a long white beard, wearing a gown splashed with mutes and embroidered with stars and leaves and mystical signs. It is his teacher, Merlyn the magician, and when the Wart walks into his cottage he finds it is a treasury of wonderful things: thousands of books, stuffed birds, live grass snakes in an aquarium, baby badgers, an owl called Archimedes. There is Venetian glass, a set of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, paint-boxes, fossils, a bottle of Mastic varnish, purse-nets and rabbit-wires, a rod-box, salmon flies, and a fox’s mask mounted on the wall. Nearly all of these things were in White’s cottage as he wrote. The book was White’s ‘Kingdom of Grammerie’,
1
wrote Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘where there was room and redress for anything he liked to put in it’. But there is another way of reading this scene, one far less mundane than a writer’s amusement at putting in his book the things around him as he writes: it is that Merlyn’s cottage in the woods is his own.
On White’s shelves were a whole clutch of books on human psychology. He’d read them, underlined passages, made notes in the margins on the pathology of sexual deviance. In Alfred Adler’s
Individual Psychology
he’d found a whole chapter on homosexuality. It held that the attitude of homosexuals was ‘that of people desirous of interfering with the flight of time’.
2
Adler thought homosexuals were irresponsible because they refused to develop into heterosexual adulthood. But interfering with the flight of time? Words once read run deep.
For White was certainly interfering with time. He was turning it backwards. In that green mound of a grave he had achieved invisibility, and after he emerged he felt he ‘had turned St Lucie’s day’, the shortest, darkest day of the year from which the earth rolls back toward spring. He spoke of that time as a rebirth: wrote that life ‘seemed to be creating itself, seemed in the blank walls of chaos to be discovering an opening, or speck of light’.
3
In his imagination, the grave was his dissolution. He had lost the war with Gos, and it had killed the man he was. But now, with his apocalyptic, child’s vision of redemption, he saw himself reborn into the world with wisdom. And reborn, too, as a man living backwards in time. I used to think Merlyn was a magnificent literary creation, but now I think of him as a much stranger invention – White’s imagined future self. Merlyn was ‘born at the wrong end of Time’.
4
He must ‘live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind’. This backwards life is what gives Merlyn his ability to predict the future – for him, it is always his past. In White’s 1941 conclusion to
The Once and Future King
, published much later as
The Book of Merlyn
, Arthur awaits his final battle. He is elderly now, tired and despairing, and when Merlyn appears he wonders if the wizard is a dream. Merlyn rebukes him. ‘When I was a third-rate schoolmaster in the twentieth century,’
5
he snaps, ‘every single boy I ever met wrote essays for me which ended: Then he woke up.’