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any hawk on the supposition that the species is antipathetic to the rearing of game. But now that one was suddenly plunged for the first time into the hawk world, stepping as it were on to another stratum of life or layer in the air, one began noticing hawks wherever one went, so that it was astonishing to see how many there were, previously unsuspected, in just a small circuit of a few miles. It was their wariness which made them escape observation, unless they were being looked for.
    I was beginning to be accustomed to the type of cry given by hawks. Gos had several varieties, from his shrieks to his tiny child notes of irritation, whichipipee, eekipip, chip-chip; and each variety of predatory bird, including the little owl, had a special note which distinguished him from his fellows: yet the generic type remained constant among all of them, a beakiness of music which did not come from the throat. So I noticed that there was something hawkish going on, the moment I slipped into Three Parks Wood. Mew cried one voice, and mew answered another. Then, as it seemed, from all over the wood, the little voices cried and replied. Cui-cui-cui-cui-cui. It must have been a family, the parents and two or three eyases already well grown but not yet driven out. I was lucky enough to see two of them close. They came, chasing each other in furious play, darting between the branches until they were almost upon us: then they swung round the bole of a tree, showing their barred underparts in two perfect vertical banks, as if they were rounding a pylon at Hatfield, and vanished in the dim leafiness of the full summer wood.
Friday, Saturday, Sunday
    They were days of attack and counter-attack, a kind of sweeping to and fro across disputed battle fields. Gos had gone back a long way toward wildness with his first sleep. Each day the ceaseless calls of housekeeping and lardering called Crusoe away from him, as his educational needs called him back, and so it was backward and forward the whole time. Sometimes he would step to the glove after hesitation, but without temper, and sometimes he would fly away as if I had come to do him murder. We walked alone for hours every day, Gos sometimes conversing in amicable if puzzled mews, sometimes flapping and bating twice every minute. All the time there was a single commandment to be observed. Patience. There was no other weapon. In the face of all set-backs, of all stupidities, of all failures and scenes and exasperating blows across the face with his wings as he struggled, there was only one thing one could seek to do. Patience ceased to be negative, became a positive action. For it had to be active benevolence. One could torture the bird, merely by giving it a hard and bitter look.
    No wonder the old austringers used to love their hawks. The effort which went into them, the worry which they occasioned, the two months of human life devoted to them both waking and dreaming, these things made the hawk, for the man who trained it, a part of himself. I was startled by the upper classes, surprised by the gentleman who allowed a ghillie to gaff his salmon for him — it made the salmon so much the less his — and, with hawking especially, could not understand a nobleman who kept a falconer. What pleasure would he get, taking this strange bird from the fist of a stranger and hurling it into the air? But to the falconer, to the man who for two months had made that bird, almost like a mother nourishing her child inside her, for the sub-consciousness of the man and the bird became really linked by a mind’s cord: to the man who had created out of a part of his life, what pleasure to fly, what terror of disaster, what triumph of success!
    The end in view was to make Gos come for food. In the end he was to come a distance of at least a hundred yards, the moment he was called, but at present it was enough if he would first not fly away when I approached. Next he had to learn to step to the fist for a reward