Blood Ties by Ben Crane

Author:Ben Crane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

‘CC’

Summer

I am sitting at a small wooden table, eating ice cream with my son. He has strawberry. I have mint choc chip. His mother has gone off to get a cup of tea. I tell him about my egg and the chick that has just hatched. I tell him about Pakistan. He talks about learning about different religions at school, and we get sidetracked by different ways of life, cultures and people.

‘Are people born religious?’

‘No, we are born animals and pretend to forget.’

‘What’s a Mohammed?’

‘A prophet. A bit like a Jesus, except he flew falcons and didn’t go fishing or bake bread.’

‘Do you believe in God?’

‘Not really. God seems a bit obvious. It’s not nearly beautiful enough to explain it all. I don’t really believe in anything religious, to be honest. Do you believe in God?’

‘Not any more, but I believe in heaven and hell.’

The questions keep rolling. His mum returns and we eventually get back to my egg and chick. I ask him to think of a name beginning with ‘C’. Without hesitation he bounces back, ‘Chief,’ and I reply, ‘Catcher.’ The little chick has a name: Chief Catcher, or CC for short.

This is the first bird of prey my son has named. It will be the first hawk he has seen in flight and the first hawk he has seen hunting.

Imprinting

There are a variety of different ways to raise a hawk. Some are easier and more commonly understood than others. The history of falconry, its literature, novels and a large proportion of the falconry hawks used in the West are parent-reared. These hawks arrive at the falconer’s fully formed, having spent the first part of their lives raised by adult parents either in the wild or bred in captivity. The isolated nature of their formative weeks, without any form of human interaction, creates high levels of fear. Locked away through this fear, a hawk’s true nature is muffled, skewed and partially hidden. Similarly to Girl, parent-reared hawks possess an ‘otherness’, a separateness that remains difficult, if not impossible, to bridge. They have no real sense of loyalty or attachment, and very few falconers manage to overcome this barrier. Even the most observant human will only ever understand or relate to a parent-reared hawk through an opaque veil, guesswork and the prism of misplaced anthropomorphism.

CC is very different.

I will raise him using a method that contrasts significantly with parent-rearing. My aim is to imprint him. The process of imprinting a hawk is time-consuming and difficult to get right. As a method it is ancient, arguably first attempted by the berkutchi of Kazakhstan. As a process, it did not travel well through history, or along the trade routes where fully grown hawks and falcon were the norm and far easier to transport. Consequently, imprinting is little understood by people outside avian and scientific circles. Even within the small world of British falconry, only a handful of falconers regularly attempt or use imprinting consistently as a method of training.

If my journeys

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