Falcon Fever by Tim Gallagher

Author:Tim Gallagher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

12

Highland Fling

* * *

IN AUGUST, I finally did something I’d dreamed of since the 1960s: I visited the Highlands of Scotland to hawk red grouse. I’m just surprised it took me so long. Ever since the days when I first started reading British falconry books at Jimmie White’s house, I had wanted to experience grouse hawking in all its glory for myself.

I left for Britain just as Heathrow Airport had a big clampdown after a terrorist scare and barred all carry-on luggage. I had to put my computer, all of my camera equipment, clothes, and rubber wellies into uninsured check-in luggage, where they ended up being lost for three days. I arrived without having slept for more than thirty-five hours and had to step immediately into a stick-shift, right-hand-drive car and blast for three hours along a Scottish roadway, driving on the opposite side of the road from what I was used to and having to negotiate endless confusing roundabouts.

I was supposed to meet Roger and Mark Upton at two o’clock in the afternoon at their cottage near Dunbeath, in the heart of Caithness. It was just past noon when I picked up my rental car, and Dunbeath was a three-hour drive away. I knew I’d be late, and I had no way of getting in touch with them, so I just hit the A-9 highway and went speeding northward—across bridges and causeways, sometimes driving on two-way roads so narrow they would have been single lanes in America.

I finally got to Dunbeath, following Mark Upton’s explicit directions—the best directions anyone has ever given me in Britain. I turned left off the highway and skirted the village, driving up a single-track road, where if someone is coming the other way, one of you has to back up all the way to a wide spot to let the other person’s car get through. After going across an old stone cart bridge, up a hill, and through a gate, I found myself driving on a narrow gravel track cutting right through the bushes and shrubs, so close together they scratched and scraped the sides of my car as I burrowed through. But I found the place. And Roger and Mark were standing in front, miraculously just loading up their dark blue Land Rover. They had kindly waited for me, and Roger even paused to make me a cup of tea before we left. I immediately got my second wind, and we were off to fly peregrines at grouse.

We drove the Land Rover to the fence at the edge of a forty-thousand-acre grouse moor and loaded the peregrines, two tiercels and two falcons, onto a cadge—the traditional square-framed carrier that falconers have used for centuries to transport falcons in the field. From there, we trudged miles across spongy, tundra-like ground and through heather in a steady drizzle (this was Scotland, after all), taking turns carrying the cadge and holding the two pointers, Wag and Imp.

When we got our first point, Mark put up his seventeen-year-old tiercel, Oliver Twist, which took a moderate pitch, waiting on steadily overhead.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.