The Goshawk by T.H. White

Author:T.H. White
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781590175460
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2012-04-24T23:00:00+00:00

Thursday

I lay in the long grass at Silston cross roads with Gos on the fist. The cars came past pretty regularly there. It was shady where we lay, with a good breeze keeping the trees alive, two men making hay in the fields opposite. Gos himself stood with full fluffed feathers and semi-contented eye, meditating standing on one leg. When he was in a good humour he would rouse his feathers, and this would leave them ruffled. Before he had done this, while the feathers lay close and sleek, you might be sure that he was not content. But if he had done it, and if he began further to stand on one leg, then you knew that you were in for peace.

It was a lovely day, and Gos was being as good as gold. He stood there, lifting the spare leg with clenched talons in tentative thrusts: a monocular or uhlan-officer expression on his face, as the eye remoter from the sun dilated more than the nearer one.

It was a scene perfectly idyllic — until another of the cars came by. Then down would go the rising claw, the erect posture would be lost, the hawk would flinch upon the fist with mad round-questing eye that meditated a bate, the feathers lying flat to his body.

I lay in the warm afternoon and thought about Gos. If one were to give him a proper name, what should it be? Hamlet would be suitable, or Macbeth (as he was subject to illusions): then there was Strindberg, or Van Gogh, or Astur, like the giant warrior in Macaulay (the hawk’s Latin name was Astur Palombarius): there was Baal, as in the poem by Kipling, or Tom (he who had the host of furious fancies), or Medici or Roderick Dhu (‘fierce lightning flashed from Roderick’s eye’), or Lord George Gordon of the lunatic riots, or Byron, or Odin, or Death, or Edgar Allen Poe, or Caligula, or Tarquin, or, for his happier moments, Gos: a cross between a gosling and a goose. Reflecting upon this problem I decided that the best solution would be to call him all of these. The last Duke of Buckingham had been called Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, and I could derive my goshawk’s lineage no lower than his.

On the way home Gos had a proper bath in a roadside ditch, ducked his head, toppled over, flapped his wings, splashed, paused to meditate and scratch his chin in the middle of it: all in the lovely sun and ripple.

At six o’clock we went out to the well and he was set down on the railing which enclosed it. While at Silston, half a pound of beef steak had been bought, and this had been divided into two equal parts. (The hawk had been given a rabbit’s hind leg that morning.) I had been out previously to the well and measured a piece of twine fifty yards long. One end of this was attached to the rail of the well, the other end extended down the ridings to its full extent.

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