Breakin' the law

I did something illegal and immoral last night.

I poached. Even worse, I poached on a nature reserve. I didn't catch anything, but being caught in possession of a goshawk in yarak on a rabbity field would, I think, be sufficient to establish 'intent' in this case.

I glassed the car-park and the field. No dog-walkers. Check. No birdwatchers. Check. No punters out for an evening stroll. Check. And off we crept, gos and I, off to the top wood, where the rabbits are. Sneaked around the corner of the wood. About thirty yards away, a little way out from the margin of the wood, were three rabbits, in sillhouette, ears glowing backlit by the sun. Surely there were more there, crouching to feed. Ah yes. Fringes of dry grass. There. Hop hop. And next to them, a cock pheasant. Such a quiet, lovely, sylvan scene. Into which I intended to let slip havoc and murder.

I stalked. I stalked around the edge of the wood, crouching low, holding my breath. Gos had her wings out from her sides, her head snaky, reptilian, eyes glowing. I felt like I was holding the bastard offspring of a flaming torch and an assault rifle. Soft grass underfoot. One hand out to steady my way, we picked our way around to the final corner. And then I slowly extended my gloved fist out from the screen of brush.

Gos left the fist with the recoil of a .303. I stepped out to watch. Saw a chain of events so fast they snapped into a comic strip: frame, frame, frame. Frame one: gos spluttering from the fist in bars and pinions and talons. Frame two: gos low to the ground, grass streaking along under her. Chocolate wings, beating strongly, hump-backed. Frame three: rabbits running. Frame four: The pheasant too, crouching and running into the wood's safe margin.

But it wasn't safe. Split-second, ink-starred decisions in the gos's tactical computer. She slewed round sling-shot style, heel-bow, soaking up g-force like a sponge. Closed her wings and was gone. Sucked into the black hole of the wood, beneath a low-hanging larch branch. Everything disappeared. No rabbits, no pheasant, no gos. Just a black hole in the wood's edge. It had gone very quiet. There was the distant coc-coc-coc of a scared pheasant.

I ran into the wood. Ooh weird.

We'd been hawking in the soft, woolly haze of a sunny autumn evening. Soft grass, meadow brown butterflies; a comfortable, easy light. Walking into the wood, the temperature dropped by five degrees, and the light by several stops. It was dark. And cold. Outside, a late summer evening in England. In here, Norway. I half-expected to feel grains of snow pattering through the needles. I stood, slightly unnerved. Looked about. Nothing. No hawk. What to do now?

I stood very still and listened. Strained to hear through the dark. Listened so hard the air became particulate: sound no longer sound, but compression waves through billions of molecules of air. But there was no sound at all. Dead, muffled silence between larch trunks.

And then, some way off to my left — a long way off — I heard a scuffle and breaking sticks and the unmistakeable sound of hawk bells. I broke through brush, blindly. I thought I'd heard a squeal in the sound; maybe she had a rabbit. Silence again, except for my breathing hard and smashing through the branches of a fallen tree, blind and brute, to get to the spot.

I saw her before I heard her. She came running out from a tangle of thornbushes capping a huge warren. Came at a run, barrel-chested, and flung herself up to my fist. Everything apart from her yellow-tinted cere and feet was black and white. Blackthorn, black needles, the hawk's white chest, black teardrop feathers, black talons. Black nose. White tailings of chalk from where the rabbits had dug. When she came back to my fist she had white chalk mud on her toes.

It's been a while since I've gone hawking like this. I had forgotten the radical change in subjectivity. I had forgotten how the world simultaneously dissolves to nothing, yet is presented in a form so utterly real and tangible, it almost hurts.

I have been telling myself, over the years, that hunting is very much like birdwatching. I had argued in academic papers that nature photography is very much like hunting. They share so much, I argued. I must have been mad. So I am going to say, for the record, here (and remember, nothing died), that hunting is nothing like either of those things. Nothing.