Man Against Hawk

THE GOSHAWK (215 pp.)--T. H. White --Putnam ($3.50).

"Sha-hou!" cries the hawksman as he sends his bird aloft. Some such command rang through the woodlands of Assyria 3,000 years ago, and carried down the Middle Ages. Every king had his eagles, every earl his peregrines, and even a knave might fly a kestrel. They brought pigeon and duck to the table, and sport to the afternoon.

The Goshawk is the story of one man's attempt to learn the ancient art for himself. In Author T. H. White's case, the attempt grew mostly out of an urge to pit himself against an exacting challenge, as another man might set out to climb a stubborn mountain. White, the author of a charming Arthurian tale, The Sword in the Stone, and of an excellent small novel, Mistress Masham's Repose, tells his story with an art and force that make it a book to remember.

Rage In a Mangold Eye. All that White knew about hawks to begin with, he had learned from three tracts on the subject and from an exchange of letters with two of the few remaining hawk-masters left in Europe. The bird was Gos, an untamed tiercel (male) of the largest European species of the short-winged hawks, only three inches smaller than a golden eagle. The scene of their encounter was a clearing in a Buckinghamshire wood, where White lived alone in a cottage.

The day the hawk arrived in a sack from Germany, White caught him by the leather jesses tied to his feet, and set him on his gloved fist. "For an instant he stared upon me with a mad, marigold or dandelion eye, all his plumage flat to the body and his head crouched like a snake's in fear or hatred, then bated wildly from the fist." Upside down he hung, by his jesses, screaming his rage.

From that moment, it was hawk or man. When White gently lifted Gos back to fist, he bated again. All night long Gos bated and Whits lifted him back. How long would it go on? Until White's patience cracked, or he fell asleep--in which case, the hawk-masters had assured him, the hawk would know that he was the stronger, and would die rather than be tamed--or until the hawk himself fell asleep on the fist. White knew that hawks sometimes held out for as long as nine days.

"Oh, the agony of patience," he writes. "At the thousandth bate in a day, on an arm that ached to the bone . . . merely to twitch him gently back to the glove . . . to reassure him with tranquillity, when one yearned ... to pound, pash, dismember!" After three days and three nights, the hawk fell asleep. The next day he was as wild as ever.

Circuits of Exultation. For the next six weeks, White carried him tirelessly about house, barn and fields. He stood "smiling into space" while Gos tore at his ungloved hand and ripped his cheek. After days of inching progress, Gos accepted a 24-yd. creance (length of twine). White's next job was to teach Gos to fly to his shoulder. At first White cringed as Gos pounced, claws first. There was always the chance that the hawk would strike at his face. Five yards, two yards--soon White could stare at the hawk until he was only a few inches away. The next step was to fly Gos against live game. But the end came suddenly. Gos flew to the end of his creance, snapped it, and soared free as the day he was born--except for a leather leash tying his legs. White chased him in vain. For three days Gos soared overhead in tremendous circuits of exultation. Then he flew away.

Writes White, who later succeeded in training other hawks and the more tractable falcon: "Nothing is more certain than that Gos entangled his jesses in one of the myriad trees of The Ridings, and there, hanging upside down by the mildewed leathers, his bundle of green bones and ruined feathers may still be swinging in the winter wind."

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