The story of a troubled lady - mostly if not entirely on account of the sudden death of her father - who took up a goshawk to provide some distraction. But the lady was an experienced falconer and it was not as if she was just starting out, she was not new to hawks even if she was new to goshawks. She was also something in the University of Cambridge and she also knew something of Freud, perhaps the result of having had a shot at being an analysand herself.
This book is partly the story of training the goshawk (called Mabel) and partly a reflection on T. H White, a chap who had tried to train a goshawk and went on to write a well known book about it all, a book which I last read, I think, in my early teens. I wonder now what on earth I could have made of it - knowing now what Ms. MacDonald tells me about White and his failings both as a person and as a falconer, at least at the time when he trained the goshawk of his book. Apart from being a very odd chap, partly because of his very odd upbringing, he also seems to have been one of those people who scuttled off to Ireland at the outbreak of the second world war, at which time he would have been in his early thirties and presumably of military age. As it happens, someone I came across quite recently in connection with a Ms. Masham. See reference 2.
The book contains various interesting snippets about life with a goshawk, some of which I share below.
Goshawks, at least this one, go for birds and animals on the ground, including rabbits. But they do not bother to kill a rabbit before they start to eat it. They just pin the thing down with a large foot and start eating. Some time after that the rabbit expires.
But in the case of a squirrel the goshawk has to be careful. Squirrels have been known to bite toes off.
Goshawks moult, which might take some weeks, if not months. Not clear how, in the wild, a goshawk feeds itself while this is going on. Perhaps they fatten up beforehand and can usually survive without eating for however long it takes.
I got the impression that goshawks were on the outer limits of what it was possible to tame, to turn into a pet, with even a trained hawk teetering on the edge of flying back into the wild - which would be unfortunate if it still had its jesses on, which were apt to get tangled up in branches, and so resulting in death of hawk by starvation. That said, Ms. MacDonald was able to play, at least to some extent, in the way one might with a cat or a dog, with Mabel. So Mabel was a bit more than a killing machine.
On the other hand, if one is up close and personal with a goshawk for a long time, one starts to take on its hunter & killer mind set. In the case of White, the allegation is that this provided an acceptable outlet for his sadism, otherwise completely repressed in his public self and in his childrens' books. Although, thinking about it now, not quite completely; the books do contain a lot of talk of sharp implements, such as spears and swords, and their uses. Talk which, even to a child, sometimes struck a rather odd note.
As it happens, at the same time as reading about goshawks in MacDonald, I was also reading about Sir Gawain, a tale which includes some long and sanguinary passages about hunting in the fourteenth century, in the Neilson translation (see reference 3). It seems that it was the custom at that time & place to butcher the animals - in this case deer and a wild boar - on the spot, where they were killed. Partly, I suppose, because the hounds needed their reward (of innards it seems) and partly because all the stuff that one did not want to eat could be dumped on the spot, reducing the refuse disposal requirements of the castle back home. So the story goes into quite a lot of detail about how exactly this was done, disguised to the extent that we no longer have words for all the bits and bobs involved, or at least they were not in the dictionary available to Mr. Neilson. A saving grace was the idea that one blew a special call on the horn, the mort, to mark each death, in part at least, in token of respect.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/tls.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/mistress-mashams-repose.html.
Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/sir-gawain.html.
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