The Goshawk (New York Review Books Classics)

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I also liked the discussions of the weather, the descriptions of the English countryside and wildlife (very Colin Dann! I tend to favor the smaller books and picked it up, but almost put it back when I discovered it was about falconry, published years ago. After half a dozen more bates - the flurry was almost continuous - I inclined my hand against his efforts to climb up the jess. You would also love James’s job – if you had the head for heights and the physical and mental stamina.

Repressed queer energy emanating off this like something radioactive - and I was delighted to find afterwards that Sylvia Townsend Warner, queen dyke, wrote that he's a sadomasochistic homosexual! White and Cockerell first encountered each other — if that is the right word — anonymously and at a distance.

In typical English fashion, a hierarchy of raptors was allowed to the falconer or austringer depending on ones class; an eagle for an emperor, a peregrine for an earl, a goshawk for a yeoman, and a kestrel for a knave.

His attribution of human characteristics (angry, suspicious, ill-mannered, "ungovernable barbarian") to the hawk irked me, yet White's observations of the seasons and the natural world, his reflections on the nature of "wild" versus domestic and his awareness of his own shortcomings were too frequent and stirring for me to dismiss him. Sitting on the night perch of his mews he looked up at the ceiling, wriggled his head and neck like an eel or snake dancer from Ind, attempted to thrust down those three enormous bones into his interior with a kind of shimmy, regarded me, hiccuping, with glassy eye. I was a badger too, in my snug cottage that lay in the badger's wood: and when the war-world came to tear me apart with whoops and halloas, the young sow and myself would be quits.

The author calmly stroked the bird through each of these inevitable batings caused by new worldly contacts, and verbally soothed Gos with the frequent recitation of the hymn, Lord, My Shepherd. Yet something I read on the back cover or introduction gave me pause and I made the purchase, and am glad I did.