Jerry was my master falconer. He must have been about forty but looked older, with the weather-beaten skin and burned-out gaze of someone who has spent a lot of time outdoors. A tattoo of a falcon graced his left forearm; his right forearm was crisscrossed with scars. He always wore a cap and carried a backpack mended with twine.
We’d meet at six in the morning on one of the rooftops of the city. He was used to rising early, the best time of day for training hawks. By the time I made it to the roof, Jerry would already be set up: the two birds on their perches, hare meat at hand, the duck-shaped lure on the ground.
Jerry taught me how to receive a hawk: left arm partially extended, body presented to the bird in three-quarters profile, more or less. The food should be visible in the glove—sight, of course, is the privileged sense of birds of prey, and once they spot the red of the blood, their gaze fixes on it. It’s important to keep a tight grip on the raw meat so that the hawk doesn’t simply land, snatch the morsel, and fly off again.
As the hawk approaches—magnificent wings extended—you may feel a moment of panic. You have to get a hold of yourself, though, and stay still, conveying that poise to the animal. Otherwise, the bird may sense your uncertainty and decide not to land on the glove after all, instead veering off at the last moment—sound of wings beating the air—and continuing on its way.
The hawk strikes the glove with a dull thud, a sudden weight that’s always greater than expected: the lightness of flight is deceptive. Almost immediately, you feel the grip: the bird’s toes—digits, phalanges—closing around the glove. You secure the jesses—those leather straps that hang from the hawk’s feet—hooking them around your thumb, while with your free hand you hide the bit of meat that lured the bird in. The animal’s gaze at first scrutinizes, intrudes, looks you up and down nervously, searching for the food you’ve stolen. But little by little, with the bait out of view, the bird grows calm. Simply closing your fist around the food is enough to dispel the hawk’s predatory anxiety, its restless look that seems to anticipate a gift of blood. And once the hawk is calm, it turns affectionate, looking at you with half-closed eyes, letting you stroke the soft feathers on its breast.
The very terms of falconry, which in Spanish have been preserved and passed down since the sixteenth century, express—with the sound, the certainty of speaking an encrypted language—the emotion of this encounter.
Falconry has the air of a secret community, a band of initiates who share a code, a glossary, and a fascination that captivates and converts. There are those who give up everything to be with hawks, leaving family and all ambition behind to spend their mornings staring into the mist with their left arm raised, holding up a bird.
Paradoxically, despite this appearance of a secret society, hunting with hawks is not necessarily a gregarious pastime. The relationship between falconer and bird is so intense it excludes all other company—an impermeable alliance. To watch Jerry interact with his Harris’s hawks was a lesson in itself: in empathy, in attention, in awareness of surroundings. No MFA in creative writing can teach you in two years what an experienced falconer can in two weeks.
Under Jerry’s instruction, I learned to train a hawk with a creance (a cord tied to one of its legs) so as to gradually gain its trust, allowing the bird to go a little farther each time before recalling it and always rewarding it with meat. Jerry taught me how to tame a wild hawk, how to man it—that is, get it used to being around people: “The bird has to be able to stay in a loud bar without flapping its wings, without getting startled,” he’d say. Jerry was—is—a complicated man, with an omnivorous passion that ended up devouring his life. Every morning, he’d weigh his two hawks on a scale, take them lovingly from their cages, and carry them off to fly in a park, where the nervous passersby would watch him with misgiving. Once a week, he’d take one of the birds to the country to hunt: an hour on public transportation, at the break of day, with a sleeping hawk on his arm. He’d return four hours later, happy, covered in dirt, smelling of blood, with two or three dead hares hidden under his vest.
I never asked Jerry how he got into falconry, what disappointments or what dreams caused him to become entangled in its nets. I assumed the role of the diligent apprentice and asked everything I could think of about the art itself, scribbling in my notebook words and phrases whose meanings I would later forget: improntar, timonera, pico a viento.
We were patient with each other. Jerry laughed freely when my uncertain fist conveyed anxiety to the hawk and caused it to turn back. I watched him with a mix of admiration and bewilderment when he explained the origin of each scar snaking up his arms: “This was one day when I took the hare away from her and she caught me with her talon,” he’d say.
His favorite hawk, the one he’d had longest, was named Greta.
I practiced falconry for only three or four months. I never had my own hawk, although I was tempted. I learned with Greta and always with Jerry by my side, ready to bail me out if the hawk ignored me. I spent a lot of time trying to put on Greta’s hood—a kind of mask that covers the eyes: these birds rest only in darkness—and summoning her unsuccessfully as she watched me haughtily from some distant branch.
I saw only one hare die, and that was enough for me. I’m an impressionable man. It happened in the wild hare country of Hidalgo State, a region of prickly pears and dust. Jerry explained how to advance silently, waiting for some motion among the branches of a shrub to betray the presence of a hare. For nearly two hours that morning, as it grew light, the mist lifted, and the sun began to beat down, we walked without coming across a thing. “There are days like that,” Jerry explained, “and others when three hares appear in twenty minutes.” The falcons were as impatient as we were and had begun to flutter on our fists, demanding we let them go free. The higher the temperature rose, the less game there would be. After spraying a little water on the hawks’ faces to refresh them, we marched on. And then it happened: in the distance, behind a rock, a barely perceptible movement that soon became unmistakable. “Hare!” Jerry shouted, and I launched Greta, who had already seen her quarry and was quivering in anticipation. Both birds flew and we followed, running to the cloud of dust and flapping wings at whose center the hare thrashed about, beyond hope now, pinned down by two hawks at once.
Jerry asked me to hold the hare while he pulled off his hawk. Then he squatted next to me. The hare’s shrieks were painful to the ears, a sound like the cries of a baby or the moans of a copulating she-cat. It branded itself on my memory. Finally, Jerry took out his knife and finished the hare off. We let the hawks eat a little, sprinkling blood here and there, as a reward. (“You call that gorging them,” he explained, giving the heart—coveted prize—to Greta.)
Later, once the hawks were back on their perches with their hoods on, Jerry cupped his hands and filled them with the still warm blood of the hare. “This is your baptism,” he said jokingly, spattering the blood all over my face. I endured the ritual with stoicism and disgust.
After the hunt, I rinsed my face with drinking water. On the way back, we stopped for barbacoa tacos at a roadside stand, and there I washed my face again, a little more thoroughly this time, with soap. But despite my double effort the scent of blood wouldn’t come off. Ana said it hung about me for a week.
The next weekend, Jerry asked me to come hunting with him again, but I didn’t feel up to repeating the experience. He seemed a little disappointed but said nothing, and we kept meeting on early weekday mornings to continue my training, flying the hawks from a rooftop or in a park.
In the end, I grew fond of the hawk, of Greta. I learned to recognize her moments of happiness, her signs of hunger. I acquired—with absurd difficulty—the assurance needed to spend several hours flying Greta and recalling her to the glove without her escaping. I received a few scratches, and I’d like to believe I learned other things I can’t put into words yet.
Then I went back to my life as an editor of books, a translator for hire, an aspiring writer. I went back to getting up late, to looking at the sky without expecting anything.
Jerry, for his part, continued his life as an early-rising falconer, and sometimes he sends me the odd picture of Greta with a fresh kill, like a proud father informing his friends of his child’s progress.
A few years passed, and one afternoon I caught myself thinking of hawks. I missed the particular variety of fear I felt knowing one of them was watching me. I remembered an exhibition of peregrine falcons I attended once with Jerry on a dusty plain, also in Hidalgo. Unlike Harris’s hawks, which are low-flying birds (meaning they hunt mostly rodents), peregrine falcons fly so high that they disappear from view, only to nosedive at astonishing speed until they collide full-on with a pigeon, killing it on impact.
I began to fantasize about what kind of raptor I would keep if I became a falconer. Goshawks are known for being particularly difficult. Kestrels are too small. Gyrfalcons strike me as very aristocratic, with their white plumage, more suited to people living far north. Training owls is for sorcerers and charlatans. Perhaps, I thought, I’d get a Harris’s hawk, like Greta. I missed Greta.
I remembered the devotion with which Jerry cared for his animals, and I longed for something similar: an all-consuming passion, an interspecies communion that would become my sole purpose in life. Something capable of making me rise at 5 a.m., in the cold and the rain, to head for open country. A magnetic north to align the mad disarray of my spiritual compasses.
Something strange started happening to me: I began to imagine personal catastrophes—divorces, addictions, violent deaths, sudden failures that would sweep aside my stability and my routine. The fantasy unfolded in my mind like a rather predictable movie: after the collapse, my life would change completely, I’d quit the city and, taking refuge in a shack beside some ravine, I’d devote myself full-time to raising a hawk. This daytime fantasy seeped into my dreams.
I had moved by then and was no longer living in Mexico. I couldn’t call Jerry on the phone and ask him to take me hunting again in the wild hare country of Hidalgo State. So I decided to substitute firsthand experience with books, with movies. I read everything I could about falconry, from ancient manuals and trade magazines to classic novels. I tried to inform myself a little about the Egyptian god Horus. My obsession was displaced, as so often, to the realm of letters on the page.
I was surprised to discover that my somber daydreams had a correlate in books. There are many stories in which a hawk shows up to fill an absence, to help overcome grief or to straighten out a character embittered by tragedy. Turning his or her back on the world but not daring to commit suicide, the protagonist pines away in solitude until salvation arrives in the form of a hawk.
For example, Kes—Ken Loach’s 1969 film adaptation of Billy Hines’s novel A Kestrel for a Knave—demonstrates this pattern nicely. Billy Casper is a solitary boy; he lives with his mother and an older brother who bullies him, taking advantage of the void left by an absent father. Billy’s life runs its course between beatings and scoldings with no clear purpose—until he adopts a kestrel and learns to train it by himself, with the help of a few books. The kestrel, named Kes, soon becomes the origin of a new stage and the motive for a new direction in the life of the protagonist. In retrospect, the story of Billy’s childhood couldn’t be told without the central part played by the animal, which later disappears under tragic circumstances.
H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald’s magnificent personal essay, recounts the narrator’s grieving process after the death of her father and how training a goshawk helped her to cope with and, in the final instance, survive her pain.
“Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how,” Macdonald writes. A hawk redeems when it’s ready, and it may also torment the falconer, postponing its grace. The human remains at the mercy of the animal, of its rhythms and caprices. At the same time, the animal lends itself as an emotional prosthesis, a crutch to sustain the mourner in his or her grief.
Macdonald also analyzes the case of T. H. White, whose 1951 memoir The Goshawk describes in detail the process—rich in cruelty, contrary to the principles of falconry—of training a goshawk by a battle of wills. Unlike Macdonald, White never succeeds in domesticating his bird, perhaps because a character flaw, a frustration—his inability to accept his homosexuality—prevents him from achieving the composure needed to coexist with hawks.
In The Peregrine, by J. A. Baker, the mere observation of peregrine falcons over the course of one winter on the coast of Essex accompanies a personal transformation of an almost mystical bent, recounted in resonantly lyrical prose that attains heights as lofty as those of the animal in question. (A recent Spanish translation by Marcelo Cohen, published by Sigilo, does justice to this rediscovered classic of English nature writing.)
What kind of transformation is it that hawks trigger or help bring about? In my reading—as in my meager experience—the hawk is a privileged portal to the animal world.
Falconers traditionally capture their hawks in the wild. Treatises remark on the advantages and disadvantages of trapping hawks at various stages of their development. A bird caught before it leaves the nest, while still covered in down, will grow up tamer and be easier to train. The disadvantage of this strategy is that the bird will have more difficulty learning to hunt and will never be as good a hunter as a hawk taken from the nest later, during the fledgling stage, or after it has flown a few times on its own.
A hawk captured early takes more readily to human hand because it confuses the falconer with its mother. In Loach’s film Kes, this quasi-symbiotic bonding goes both ways: the nestling hawk confuses Billy with its mother, while Billy identifies the hawk with his absent father.
When the eyes of hawk and falconer meet, their gaze constitutes an interstitial world, a space where the hawk belongs to a human family or the human to an avian one. The falconer experiences a partial restitution of his or her lost animal nature, a sense of belonging to a savage world that is leaving the door ajar, permitting a human to peer in without crossing the threshold.
In Greek mythology, this property of hawks is echoed in the goddess Kírkē, or Circe (the one with the pretty braids), whose name comes from kírkos, meaning hawk. Circe changes the men who arrive on her island into animals, but animals who retain their human minds. And in this intermediate or symbiotic space conjured up by the gaze of a hawk, the falconer finds, I believe, a salvific possibility.
I don’t know whether I’ll ever convert entirely to falconry. After so much flirting with the idea, I suppose only a personal tragedy of some magnitude could take me down that path, and I’d prefer that no such tragedy occur. I’m better off, perhaps, just reading and daydreaming.
What I can say for certain is that, when you have lived closely with hawks for some time, the shadow of the bird with its wings spread, silhouetted against the sunlit sky, will never leave you. The scent of the blood of the one hare I hunted with Greta will linger on under my beard, like a reminder that Circe could at any moment throw wide open the doors to my own inner animal.
(Tr. Philip K. Zimmerman)