The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker. Mark Cocker
Читать онлайн книгу.
or sleeping. The tiercel glided at two hundred feet, spread his wings and tail upon the billowing air, and turned down wind in a long and sweeping curve. Quickly his circles stretched away to the east, blown out elliptically by the force of the wind. Hundreds of birds rose beneath him. The most exciting thing about a hawk is the way in which it can create life from the still earth by conjuring flocks of birds into the air. All the feeding gulls and lapwings and woodpigeons went up from the big field between the road and the brook as the hawk circled above them. The farm seemed to be hidden by a sheet of white water, so close together were the rising gulls. Dark through the white gulls the sharp hawk dropped, shattering them apart like flinging white foam. When I lowered my binoculars, I saw that the birds around me had also been watching the hawk. In bushes and trees there were many sparrows, starlings, blackbirds and thrushes, looking east and steadily chattering and scolding. And all the way along the lanes, as I hurried east, there were huddles of small birds lining the hedges, shrilling their warning to the empty sky.
As I passed the farm, a flock of golden plover went up like a puff of gunsmoke. The whole flock streamed low, then slowly rose, like a single golden wing. When I reached ford lane, the trees by the pond were full of woodpigeons. None moved when I walked past them, but from the last tree of the line the peregrine flew up into the wind and circled east. The pigeons immediately left the trees, where they had been comparatively safe, and flew towards North Wood. They passed below the peregrine. He could have stooped at them if he had wished to do so. Woodpigeons are very fast and wary, but like teal they sometimes have a fatal weakness for flying towards danger instead of away from it.
In long arcs and tangents the hawk drifted slowly higher. From five hundred feet above the brook, without warning, he suddenly fell. He simply stopped, flung his wings up, dived vertically down. He seemed to split in two, his body shooting off like an arrow from the tight-strung bow of his wings. There was an unholy impetus in his falling, as though he had been hurled from the sky. It was hard to believe, afterwards, that it had happened at all. The best stoops are always like that, and they often miss. A few seconds later the hawk flew up from the brook and resumed his eastward circling, moving higher over the dark woods and orchards till he was lost to sight. I searched the fields, but found no kill. Woodpigeons in hawthorns, and snipe in the marshy ground, were tamed by their greater fear of the hawk. They did not fly when I went near them. Partridges crouched together in the longest grass.
Rain began, and the peregrine returned to the brook. He flew from an elm near the bridge, and I lost him at once in the hiss and shine of rain and the wet shuddering of the wind. He looked thin and keen, and very wild. When the rain stopped, the wind roared into frenzy. It was hard to stand still in the open, and I kept to the lee of the trees. At half past two the peregrine swung up into the eastern sky. He climbed vertically upward, like a salmon leaping in the great waves of air that broke against the cliff of South Wood. He dived to the trough of a wave, then rose steeply within it, flinging himself high in the air, on outstretched wings exultant. At five hundred feet he hung still, tail closed, wings curving far back with their tips almost touching the tip of his tail. He was stoopping horizontally forward at the speed of the oncoming wind. He rocked and swayed and shuddered, close-hauled in a roaring sea of air, his furled wings whipping and plying like wet canvas. Suddenly he plunged to the north, curved over to the vertical stoop, flourished his wings high, shrank small, and fell.
He fell so fast, he fired so furiously from the sky to the dark wood below, that his black shape dimmed to grey air, hidden in a shining cloud of speed. He drew the sky about him as he fell. It was final. It was death. There was nothing more. There could be nothing more. Dusk came early. Through the almost dark, the fearful pigeons flew quietly down to roost above the feathered bloodstain in the woodland ride.
December 17th
The low sun was dazzling, the south a polar blaze. The north wind was cold. The night’s frost was un-melted, white on the grass like salt, and crisp in the morning sun.
The falcon peregrine flew tentatively up wind, and hovered over the still, white fields. The air would not be warm enough for soaring for another hour at least; till then, she was simply passing the time. Her hovering was desultory. She moved idly from tree to tree. You can almost feel the boredom of a hawk that has bathed and preened and is neither hungry nor sleepy. It seems to lounge about, stirring up trouble, just for the sake of something to do.
The morning was strange and wraith-like, very pure and new. The frosted fields were quiet. The sun had no grip of warmth. Where the frost had gone, the dry grass smelt of hay. Golden plover were close, softly calling. A corn bunting sang. The north wind brittled icily in the pleached lattice of the hedges, and smote through the thorny gaps. A woodcock swished up from the darkness of a ditch into the stinging gleam of light. It flew north with deep, sharp wing-beats, then looser, shallower ones. The falcon went after it, in a leisurely disinterested way. She did not come back, so I went down to the river.
At midday she rose from the willows and floated up into the wind, gliding briefly, or moving the tips of her wings in small paddling circles. They quivered rapidly, as though they were merely vibrating in the wind. The growing warmth of the sun had told her she could soar. She was delicately feeling her way forward till she found the first rising of the warmer air. Over the dead oak she glided very slowly, then spread out her wings and tail, and turned down wind. In wide sweeping arcs she drifted to the south, circling a hundred feet above me. Her long, powerful head, like a hooked pike glaring from reeds, flexed slowly round as she scanned the fields below. The two deep-brown moustachial bars shone glossily in the sun, hanging down each side of the bill like strips of polished leather. The large dark eyes, and the bare white patches of skin in front of them, glinted black and white like wet flint. The low sun glowed the hawk’s colours into rich relief: copper and rust of dead beech leaves, shining damp-earth brown. She was a large and broad-winged hawk, a falcon unmistakably, spreading her long wings like a buzzard to win lift from the warm air rising from melting frost and from fields now steaming in the sun. I could almost hear the hiss and rustle of the parting air as she swished round in her taut muscular gliding.
Quickly she circled southward, turning in smaller arcs. I was afraid I would lose her in sun-dazzle, but she rose above it. She was moving faster, beating her wings between short glides, changing direction erratically. Sometimes she circled to left and right alternately, sometimes she went round clockwise. When circling alternately, she looked intently inwards or down; when she went round in the same direction, she looked outwards or straight ahead. She leaned round in steep banking curves. Over the roofs of farm buildings warm air was rising faster. Thrusting her wings in quick pumping movements, and gliding at steep upward angles, the hawk climbed to a thousand feet, and drifted south-east. Then her circling stopped. She floated on the white surface of the sky. Half-way to the woods she circled up as before, adding another five hundred feet to her height, till she was almost hidden in mist and distance. Suddenly she glided to the north, cutting away very fast, occasionally beating her wings in a flurry. She flew a mile in much less than a minute, sweeping down through the sky from South Wood to the river, following the line of the brook, till she pierced the horizon in a puff of white gulls. Throughout this long flight, over three miles of valley, she rose so far and fast that perspective did not level her down to earth, in spite of the distance covered. I saw her only against the sky. To trace her movements I had always to lower the binoculars through thirty to forty degrees to pick out the landmarks beneath. She was wholly of the sun and wind and the purity of sky.
Birds were still restless when I reached the place where she had descended. Gulls circled along the rim of the valley; lapwings flew over from the east. Remote as a star, the falcon glided out towards the estuary, a purple speck kindling and fading through the frost-fire of the sky.
December 18th
The silent east wind breathed white frost on to grass and trees and the edges of still water, and the sun did not melt it. The sun shone from a cobalt sky that curved down, through pale violet, to cold and white horizons.
The reservoir glittered in the sun, still as ice, and rippling with duck. Ten goosander launched upward from the water in crystal troughs of foam, and rose superbly through the sky. All were drakes. Their long red bills, sleek green heads, and narrow straining necks, led their heavy, lean, bomb-shaped bodies forward under the black and white flicking fins of their