The Goshawk by T.H. White Page A

dead: the red moon perceptibly rising, which I had seen to sink as a yellow one at dawn.
Thursday, Friday
    I had cured the bird of his repletion, by means of the fast which he had himself insisted on, and our long watch and longer walking had brought us back to the good terms which existed immediately after the first watch. I now proceeded innocently to stuff him up again, making him eat what would have more than sufficed for a jer-falcon, and at the same time continuing the efforts to make him jump to fist for the food. When he would even step to the glove I fed him, still fearful of the hunger trace.
    These two days were characterized by the hunt for food rather than by the carriage of the hawk. Having got it into my head that he was not eating as much as seemed necessary because he was tired of rabbits, I would buy beef steak from the butcher’s and spend the generally rainy or windy afternoons trying to shoot him a pigeon.
    The day, like all austringer’s days, would begin at six o’clock. One would finish writing at about eleven in the evening. Between these times the hawk would be carried for about six hours, and fed three or four times. There was in addition to this the housework and the pleasant occupation of making him spare jesses or other furniture. In the afternoons there was the shooting to be done, and on the Friday I had despaired of a pigeon and shot him a Frenchman — out of season. Gos, while he was being carried, began to keep his eye on external objects rather than on myself, and to bate from them rather than from me. The illegal Frenchman was a great success: half eaten at his evening dinner, with greedy pounces and madly gripping claws.
Saturday
    I got up at six o’clock as usual, and for confused reasons decided to get my own breakfast before the hawk’s. I was too sleepy to know very clearly what I was doing (one would make plans as one fell asleep and break them when one woke up) but there was some sort of idea at the back of the mind. There were about five great milestones in hawking: the moment when the hawk first ate, the moment when it gave in to its master after the watch, the moment when it flew to his fist, the moment when it flew to him a distance of a hundred yards, and the moment when it made its kill. I have left out the moment when it could be said to be manned to loud noises, bustle and traffic: it was difficult to determine that moment, so the list may be allowed to stand. As the day broke, then, we were still upon the threshold of the third step: we had been trying for days to make him fly for reward, without success. I knew that half the partridge was still left, of which the bird was madly fond, so that greed and hunger might join battle on my side: and I put off his breakfast until after my own, in order that the hunger might be increased.
    At half past seven I went out to the mews, spoke a few words in unlocking the dead keeper’s door, confronted the unfathomable raptor. Gos regarded me like the sphinx. I held out the partridge.
    It seemed that partridges were not attractive. Rather pathetically trying to cry up my own goods, I turned it this way and that, so that he could get a good view, ruffled the feathers like one of those travelling Indians trying to sell a rug, plucked out a few as if I intended to eat the horrid morsel myself. I could never make up my mind whether I was the master. Gos regarded me with tolerant contempt. He had no doubts about who was the slave, the ridiculous and subservient one who stood and waited. For himself, he had the whole day to fill in.
    I looked at my watch and stood still for fifteen minutes, saying: ‘I will give him a quarter of an hour.’ It meant standing motionless beside the bird, about a yard away from him, leaning forward like a butler and staring out of the door with the butler’s distant gaze. Even to look at one’s watch, one merely dropped the eyes without raising the wrist. The mangled bird