I can probably visualize every goshawk sighting I have ever had; each seems unique and unforgettable. My most recent sighting was in almost exactly the same place as my first definite sighting long ago. She flew out towards me from the edge of my pine wood, slow and stately. A massive, powerful bird, how could I ever have mistaken her for a sparrowhawk? She flew lazily and inattentively, and saw me long after I had first spotted her. She was almost on top of me when she finally noticed me; she pulled up sharp, wheeled around and flew away in the direction she had come from. I followed the invisible pathway right to the spot where she had emerged from the wood. Inside the fenced area was a freshly killed rabbit. I had not missed the kill by long; the blood was still flowing, seeping into the grass. The goshawk had eaten nearly half of it, and I wondered whether she planned to return for the rest later or would abandon it now she’d had her fill. This wood harbours more rabbits than anywhere else on this side of the river. They dig their burrows all around the fringes of the wood, and emerge to feed in the fields alongside. They are timid though; they stay close to the edge of the wood, and race for cover at the slightest disturbance. Perhaps this rabbit had thought it was home and dry when it had made it through the fence; its corpse still pointed inwards, towards its burrow, towards safety.
I walked slowly around the perimeter of the wood, though I knew I would not see the hawk again now; she would be far away from here, resting off her meal in the dark heart of a different wood. At the far edge, almost directly opposite, I found the remains of a second rabbit, perhaps a couple of days dead, its plucked fur sifting through the trees. I wondered if one day the hawks might choose to summer here, and make this wood their own. This plantation is growing up fast, the trunks are stout columns now and it is gathering that monumental solemnity of the mature wood of Scots pine. There are broad rides through the trees that I carved with my own chainsaw, runways down the hill for the racing hawk. And of course it is stuffed with rabbits. The truth is, this wood will probably never be big enough for goshawks, but you can always hope.
The goshawks should have been the most frustrating of birds; they would disappear for long periods without warning and they would often tantalize with fleeting appearances, which were often not even enough to offer me a definitive identification, and yet I prized these sightings almost more than those of any other bird. Perhaps the challenges were part of the reward; perhaps this is why some people will go to such great lengths to pursue rarities. Of course if I wanted a good look at a goshawk I could easily have gone to a falconry centre and stared at one all day, eyeball to eyeball; I could even have flown one myself if I had taken a little trouble to organize it. I am sure that would have been a worthwhile experience, but in some respects it would not have been the same thing at all. The bird in the bush is worth ten in the hand. We take pleasure from watching birds partly because they are beautiful, but the birds that we see in our minds are more than just feather and bone, their appeal is not simply aesthetic. We watch them because of what they tell us about ourselves, and about our sense of what it means to be wild and free.
7. The Thief
There was a ritual I performed late every spring, whenever I felt that the time had come. I would take my bow saw off its hook on the woodshed wall and stroll down the hill to the stream. There I would work my way through the streamside hazels in search of the perfect hazel wand, just the right weight and thickness. I would take my time; the staff I would cut would be my companion all summer long. My summer season was a long one; when it was still spring in the woods, when the birds were still busy singing and nesting, I considered it summer in the hills. And when the leaves and the mushrooms were telling me that autumn had long since come, I would still be holding on. So long as there was life on the moors, and the weather was good enough to walk them, it was still my mountain summer.
As I wandered around the fields close to my home, I would often run into the farmer, and he would occasionally ask me to lend him a hand with whatever he was doing, if I wasn’t too busy. Which, let’s face it, I seldom was. Perhaps he would ask me to hold a reel of barbed wire while he restrung a fence. Or perhaps I would get sheepdog duties, guarding an open gate to make sure the sheep being rounded up didn’t make their escape. The farmer had two sheepdogs, a dog and a bitch, but the dog he described as the worst sheepdog in the world, and it was handy to have me there in case the dog noticed a squirrel, or had an itch that needed scratching, or felt like a quick nap. While I kept the farmer company, he would talk to me a little, mostly about sheep farming. He would pause and put his hand to his head and tip back his cap so that its peak pointed to the sky, and tell me stories about foot-rot and twins, about gelds and thieves. A geld is a ewe that has failed to produce a lamb, while a thief is one of the year’s lambs that has escaped the trip to market, and has instead been put up on the open sheepwalk to roam free for a season. A thief of time.
I too was a thief; I had stolen myself away from the world and had the freedom of the hills, for now at least. When I set off for the moors, often the steepest climb of the day would be my back field. The mountains here are whale-backed, smoothed by time. The sides are steep, but I was already high up on the hillside; once I was on the tops there were hundreds of square miles of rolling moorland, uninhabited and unfenced. The further I walked the wilder the land became, as the number of grazing sheep that had made it this far began to reduce. There were half-wild ponies up here too, with long shaggy manes. They would not run off but nor would they approach; instead they would freeze when they saw me and stare right back at me through their fringes for as long as I was in view. When the weather allowed, I would pack a bag, take my trusty staff, and set off on a sunny morning, not to return home for two or three or four days. I would walk into the westerly wind, with the clouds scudding towards me, making the hills a patchwork of light and shadow. The weather changed so quickly up here, but I could see for miles, and sometimes I would see the showers coming an hour before they reached me. This was a land of rainbows.
All day long I roamed the tops, then as the afternoon began to wear on I would walk to the first stream I came to and begin to follow it down. I would stop at the head of the valley, as soon as there was the first scattering of rowans and hawthorns, enough fallen sticks for me to build a small fire. Then I would find a dry, level patch of clear ground alongside the stream, light my fire, and boil up water in an old tin can with the lid folded back as a handle. I would make myself tea and eat whatever I had brought with me, and as darkness fell I would climb into my sleeping bag, lie back and look at the stars. I had the tiniest one-man tent too, only a few pounds in weight, as a contingency for a sudden change in the weather.
It is hard to do justice to the beauty of the night sky in these hills. With no light pollution for miles around, the gaps between the stars seemed to shrink to nothing. If I focused on the space between any two stars, more stars would appear to fill that space, and then still more to fill the spaces between them. The night sky became not a sprinkling of stars against a black backdrop, but a wash of unbroken light. The Milky Way was no longer milky; it had curdled, solidified like scrambled eggs in a pan. I would step outside on a clear night and it would make me gasp. I could never get used to it. And deep in the summer, when the Perseids came, there would be shooting stars every few seconds all night long. Drifting through space since time immemorial, then suddenly burning up in a blaze of glory, witnessed by no one save for me, by sheer chance looking at the right spot in the sky at the perfect moment. One night, sitting by my little fire by a mountainside stream counting off the shooting stars, I noticed a spectral green glow in the bracken beside me and followed the light to its source. A glow-worm, the first I had ever seen here, shining in the night like a star that had come to earth.