If you are intending to fly a hawk for the first time at a wild rook, get some other person who is out with a made hawk to be also ready with her. Then, if the first chance at a rook is not an easy one, let that other person throw off his hawk and keep yours for a less difficult flight. Wait, if possible, until you can find a quarry which is not too far off and not high in the air. If you can get up within a hundred yards or so of one on the ground to windward of you, so much the better. The moment he jumps up, off with the hood, and with a steady movement of the left arm forwards, something like that of a left-arm slow bowler, launch your hawk into the wind. Use whatever cry of encouragement you like, or use none at all; at anyrate, not any cry which you may have used in calling off. And if, in the excitement of the moment you should not throw away the hood, but stuff it into your pouch or pocket, that will also be satisfactory. If you drop it you are not likely to find it on the open down without some hours' search, if at all. Such presence of mind is, however, I am aware, rather too great to expect. A rook with any self-respect about him will begin to mount as soon as he is aware that he is being pursued. And of this fact he will not be long in ignorance. Seldom does a trained hawk make half a dozen strokes of her wing before the quarry espies her and knows exactly what she means. With this knowledge the black-a-moor of the air wakes up, and then, if never before, he is on his mettle. Few people know how a rook can fly until they have seen him in front of a peregrine which means business. His wings are broad and strong, and not much worse shaped than a hawk's. His muscles are good; and by reason of much daily exercise in all weathers he is in good condition--better far, perhaps, than your passage hawk, which was cooped up inactive for weeks, and only during the last fortnight or so has had a modicum of exercise while flying to the lure. The two birds will breast the wind as they mount; but not necessarily taking the same line. Sometimes the two lines will diverge so much that from your point of view behind, the birds seem to be flying away from one another. Generally speaking, the better the hawk the less slavishly will she follow the course taken by the quarry. She flies "with her head," and, trusting for victory to the long, powerful stoop, concentrates her efforts on attaining to a position from which she can deliver it to best advantage. Thus if, the wind being north, and the safest shelter west, the rook shapes his course to the north-west, the falcon may very probably steer due west. By doing so she makes sure that she will soon be almost between the quarry and that desirable place of refuge. To make it he must come right past her and under her. Or else he must keep away and make for another covert, and in that case he will have a long way to go; and there will be time to catch him up, and get between him and that other haven.