The Art and Practice of HawkingMichell, E. B. (Edward Blair)
History
The Art and Practice of Hawking
Michell, E. B. (Edward Blair)
Falconry
should think it her duty to go for him.
Let us, however, speak of the eyess first, and we can see afterwards
what modifications are to be made in the case of the older hawk. When
your pupil will come well to the lure do not keep her long, if at all,
at work in stooping at it. On the contrary, let the interval between
the time when she is thrown off and the time when she is invited to
come down on the lure be as long as possible. Keep her on the wing
as long as you dare. But you must not at first go too far in this
direction. If you wear out her patience she may go to perch, either
on the ground or perhaps in a tree half a mile away. Take her down,
therefore, if you can, before she is too much tired. But if you should
make a mistake, and the inapt pupil goes to perch, do not hurry after
her, unless there is any special reason for doing so. Stay where you
are if she is well in sight; or, if not, move to a spot where she can
easily see you, and do not have the air of pursuing her. Make her
understand that, in this case, it is she who must come to you, and not
you to her. When she finds after a long sojourn in the tree or on the
ground, that after all, she has either to trouble herself to come or
else go without her food, she will be less likely to be troublesome
next time. She will think to herself, "What was the use of all that
delay? I might as well have kept on the wing and had my dinner sooner."
Such reflections are very salutary. You do not want to be beat by your
pupil, but your pupil to be beat by you, and to learn that your way
of doing things is the best both for her and for you. She will learn
it, too, if you go the right way to work and persevere. With an eyess
you have the whip hand. She cannot easily feed herself without you;
and she knows it. For weeks she has been indebted to you, directly or
indirectly, for her daily rations. Even in her wildest days at the
end of hack, when she would let no one come near her, she was often
watching you with eager eyes as you put out her meat on the hack
board, and since that, have you not always either given her her food on
the lure, or at all events taken her to a place where she could fly and
kill a quarry which you had put up for her?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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