For the first twelve months you must still be mistrustful of your passager. Some of the old writers advise not to try her at waiting on until she is intermewed. But when once she can be trusted she will do better than almost any eyess. To begin with, she can kill from a much lower pitch than the latter. She is swifter on the wing; she is a better footer; and she knows much better how to play her cards. And one of the best cards of a game-hawk is a high pitch. Why should she not play it? Has she not already done so to perfection long before you had the honour of her acquaintance? How often, in far northern lands, has she from above the highest mountains come down like a thunderbolt upon the fast-flying ptarmigan or shifty rock-pigeon? Does she not know that it is this altitude which gives power and success? When she has begun killing grouse she will soon enter into the spirit of the thing. Every bird--and a hawk not least--knows that what has happened once or twice may happen again. She was thrown off; she saw no lure, no rook. (For we took care, did we not, that none was in sight?) After a while you put up a grouse for her. And now, on another occasion, to the same beginning will there not be the same end? She will almost certainly think it well to be prepared for such a contingency; and the only way to be prepared is to get up a bit, and to remain pretty near the falconer. As soon as her pains have been rewarded she is "made." The mischief of it is that you cannot, with grouse, make sure of giving her these fair trials just when you wish. Grouse are such "contrairy" birds, that you cannot always find them when you have the best right to expect that you will. You must, however, do your best; and I, for one, verily believe that the hawk knows when you are doing your best. Otherwise, what is the moral of that pretty story, so well told by "Peregrine," of the falcon which, finding the pointer rather slow in putting up the covey, made a stoop at him by way of a gentle hint, and then got up to her pitch again? Black-game are still more difficult to take than grouse. An old cock will hardly be taken unless from a good pitch and under favourable circumstances. Grey-hens, however, have a way early in the season of sometimes lying very close; and when this happens, and the hawk happens to be waiting on near, she will cut the poor wretch down easily. With black-game the first stoop is generally the most deadly, but it must be made from a high pitch. A gerfalcon or tiercel stooping at an old blackcock in a really open place is the perfection of game-hawking, and from certain points of view--that of mere speed, for instance--the _ne plus ultra_ of all hawking.