Why I read the book: I heard about it somewhere quite a while ago and that it was good. It wasn’t at any of the libraries I frequent, and it took me this long to bother with inter-library loan. I like birds, and I’ve liked other things I’ve read by White, namely The Once and Future King and Mistress Masham’s Repose.

What the book was about: White decides he’s tired of people and wars (this is right before World War II). He lives in a cottage in the country and buys a Goshawk to train. (A falconer works with falcons — an austringer trains accipiters, short-winged bird hawks.)

He chronicles his battle of wills with Gos and talks of the methods he uses to train him — taken in part from the Treatise of Hawks and Hawking, which had been written in 1619. The song he used to whistle Gos in for food was a Scottish hymn, The Lord’s My Shepherd. When he had just about gotten to the point where he was going to teach Gos to hunt, the straps broke and the hawk flew off, probably to die entangled in a tree.

White spends the rest of the year trying to trap one of the smaller hawks in the neighborhood, then buys a second Goshawk, Cully, the next spring and has better luck with her.

What I liked about the book: Fascinating look at the discipline and patience it takes to train (never tame) a hawk, with side looks at life and nature.

What I didn’t like about the book: Nothing, really, although the writing was a bit obscure in places.

The most interesting quotes:

• I took him out, after he had stepped obediently to the fist, into the bright moonlight where strato-cumulus went fast across a full, pale moon in a north-westerly wind. King Charles’ wain was hiding behind a bank of clouds, but Cassiopeia faithfully presided over the north star, and one could faintly see a few pinpricks of the little bear as he hung by his tail … A nocturnal motor bicycle, probably a Silston poacher bent on some lawless errand miles away, just muttered in the silence as the breeze dropped. Standing in the thick grass, with slow heart beats soothed by the still night, I thoughtfully broke wind. The horns of elfland faintly blowing.

• Two years before I had passed an evening in a public house with a trained nurse and midwife who had been laying out one of the local farmers who had died. Between the numerous draughts of Guinness which we stood her, this singularly intelligent and communicative spinster had explained in detail the full process of cleaning, trussing, stuffing and laying out a corpse. She had parted from me with the following good wish: “Well, I ‘opes yer stuffs nicely.”

Recommendation: I gave it an 8. If you like reading about slices of life you probably aren’t very familiar with, I think you’d like this — even if you’re not into birds.

Further Comments: Off the topic of the book, but just for fun. In 27 years of birding, I’ve seen one Goshawk. It was 26 years ago, on a morning in July at my parents’ house in Northern Wisconsin. I heard crows mobbing something down in the bog along the lake. I fought my way through the black spruce and saw a large bird fly up into a tree. I got a good enough look to identify it as a Goshawk before it took off out of sight. I went back to the house and double-checked in my field guide. Half an hour later, I heard the crows again. I made my way more carefully this time and saw the Goshawk again. It flew up from the same spot (it evidently had a kill there, although I never bothered to go see what it was, for some reason). It landed in a tree for a few minutes and gave me a good look, then took off. That has been it, except for a possible flyover a few years later. It’s a cool bird, slate gray and mean looking, the size of a Red-tailed Hawk, but differently-proportioned for slicing through woods after small birds, squirrels and rabbits. I’d love to see another.