Read Online Sworn Brother by Tim Severin - Free Book Online Page B

worth its weight in pure silver or ‘the price of three male slaves or perhaps four useless kennelmen’. He and I would go into the hack house every day, to ‘man’ the birds as he put it. This meant picking them up and getting them used to being handled by humans while feeding them special titbits to increase their strength and condition as their new feathers grew. Edgar proved to be just as expert with birds as he was with hounds. He favoured a diet of goslings, eels and adders for the long-winged falcons and mice for the short-winged hawks. Now I learned why there was sandy floor beneath their perches: it allowed us to find and collect the droppings from each bird, which Edgar examined with close attention. He explained that hunting birds could suffer from almost-human ailments, including itch, rheum, worms, mouth ulcers and cough. When Edgar detected a suspicion of gout in one of the peregrines, an older bird, he sent me to find a hedgehog for it to eat, which he pronounced to be the only cure.
    Most of the birds, with the exception of the gyrfalcon and one of the sparrowhawks, were already trained. When they had their new feathers, it was only necessary to reintroduce them to their hunting duties. But the gyrfalcon had recently arrived in the hack house when I first saw it. That was why its eyelids had been sewn shut. ‘It keeps the bird calm and quiet when it’s being transported,’ Edgar explained. ‘Once it arrives in its new home, I ease the thread little by little so that the bird looks out on its surroundings gradually and setdes in without stress. It may seem cruel, but the only other method is to enclose its head in a leather hood, and I don’t like to do that to a bird captured after it has learned to hunt in the wild. Putting on the hood too soon can cause chafing and distress.’
    Edgar also had a warning. ‘A dog comes to depend upon its master, but a hunting bird keeps its independence,’ he said. ‘You may tame and train a bird to work with you, and there is no greater pleasure in any sport than to fly your bird and see it take its prey and then return to your hand. But always remember that the moment the bird takes to the air it has the choice of liberty. It may fly away and never return. Then you will suffer falconer’s heartbreak.’
    Their free spirit attracted me to the hunting birds and I quickly found that I had a natural talent for handling them. Edgar started me off with one of the little sparrowhawks, the least valuable of his charges. He chose the one which had never yet been trained and showed me how to tie six-inch strips of leather to the bird’s ankles with a special knot, then slip a longer leash through the metal rings at their ends. He equipped me with a falconer’s protective glove, and each day I fed the hawk its diet of fresh mouse, encouraging it to leap from the perch to the warm carcass in my hand. The sparrowhawk was shrill and bad tempered when it first arrived - a sure sign, according to Edgar, that it had been taken from the nest as a fledgling and not caught after it had left the nest - yet within two weeks I had it hopping back and forth like a garden pet. Edgar confessed he had never seen a sparrowhawk tamed so fast. ‘You seem to have a way with women,’ he commented, slily because only the female sparrow-hawk is any use for hunting.
    Not long afterwards he decided that I was the right person to train the gyrfalcon. It was a bold decision and may have been superstitious on Edgar’s part, thinking that I would have some special understanding of the spear falcon because I came from its homeland. But Edgar knew that I had been brought to Northampton at the express wish of Aelfgifu, and he may have been playing a deeper game. He made me the gyrfalcon’s keeper. I handled her - she was also a female - two or three times each day, fed her, bathed her once a week in a bath of yellow powder to get rid of lice, gave her chicken wings to tug and twist as she stood on