The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker

November 6th

Morning was hooded and seeled with deep grey cloud and mist. The mist cleared when the rain began. Many birds fled westward from the river, golden plover high among them. Their melancholy plover voices threaded down through the rain the sorrowing beauty of ultima thule.

The peregrine was restless and wild as I followed him across the soaking ploughland clay. He flickered lightly ahead of me in the driving rain, flitting from bush to post, from post to fence, from fence to overhead wire. I followed heavily, with a stone of clay on my boots. But it was worthwhile, for he grew tired of flying, and he did not want to leave the fields. After an hour’s pursuit, he allowed me to watch him from fifty yards; two hundred yards had been the limit when we started. Perched on a post, he looked back over his shoulder, but when I moved too much, he jumped up and twisted round to face me, without moving his wings. It was done so quickly that another hawk seemed suddenly to appear there.

He soon became restless again. Partridges called, and he flew across to have a look at them, moving his wings with a stiff downcurving jerkiness, as though he were trying to fly like a partridge. When he glided, he glided like a partridge, with bent wings rigid and trembling. He did not attack, and I do not know whether this mimicry was deliberate, unconscious, or just coincidental. When I saw him again, ten minutes later, he flew with his usual loose-limbed panache.

The rain stopped, the sky cleared, and the hawk began to fly faster. At two o’clock he raced away to the east through snaking lariats of starlings. Effortlessly he climbed above them, red-gold shining above black. They ringed up in pursuit, and he dipped neatly beneath them. Beyond the river he swept down to ground level, and starlings rose steeply up like spray from a breaking wave. They could not overtake him. He was running free, wind flowing from the curves of his wings like water from the back of a diving otter. I put up seven mallard from the river. They circled overhead, and to the west, but they would not fly one yard to the east where the hawk had gone. Running across fields, clambering over gates, cycling along lanes, I followed at my own poor speed. Fortunately he did not get too far ahead, for he paused to chase every flock of birds he saw. They were not serious attacks; he was not yet hunting; it was like a puppy frisking after butterflies. Fieldfares, lapwings, gulls, and golden plover, were scattered, and driven, and goaded into panic. Rooks, jackdaws, sparrows, and skylarks, were threshed up from the furrows and flung about like dead leaves. The whole sky hissed and rained with birds. And with each rush, and plunge, and zigzagging pursuit, his playfulness ebbed away and his hunger grew. He climbed above the hills, looking for sport among the spiky orchards and the moss-green oak woods. Starlings rose into the sky like black searchlight beams, and wavered aimlessly about, seeking the hawk. Woodpigeons began to come back from the east like the survivors of a battle, flying low across the fields. There were thousands of them feeding on acorns in the woods, and the hawk had found them. From every wood and covert, as far as I could see, flock after flock went roaring up into the sky, keeping very close, circling and swirling like dunlin. They rose very high, till there were fifty flocks climbing steeply from the hill and dwindling away down to the eastern horizon. Each flock contained at least a hundred birds. The peregrine was clearing the entire hill of its pigeons, stooping at each wood in turn, sweeping along the rides, flicking between the trees, switchbacking from orchard to orchard, riding along the rim of the sky in a tremendous serration of rebounding dives and ascensions. Suddenly it ended. He mounted like a rocket, curved over in splendid parabola, dived down through cumulus of pigeons. One bird fell back, gashed dead, looking astonished, like a man falling out of a tree. The ground came up and crushed it.

November 9th

A magpie chattered in an elm near the river, watching the sky. Blackbirds scolded; the magpie dived into a bush as the tiercel peregrine flew over. Suddenly the dim day flared. He flashed across clouds like a transient beam of sunlight. Then greyness faded in behind, and he was gone. All morning, birds were huddled together in fear of the hawk, but I could not find him again. If I too were afraid I am sure I should see him more often. Fear releases power. Man might be more tolerable, less fractious and smug, if he had more to fear. I do not mean fear of the intangible, the suffocation of the introvert, but physical fear, cold sweating fear for one’s life, fear of the unseen menacing beast, imminent, bristly, tusked and terrible, ravening for one’s own hot saline blood.

Halfway to the coast, lapwings went up as a hawk flew above them. They kept in small flocks, and soon there were ten flocks in the air together, scattered across a mile of sky. Those that had been up longest flew higher and wider apart, drifting downwind in tremendous circles half a mile across. The most recently flushed stayed lower, wheeling faster and in narrower circles, closely packed, with only small chinks of light between them. When hawks have gone from sight, you must look up into the sky; their reflection rises in the birds that fear them. There is so much more sky than land.

Under sagging slate-grey clouds the estuary at low tide stretched out into the gloom of the east wind. Long moors of mud shone with deep-cut silver burns. The marshes were intensely green. The feet of grazing cattle sucked and shuddered through craters of dark mud. Several peregrine kills lay on the sides of the sea-wall. I found the remains of a dunlin, dead no more than an hour. The blood was still wet inside it, and it smelt clean and fresh, like mown grass. The wings, and the shining black legs, were untouched. A pile of soft brown and white feathers lay beside them. The head, and most of the body flesh, had been eaten, but the white skin – pimply from careful plucking – had been left. It was still in breeding plumage, which would have made it different from the majority of the flock and so more likely to be attacked by a hawk.

Later, a peregrine flew low across the marsh towards the dunlin he had killed not long before. A black-headed gull rose frantically up in front of him, taken by surprise. (Surely ‘taken by surprise’ must originally have been a hawking term?) The gull was not quite taken, however, for it strove up vertically, with wildly flapping wings. The hawk glided under its breast and wrenched a few feathers away with its clutching foot before sweeping over and beyond. The gull circled high across the estuary, the hawk alighted on the sea-wall. I walked towards him, but he was reluctant to fly. He waited till I was within twenty yards before he went twisting and zigzagging and rolling away in a most spectacular manner, dodging and jinking across the rising tide like a huge snipe. Shaped against the white water, he glided with wings held stiffly upward from his deep chest, as though he were cast in bronze, like the winged helmet of a Viking warrior.

November 11th

Wisps of sunlight in a bleak of cloud, gulls bone-white in ashes of sky. Sparrows shrilling in tall elm hedges near the river.

I moved slowly and warily forward through the flicking shadows of twigs, and crept from cover to find the tiercel perched on a post five yards in front of me. He looked round as I stopped, and we both went rigid with the shock of surprise. Light drained away, and the hawk was a dark shape against white sky. His sunken, owl-like head looked dazed and stupid as it turned and bobbed and jerked about. He was dazzled by this sudden confrontation with the devil. The dark moustachial lobes were livid and bristling on the pale Siberian face peering from thick furs. The large bill opened and closed in a silent hiss of alarm, puffing out breath into the cold air. Hesitant, incredulous, outraged, he just squatted on his post and gasped. Then the splintered fragments of his mind sprang together, and he flew very fast and softly away, rolling and twisting from side to side in steepling banks and curves as though avoiding gunshot.

Following him across the river meadows and over the fields by the brook, I found eight recent kills: five lapwings, a moorhen, a partridge, and a woodpigeon. Many fieldfares flew up from the grass. Golden plover and lapwing numbers have increased, and there are more gulls and skylarks now than there were a week ago. Fifteen curlew were feeding in stubble near the brook, among large flocks of starlings and house sparrows.

At one o’clock I flushed the hawk from a post by the road. He flew low along a deep furrow of ploughed field to the west, and I saw a red-legged partridge crouching a hundred yards ahead of him. It was looking the other way, oblivious of danger. The hawk glided forward, reached one foot nonchalantly down, gently kicked the partridge in the back as he floated slowly above it. The partridge scrabbled frantically in the dust, wings flurrying, righted itself, stared about as though completely bewildered. The hawk flew on without looking round, and many partridges began calling. He swooped down and kicked another one over as it ran towards the covey. Then he flew off towards the river. Peregrines spend a lot of time hovering over partridges, or watching them from posts and fences. They are intrigued by their endless walking, by their reluctance to fly. Sometimes this playful interest develops into serious attack.

November 12th

Very still the estuary; misty skylines merged into white water; all peaceful, just the talk of the duck floating in with the tide. Red-breasted mergansers were out in the deep water, diving for fish. They suddenly doubled over and down in a forward roll, very neat and quick. They came up, and swallowed, and looked around, water dripping from their bills; alert, dandified, submarine duck.

A red-throated diver, matted with oil, was stranded in a mud-hoe. Only its head was visible. It called incessantly, a painful grunting rising to a long moaning whistle.

I walked along the sea-wall between marsh and water. Short-eared owls breathed out of the grass, turning their overgrown, neglected faces, their yellow eyes’ goblin glow. A green woodpecker flew ahead, looping from post to post, clinging like moss, then sinking into heavy flight. The marsh echoed with the hoarse complaint of snipe. I found six peregrine kills: two black-headed gulls, a redshank, and a lapwing, on the wall; an oystercatcher and a grey plover on the shingle beach.

An oval flock of waders came up from the south; fast, compact, white wing-bars flashing in the dull light: ten black-tailed godwits. They lanced the air with long, swordfish bills, their long legs stretched out behind. They were calling as they flew – a harsh clamorous gobbling, a heathen laughter, like curlew crossed with mallard. They were greenish-brown, the colour of reeds and saltings. They were dry-looking, crackly, bony birds, with everything pulled out to extremes; beautifully funny. They did not land. They circled, and went back to the south. In summer, their breeding plumage glows fiery orange-red. They feed in deep water, grazing like cattle, and their red reflections seem to scorch and hiss along the surface.

From the big marsh pond came the murmur of the teal flock, like a distant orchestra tuning up. They were skidding and darting through the water, skating up ripples, braking in a flurry of spray. They sprang into the air as a peregrine came flickering from inland. By the time he reached the pond they were half-way across the estuary, their soft calls muffled like a chime of distant hounds. The peregrine disappeared. The teal soon came back, swooping and swirling down to the marsh, rising and falling like round stones skimmed across ice, humming, rebounding, vibrating. Gradually they settled to their feeding and musical calling. I moved nearer to the pond. A pair of teal flew up and came towards me in that silly way they have. The duck landed, but the drake flew past. Suddenly realising he was alone, he turned to go back. As he turned, the peregrine dashed up at him from the marsh and raked him with outstretched talons. The teal was tossed up and over, as though flung up on the horns of a bull. He landed with a splash of blood, his heart torn open. I left the hawk to his kill; the duck flew back to the pond.

November 13th

I flushed two woodcock from hornbeam coppice. They had been sleeping under arches of bramble. They rose vertically into sunlight, their wings making a harsh ripping sound, as though they were tearing themselves free. I could see their long down-pointing bills, shining pink and brown; their heads and chests were striped brown and fawn, like sun and shadow on the woodland floor. Their slack legs dangled, then slowly gathered up. Their dark eyes, large and damp, shone brown and gentle. The tops of the hornbeams rattled, twigs swished and snapped. Then the woodcock were free, darting and weaving away above the trees, glowing in the sun like golden roast. Black mud beneath the brambles, where they had squatted side by side, showed the spidery imprint of their feet.

Under pylons, in a flooded field between two woods, I found the remnants of a rook that the peregrine had eaten. The breast-bone was serrated along the keel, where pieces had been nipped out of it by the hawk’s bill. The legs were orange, though they should have been black. When so reduced, a rook’s frame and skull seem pathetically small compared with the huge and heavy bill.

By four o’clock, hundreds of clacking fieldfares had gathered in the woods. They moved higher in the trees and became silent, facing the sun. Then they flew north towards their roosting place, rising and calling, straggling out in uneven lines, the sun shining beneath them. And far above them, a peregrine wandered idly round the blue cupola of the cooling sky, and drifted with them to the dead light of the north.

Half an hour before sunset I came to a pine wood. It was already dark under the trees, but there was light in the ride as I walked along it from the west. Outside it was cold, but the wood was still warm. The boles of the pines glowed redly under the blue-black gloom of their branches. The wood had kept its dusk all day, and seemed now to be breathing it out again. I went quietly down the ride, listening to the last rich dungeon notes of a crow. In the middle of the wood, I stopped. A chill spread over my face and neck. Three yards away, on a pine branch close to the ride, there was a tawny owl. I held my breath. The owl did not move. I heard every small sound of the wood as loudly as though I too were an owl. It looked at the light reflected in my eyes. It waited. Its breast was white, thickly arrowed and speckled with tawny red. The redness passed over the sides of its face and head to form a rufous crown. The helmeted face was pale white, ascetic, half-human, bitter and withdrawn. The eyes were dark, intense, baleful. This helmet effect was grotesque, as though some lost and shrunken knight had withered to an owl. As I looked at those grape-blue eyes, fringed with their fiery gold, the bleak face seemed to crumble back into the dusk; only the eyes lived on. The slow recognition of an enemy came visibly to the owl, passing from the eyes, and spreading over the stony face like a shadow. But it had been startled out of its fear, and even now it did not fly at once. Neither of us could bear to look away. Its face was like a mask; macabre, ravaged, sorrowing, like the face of a drowned man. I moved. I could not help it. And the owl suddenly turned its head, shuffled along the branch as though cringing, and flew softly away into the wood.

November 15th

Above South Wood, a small stream flows through a steep-sided valley. The northern slope is open woodland, rusty with winter bracken, silvered with birches, green with mossy oak. The southern slope is pasture, unchanged for many years, rich with worms, lined by small hedges, freckled with thick-branched oak. Two hundred lapwings, and many fieldfares, redwings and blackbirds, were listening for worms as I went down to the stream, which was loud in the quiet morning. There was no ploughing in the river valley, and I expected the peregrine to hunt the lapwings in the higher pasture.

A hard tapping sound began, a long way off. It was like a song thrush banging a snail on a stone, but it came from above. In a hedgerow oak, at the tip of a side branch, a lesser spotted woodpecker was clinging to a small twig, hammering a marble gall with his bill, trying to hack out the grub inside it. To the six-inch-long woodpecker this gall was the size a large medicine ball is to a man. He swung about freely on the twig, sometimes hanging upside down, attacking from many angles. His head went back at least two inches, then thudded forward with pickaxing ferocity. His black shining eyes were needle bright as he looked all round the yellow gall. He could not pierce it. He flew to another oak and tried another gall. All morning I heard him tapping his way across the fields. I tapped a gall with my fingernail, and with a sharp stone, but I could not reproduce the woodpecker’s loud cracking sound, which was audible a hundred yards away. He was fairly tame, but if I went too near he stopped, and shuffled farther up the branch, returning when I moved back. When jays called in the wood, he stopped hammering, and listened. Lesser spotted woodpeckers are wary of predators; they fly from cuckoos, and take cover from jays and crows.

Jays were noisy all day in the wood, digging up the acorns they buried a month ago. The first to find one was chased by the others. Several woodcock were feeding at the side of the stream, where the flow of water was checked by fallen branches and dead leaves, and I flushed many more from their resting places in the bracken. During the day, they like to lie up on bracken slopes facing south or west, usually near a cluster of sapling chestnuts or small birches, occasionally under holly or pine. Some birds prefer bramble cover to bracken. Woodcock go up suddenly, after one has been standing near them for a time, as little as five yards away. They may wait for a minute or more, till they can bear the uncertainty no longer. You can flush a greater number by making frequent stops. When trudging straight on through the wood, you put up only those directly in your path. Watching its first steep ascent, you can, for a second, capture the woodcock’s colour. Held in a sudden yellowness of light, the blended browns and fawns and chestnuts of its back stand out in relief, like a plating of dead leaves. In the middle of the ridged and stripy back, behind the head, there is a tint of greenish bronze, like verdigris. They may seem to go right away into the distance of the wood, but in fact they pitch steeply down to cover as soon as they are screened by trees. A sudden zigzag and downward flop, over open ground, can be deceptive. They may fly low for a time, rising again when out of sight. Thousands of years of escape practice have evolved these crafty ways. It becomes easy to guess where woodcock are resting, but the actual catapulting ejection from bracken or bramble always startles. One is seldom looking in the right direction.

All wormy mud must have its wader. The fugitive woodcock finds his way along the small windings of the brooks and gulleys, past the forlorn ponds and the muddy undrained rides, to his hermitage of bracken.

The ‘pee-wit’ calls of plover grew louder as the sun declined. Standing among oaks and birches, I saw between the trees the dark curve of a peregrine scything smoothly up the green slope of the valley. Fieldfares fled towards the trees. Some thudded down into bracken, like falling acorns. The peregrine turned and followed, rose steeply, flicked a fieldfare from its perch, lightly as the wind seizing a leaf. The dead bird dangled from a hawk’s-foot gallows. He took it to the brook, plucked and ate it by the water’s edge, and left the feathers for the wind to sift.

November 16th

The valley was calm, magnified in mist, domed with a cold adamantine glory. Fifty herring gulls flew north along a thin icicle of blue that wedged the clouds apart. Solemn-winged and sombre, moving away into the narrow pincer of blue, they were a splendid portent of the day to come.

By ten o’clock the blue wedge had widened, and defeated clouds were massing in the eastern sky. Lapwings and golden plover circled down to feed in a newly ploughed field near the river. The first rays of the morning sun reached out to the plover, dim in the dark earth. They shone frail gold, as though their bones were luminous, their feathered skin transparent. The peregrine, which had been hunched and drab in the dead oak, gleamed up in red-gold splendour, like the glowing puffed-out fieldfares in bushes by the river.

When I looked away, the peregrine left his perch, and panic began. The southern sky was terraced with mazes of upward winding birds: seven hundred lapwings, a thousand gulls, two hundred woodpigeons, and five thousand starlings, dwindled up in spiral tiers and widening gyres. Three hundred golden plover circled above them all, visible only when they turned and glinted in the sun. Eventually I found the hawk in the last place I thought of looking – which should have been the first – directly above my head.

He flew southward, rising: four light wing-beats and then a glide, an easy rhythm. Seen from below, his wings seemed merely to kink and straighten, kink and straighten, twitching in and out like a pulse. A crow chased him, and they zigzagged together. As he rose higher the hawk flew faster; but so light and deft was his wing flicker that he looked to be almost hovering, while the crow moved backwards and down. He fused into the white mist of the sun, and a mass of starlings rose to meet him, as though sucked up by the vortex of a whirlwind. He began to circle at great speed, swinging narrowly round, curving alternately to left and right, sweeping through intricate figures of eight. The starlings were baffled by his sharp twists and turns. They rushed wildly behind him, overshooting the angular bends of his flight. He seemed to swing them around on a line, shaking them out and drawing them in, at will. They all climbed high to the south and were suddenly gone, expunged in mist. This evasion flight – which the hawk seems to enjoy as a form of play, and could so easily escape if he wished – is similar to one of his ways of hunting, and is greatly feared by the birds below. Starlings not actually mobbing sky up violently. They fly to trees or whirl away down wind.

An hour later, there was panic again to the south and west. Plover and gulls spiralled above, blackbirds scolded, cockerels called from farms half a mile apart. The peregrine drifted down to the dead oak to perch, and the calling birds were silent. He rested, preened, and slept for a while, then flew across the open fields north of the river. Tractors were ploughing, and hundreds of gulls were scattered on the black-brown earth, like white chalk. A few sere stubbles still shine between the crinkled darkness of the ploughlands, but the elms are bare, and the poplars tattered yellow. Beagles were silently webbing out on to the wet surface of the fields. Huntsmen and followers were still and waiting. The hare was an acre away, sitting boldly in a furrow, big slant eyes shining in the sun, long ears bending and listening to the wind. The falcon flew up, and hovered above the hare. A distant shot made her flinch and lose height, as though she had been hit. She dropped down, and flew fast and low across the fields. I have never seen a hawk fly lower. Where the headland grass was long, she brushed it with her wings as she passed over. She was hidden by every dip and undulation of the ground. She disappeared along ditches, fanning the long grass outward, flying with her wings bent up, so that the keel of her breast-bone sheared the grass or skimmed an inch above the ground. Suddenly she seemed to fly straight into the furrows. There was no perching place within a quarter of a mile of the spot where she vanished, but I could not find her again, though I diligently quartered every field. Subtle as a harrier, soft-winged as an owl, but flicking along at twice their easy speed, she was as cunning as a fox in her use of cover and camouflage. She clings to the rippling fleece of the earth as the leaping hare cleaves to the wind.

All the gulls left the fields and spiralled silently away to the south. Cinctures of golden plover glittered round the clear zenith of the ice-blue sky. The sun was free of the mist at last, the rising north wind very cold. Beagles had scented the hare and were streaming over the leaf-stained plough, the hunt running behind, and the horn sounding. The tiercel circled low to the north, looking like a tawny kite cut from the earth beneath him, yellow as stubble, barred with dark brown. He rose slowly, and drifted down wind. The falcon flew up to join him, and they circled together, though not in the same direction. He moved clockwise, she anti-clockwise. Their random curving paths twined and intersected, but never matched. As they came nearer to the river, where I was standing, they quickly rose higher. Both were burnished by sunlight to a warm red-gold, but the falcon had browner plumage and was less luminous. They sailed overhead, three hundred feet up, canting slowly round on still and rigid wings, the tiercel thirty feet above the falcon. They stared down at me, with their big heads bent so far under that they appeared small and sunken between the deep arches of their wings. With feathers fully spread, and dilated with the sustaining air, they were wide, thick-set, cobby-looking hawks. The thin, intricate mesh of pale brown and silver-grey markings overlaying the buff surfaces of their underwings contrasted with the vertical mahogany-brown streaks on the deep amber yellow of their chests. Their clenched feet shone against the white tufts of their under-tail coverts. The bunched toes were ridged and knuckled like golden grenades.

They moved to the south of the river, and red-legged partridges began calling. Each hawk swung up into the wind, poised briefly, then drifted down and around in a long sweeping circle. Twice the tiercel swooped playfully at the falcon, almost touching her as he flicked past. He was the shorter in length by two to three inches, and the lighter in build, with relatively longer wings and tail. He had grace and slender strength, she power and solidity. As they dwindled higher, and farther to the south, perspective flattened their circles down to ellipses, and then to straight lines, gliding incisively to and fro across the sky. Their course seemed curiously inevitable, as though they were moving on hidden wires, or following some familiar pathway through the air. It is this beautiful precision, this feeling of pre-ordained movement, that makes the peregrine so exciting to watch.

Now the tiercel drew steadily away from the falcon, rising to the east, while she curved round to the west, and kept lower. Between circles she stayed motionless in the wind. From one of these pitches she turned away as usual, then slanted downwards. Something contained and menacing in her movement made me realise at once that she was going to stoop. She swept down and round in a spiral, wings half bent back, glancing down through the air, smoothly and without haste, at a forty-five degree angle. In this first long curving fall she slowly revolved her body on its axis, and just as the full turn was completed, she tilted over in a perfect arc and poured into the vertical descent. There was a slight check, as though some tenuous barrier of unruly air had been forced through; then she dropped smoothly down. Her wings were now flung up and back and bending inwards, quivering like fins in the gale that rushed along her tapering sides. They were like the flights of an arrow, rippling and pluming above the rigid shaft. She hurled to earth; dashed herself down; disappeared.

A minute later she rose unharmed, but without prey, and flew off to the south. Against blue sky, white cloud, blue sky, dark hills, green fields, brown fields, she had flashed lightly, shone darkly, wheeling and falling. And suddenly the cold, breath-catching air seemed very clear and sweet. The calling of small birds blended with the chiming bark of the beagles and the thudding away of the hunted hare. It streamed through a hedge and flung into the river, splashing in like a spadeful of brown earth. It swam to the far bank, and limped away to safety.

Where the tiercel still circled to the east, the sky was drifted with gulls and plover and curlew. The sharp glinting speck of the hawk faded slowly out above the hills, sweeping majestically towards the sea. The alarmed birds descended, and the great flight was over.

I followed the falcon, and found her again at half past three. Smoked out by dense clouds of starlings, she flew from the ash tree by ford lane pond and flickered low across fields where tractors were working and sugar beet was being cut and carted. Where the ground had been cleared, hundreds of gulls and lapwings were feeding; I lost the hawk among them as they rose. Ten minutes later she flew north-east, passing high towards the river, black against the lemon-yellow sky. She veered to the east, flying higher and faster, as though she had sighted prey.

The beagles are going home along the small hill lanes, the huntsmen tired, the followers gone, the hare safe in its form. The valley sinks into mist, and the yellow orbital ring of the horizon closes over the glaring cornea of the sun. The eastern ridge blooms purple, then fades to inimical black. The earth exhales into the cold dusk. Frost forms in hollows shaded from the afterglow. Owls wake and call. The first stars hover and drift down. Like a roosting hawk, I listen to silence and gaze into the dark.

November 18th

In the morning I walked east along the sea-wall, from the estuary to the sea. The water was pale grey and white under high cloud. It became seamed and veined with blue as the sky cleared and the sun came out. Waders, gulls and rooks fed by the tide-line. Bushes near the wall were full of larks and finches. Three snow buntings ran over the white shingle and sand, like waders, unwilling to fly, brown and white as the sand beneath them. When they ran on to darker ground, they flew at once, calling. Their long white-barred wings flashed up into sunlight, their hard, pure calls chimed faintly down.

All morning, I had the wary, uneasy feeling that comes when a hawk is near. I felt that he was hidden just beyond sight; in time and distance barely outpacing me, always dropping below the horizon as I moved up over the curve of the flat green land. By one o’clock I was heading south, and the sun was dazzling. Suddenly I seemed to be walking away from the hawk instead of towards it. I went down into the fields and across to the estuary again, not thinking, moving only on the rim of thought, content to see and absorb the day. Turning through the hedge-gap, I surprised a wren. It trembled on its perch in an agony of hesitation, not knowing whether to fly or not, its mind in a stutter, splitting up with fear. I went quickly past, and it relaxed, and sang.

At half past two I reached the estuary. It was high tide. White gulls floated on blue unclouded water, duck slept, waders crowded the saltings. I walked slowly west along the sea-wall. It was now the ebb-light of a cold November day, and the western sky was frosted with pale gold. That radiant arch of light, which curves up and over the flat river land from the North Sea beyond it, was crumbling at the zenith and flaking back to grey. This was the last true hunting light, a call as clear to the hungry hawk as the ‘gone away’ of a huntsman’s horn.

A low stream of dunlin left the saltings and swelled upon the water to a glittering silver sail, billowing out towards the island. Above, and far beyond them, a peregrine was flying, a small dark knuckle in the flawless sky. Swiftly it grew to a dart of flickering wings. It rose black and sharp against the sun, and then it was beyond the sun and was browner and less menacing. It dived, and the island birds were flung up like spray. It circled above them, and they fell back like a wave. In steeply rising rings the hawk mounted to a silent crescendo. Gulls flew up. It stopped above them, poised, then dived downward, sweeping down and under and up again in a great ‘U’-shaped curve, cleaving the air as a human diver cleaves through air and water. From the reaching talons a gull flopped gracelessly aside. The peregrine rose higher, and shivered out into the greying eastern sky.