110 ART AND PRACTICE OF HAWKING 



good hawk after once getting well above her rook will keep the 

 command of the air for the rest of the flight. The quarry 

 may throw up too ; but if his pursuer makes the most of her 

 first advantage, he will always find her above him after he has 

 done so. It may be that she will be very wide of him. But 

 distance calculated in mere length counts for comparatively 

 little. It is the distance in height from the earth below that 

 makes all the difference. 



Consequently, if the rook persists in trying to keep the air, 

 and Lady Long-wing has the pluck and the condition to keep up 

 the chase, the time comes sooner or later when the shift is not 

 strong enough or not quick enough. Then as you watch the 

 two birds — or the two little specks, as they may by that time 

 have become — the lines along which they are moving will be 

 seen to converge and not separate again. There will be a shout 

 of jubilation from below. " Who-whoop " : it is the death-cry. 

 One of those eight sharp talons which, half hid by feathers, arm 

 the lower side of the hawk's body has hooked itself into some 

 bone, or at least some fleshy part, of the victim's body. Then 

 from the under side of the slim falcon, as she spreads her wings 

 and sinks nearer into sight, will be seen hanging a confused 

 mass of black shiny feathers. As the two birds — victor and 

 vanquished — come down to earth, the former will sometimes 

 be seen tightening her grasp or catching hold with the second 

 foot. At anyrate, within less than a second after they have 

 reached the ground, the deadly clutch of the conqueror will be 

 on the head of the conquered. In another second or two the 

 point of her beak will have broken the victim's neck at the top 

 of the vertebral column. No man can encompass the killing of 

 a rook so speedily and neatly as can a peregrine. Within a 

 marvellously short time after the last stoop was delivered, the 

 head of the captured bird droops inert from the dislocated neck, 

 and life is completely extinct. 



Such is the finish of a ringing flight flown out on both sides 

 with unflagging courage — the sort of flight which every true 

 sportsman would like to see often in the hawking-field. But 

 much more often the rook, when getting the worst of it in the 

 air, abandons the hope of beating his foe in fair mounting and 

 fair manoeuvring. Taking advantage of some moment — per- 

 haps after an ineffectual stoop — when his foe is a trifle wide, 

 and on the side farthest from a covert which he has marked as a 

 possible place of refuge, he turns tail, and makes off— down- 

 wind if possible, or if not, across the wind — to that seductive 

 shelter. A wood or spinny is what he would prefer, but a tree 



