118 ART AND PRACTICE OF HAWKING 



ing you with eager eyes as you put out her meat on the hack 

 board, and since that, have you not always either given her her 

 food on the lure, or at all events taken her to a place where she 

 could fly and kill a quarry which you had put up for her ? 



Have patience with her, therefore, and induce her by slow 

 degrees to go up higher and higher. You must use all 

 imaginable devices to accomplish this main object. Try to 

 make her understand that the higher she goes the more chance 

 there is of your producing the lure. Thus, suppose she has 

 made three or four circles without going more than forty feet 

 high, and in the next goes to fifty or sixty feet, bring out the 

 lure and let her have it. Here is another device. Two men go 

 out, each having a lure. One stands on higher ground than the 

 other. Then call off the hawk alternately, each man showing 

 his lure in turn, and hiding it as the hawk comes up. But 

 let the man on the upper ground never indulge her with any 

 success. When she is gratified let it be when she comes from 

 above. She is not unlikely to associate the idea of success with 

 that of toiling upwards and then coming more swiftly down. 

 This is, moreover, a view of the matter to which the minds of 

 all hawks are naturally prone. The flesh is weak, particularly 

 in eyesses, but the spirit knows that the proper way to earn a 

 living is to mount and then stoop down. 



It is not good to defer needlessly the moment when you 

 give your hawk a flight. Flights at quarry, even if it is 

 bagged quarry only, almost always improve the mounting of 

 a hawk. Why? Because first nature and then experience 

 teaches her that from a height she has more chance of catching 

 a live bird. It is not a bad plan, if your hawk mounts badly, 

 to start for her (from a place of concealment, of course) a fast 

 house-pigeon at a distance of five or six hundred yards up-wind 

 from a thick covert. She will have plenty of time to make a 

 stoop or two in the open. But she will almost certainly fail, 

 and the pigeon will get off easily into shelter. Then if your 

 hawk comes back to you at a good height, give her a much 

 worse pigeon, which she will have a good chance of taking. If 

 she comes back low, take her down to the lure, and save the 

 second pigeon. The next day you may take out two pigeons 

 — a good and a bad. If your hawk mounts better give the bad 

 pigeon ; and if not, give her again the one which she will not 

 be able to catch. These are not infallible methods ; but they 

 may succeed, and they are worth trying, when a hawk is averse 

 to mounting naturally. In the lone hours of darkness, when 

 her hood is on, such a hawk may fight her battles over again, 



