268 ART AND PRACTICE OF HAWKING 



the outcome of the falconer's own action. Has he not himself 

 used a pigeon as a live lure ? Has he not; when teaching his 

 pupil to wait on, let loose a pigeon with the express intention 

 that she should fly it ? If he has never had occasion to do so 

 in training his passage hawk he has been exceptionally lucky. 

 As regards pigeons, it is generally pretty easy to break 

 peregrines of checking at them as soon as they have once 

 begun to fly at game. To achieve this feat get a good number 

 of very good pigeons — say a dozen, the faster the better ; make 

 the hawk wait on at a short distance — say 600 yards — from 

 some covert in which the pigeon, if he can get as far, will be 

 safe from pursuit ; then, while the hawk is waiting on on that 

 side of you which is farthest from the covert, let go one of the 

 pigeons. The hawk will start, but the pigeon, if a good one, 

 will manage to make the covert ; the hawk will throw up, and, 

 if all is well, come down to your dead lure. Repeat this per- 

 formance, always making as sure as you can that the pigeon 

 will save himself, until your pupil has got sick of the whole 

 business, and at last refuses to go for such disappointing quarry. 

 If you can put in, between whiles, an easy flight at a grouse or 

 partridge, and reward the hawk well upon it, the contrast will 

 be all the more striking, and she will begin to have a settled 

 conviction that game-hawking is capital fun, whereas pigeon- 

 hawking is a fraud. It is obvious that a somewhat similar 

 trick may be used with regard to other birds besides pigeons — 

 flying the hawk in impossible places at those which you don't 

 want her to pursue, and in easy places at those which you do. 



Some hawks, which ought to know better, from laziness or 

 want of condition, will not remain on the wing, but go off, after 

 a few turns in the air, to a tree or to the ground, and there sit 

 waiting for the lure, or till the spirit moves them to stir. This 

 is disheartening conduct, quite unworthy of a ladylike or 

 gentlemanly hawk, and disgraceful in a falcon-gentle. Yet so 

 it is that many of these high-born dames, and not a few tiercels 

 also of noble birth, are so lost to a sense of their own dignity 

 that they give way to this degrading weakness, and demean 

 themselves to the level of a base-born short-wing. What is to 

 be done with them? Various devices have been tried with 

 varying success. In the first place, as the hawk behaves in an 

 ignoble manner, she cannot complain if you treat her in ignoble 

 wise. You may therefore ride at her as she sits on the ground, 

 and force her to get up, or you may throw clods at her, and 

 drive her out of her tree ; but the surest plan — only it requires 



