'The Goshawk' Redux

Poet and all- round brilliant writer Pluvialis has been given a Finnish Goshawk. She is thinking of retreating somewhere and writing a book on its training, a meditation, a look at T. H. White, who wrote the original book of that title during another dark and chaotic time. As White said: "These efforts might have some value because they were continually faced with those dificulties that the mind has to circumvent, because falconry was an historic but dying sport [perhaps more in the Thirties than today-- SB], because the faculties exercised were those that throve among trees rather than houses, and because the whole thing was inexpressibly difficult".

I think we need Pluvialis' reaction to this book, and to that of crusty old Edmund Bert, who wrote the best Goshawk training manual ever in 1619.

Why? Here is Pluvi on a wild Gos in Uzbekistan:

"...Halimjan made soup for lunch; there it was, bubbling in the cast-iron pot over the gas flame and we were sitting around our red plastic table chewing on stale bread waiting for the soup, and all our heads went up at once. A noise like ripping, tearing hessian, like a European Jay, only with real terror in it, was coming towards us right there and we watched — and slow as syrup and fast as a blink all at once, came the male gos trying his damnest to catch a magpie; they flashed right through the trees in front of the table, and gos nearly had a foot to the magpie before he saw us — five humans and a fire and a truck and a Giant Red Table right below him — ack! — wave off! wave off! — and the magpie dove downwards to the fork of a branch, crouching like a man avoiding a blow, and the gos spooled away through the trees. He looked like a coin falling through water, flashing silver and grey. Some kind of metal. A very fierce one. Potassium, Sodium, Goshawk."

More, please.