The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works of J. A. Baker. Mark Cocker
On the marsh, a swan – shot in the breast – had been left to rot. It was greasy, and heavy to lift, and it stank. This handling of the dead left a taint upon the splendour of the day, which ended in a quiet desolation of cloud as the wind fell and the sun passed down.
November 2nd
The whole land shone golden-yellow, bronze, and rusty-red, gleamed water-clear, submerged in brine of autumn light. The peregrine sank up into blue depths, luring the flocked birds higher. Constellations of golden plover glinted far above; gulls and lapwings orbited below; pigeons, duck and starlings hissed in shallow air.
A shower cloud bloomed at the northern edge of the valley and slowly opened out across the sky. The peregrine circled beneath it, clenched in dark fists of starlings. Savagely he lashed himself free, and came superbly to the south, rising on the bright rim of the black cloud, dark in the sun-dazzle floating upon it. He came directly towards me, outlined and fore-shortened, and I could see his long wings angling steeply from his rounded head. The inner wings were inclined upward at an angle of sixty degrees to the body, and they did not move; the narrow outer wings curled higher and dipped lightly into air, waving flamboyantly like sculls that touch and feather through a river’s gliding skin. He passed above me, and floated up across the open fields. Slowly he drifted and began to soar, shining in the sun like a bar of river gravel, golden-red. The falcon soared to meet him; together they circled out into the glaring whiteness of the south.
When they had gone, hundreds of fieldfares went back to feed in hawthorns by the river. Some stayed in the yellow Lombardy poplars, silently watching, noble in the topmost branches, thin bright eyes and fierce warrior faces. The deep blue of the sky was stained with cloud. Slowly its brilliance descended to the earth. Yellow stubble and dark ploughland shone upward with a greater light.
At half-past one the tiercel returned, flying quickly down towards me as I stood among trees by the brook. He is more willing to face me now, less ready to fly when I approach, puzzled perhaps by my steady pursuit. Seven magpies suddenly dashed up from the grass, squawked in alarm like deep-voiced snipe, swirled together like waders, flung themselves into a tree. The peregrine hovered briefly above the place where they had been. Veering and swaying from side to side, beating his wings with great power and careless freedom, he went overhead in a wash of rushing air. Wings pliant as willow, body firm as oak, he had all the spring and buoyancy of a tern in his leaping, darting flight. Below, he was the colour of river mud, ochreous and tawny; above, he had the sheen of autumn leaves, beech and elm and chestnut. His feathers were finely grained and shaded; they shone like polished wood. Trees hid him from me. When I saw him again, he was a hundred feet higher, climbing fast towards the coast. Two hours to sunset, and the tide rising: it seemed likely that he was heading for the estuary. I followed him there an hour later.
The north wind grew, towering over a cold sky, shedding bleak light, hardening the edges of the hills. Rain drifted across the estuary, and islands stood black on striped and silver water. There were fires and shooting to the north, and a rainbow shone. A horseman rode across the marsh and put up the peregrine, which flew north above the smoke of the fires and the crash of the guns. He carried a dead gull. Long after the brown and yellow hawk had merged into the brown and yellow autumn field I could see the white wings of the gull fluttering in the wind.
November 4th
The sky peeled white in the north-west gale, leaving the eye no refuge from the sun’s cold glare. Distance was blown away, and every tree and church and farm came closer, scoured of its skin of haze. Down the estuary I could see trees nine miles away, bending over in the wind-whipped sea. New horizons stood up bleached and stark, plucked out by the cold talons of the gale.
An iridescence of duck’s heads smouldered in foaming blue water: teal brown and green, with a nap like velvet; wigeon copper-red, bla-zoned with a crest of chrome; mallard deep green in shadow but in the sun luminous, seething up through turquoise, to palest burning blue. A cock bullfinch, alighting on a post against the water, seemed suddenly to flame there, like a winged firework hissing up to glory.
For two hours a falcon peregrine hovered in the gale, leaning into it with heavy flailing wings, moving slowly round the creeks and saltings. She seldom rested, and the wind was too strong for soaring. She followed the sea-wall, flying forward for thirty yards, then hovering. Once, she hovered for a long time, and sank to sixty feet; hovered, and sank to thirty feet; hovered and dropped till only a foot above the long grass on the top of the wall. There she stayed, hovering steadily, for two minutes. She had to fly strongly forward to keep in the same place. Then the grass swayed and crumpled as something ran through it, and the hawk plunged down with outspread wings. There was a scuffle, and something ran along the side of the wall to safety in the ditch at the bottom. The falcon rose, and resumed her patient hovering. She was probably hunting for hares or rabbits. I found the remains of both; the fur had been carefully plucked from them, and the bones neatly cleaned. I also found a mallard drake, drab and ignominious in death.
At sunset the tiercel flew above the marsh, pursuing a wisp of snip. They drummed away down wind, like stones skidding across ice.
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