Toward late afternoon, when Matt Jones takes Luke out of the station wagon for the last hunt of the day, we are all expecting very little. It has not been a good day for hawking. The weather is way too warm, and anyway the only rabbits that have survived the winter are the quick and canny ones.
Matt pulls a heavy brown glove made of three layers of goatskin onto his left fist. A large home-built plywood box with two latched doors fills most of the station wagon’s cargo bay. As he pulls the right latch and opens the door we hear a high peeping that sounds as though it comes from a songbird. But perched on a thick dowel in the box is a large brown-and-white hawk wearing a leather hood.
Luke’s eyes are brown, large, and glaring; he always looks alert. Biologists say that a hawk’s eyes can see four times as acutely as a human’s or better. They are almost as large as a human’s eyes, in a body that weighs only two to three pounds. A hawk is so much a visual creature that putting a hood over its head cuts off a great deal of its sensory input–and calms it even while it’s bumping along in a car or on horseback.
The five of us walk toward the creek–Matt, his old friend Tim Dorgan, Dave Giese and his son Tony, and me. We leap over the small muddy stream and walk up a short slope into the field proper.
Matt would prefer to be hunting this field in cooler weather. But the trip had been planned well in advance; Matt wanted to spend some time in the field with Dave, who is one of his apprentices. Matt will spend two years acting as mentor for each of his two apprentices. Part of that training involves long conversations about falconry techniques. Part of it involves Matt’s willingness to be on call in case one of the apprentice’s hawks gets sick. But mostly it involves going out into the field, where the apprentices can observe Matt’s technique and he can observe theirs. “Falconry is mainly learned by watching others, by seeing what works and what doesn’t,” he says.
His favorite bird, one of the red-tails, had been shot and had its wing amputated. “This was a bird that had been captive for eight years,” Matt says. “And it was still wild. It had that proud look. If you had to pick an adjective for a hawk, it would be wild.”
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On the sixth day, September 30, they again saw the same bird swoop down and dance on the trap as if its feet were caught. “It really looks like it’s caught,” Matt says. “And as we drive up, he takes off into a tree.” The two drove near the tree and figured the hawk would fly away. Unexpectedly, it swooped right down onto the trap again. This time Matt and Roger figured they would wait as long as it took. It was after six in the evening, getting dark already. Three deer walked across the road. “The next thing I know is I see him dragging the trap across the road,” says Matt. “So we rushed over, and I unhooked him and wrapped him in a towel.”
