Free The Goshawk by T.H. White Page B

forward with every precaution, to see what it tasted of. (Hawks were one of the few creatures which did not regularly drink water except as a laxative: none needed to be provided for them in the mews.) It did not taste of anything, so he put in his beak again. Curious. He looked over his shoulder at the bigger bit of the stuff behind him, roused his feathers with a rattle, inspected the reeds, the landing stage, me motionless. He thought of flying to the landing stage, less than a yard away, and then gave up the idea. He walked down the slope of the plank into the water. All the time I did not know whether he would accept a bath or not.
    Gos stopped in about an eighth of an inch of water and looked at his refracted toes. He bit one of them to see if it was there. When he noticed that it was there he diverted his attention and bit some of the water. He then bit his jesses and the plank, at points where both of them were wet. It was exceedingly strange.
    Gos slipped on the wet plank, with an undignified lurch, went into quite half an inch of water, and hurried back to recover his composure. He bit his toe again. It was rather nice.
    With the utmost caution he walked down the plank again and considered the possibility of stepping off into two inches. It was evidently a rash step; so he merely made a pass at it with one leg, withdrawing the talon pensively half-way through.
    Gos generally looked terrible, terrible in the sense that an eagle or a vulture had that look. In the strong sunlight which shone on the lake — at last the weather was pretending to turn for haymaking — he certainly looked beautiful. But the cruelty had gone out of his aspect. He was only a funny and silly little Gos, whose transparent mind showed him to be an infant still, as it struggled with the elements of hydrostatics.
    The sun shone on him, giving him a blue nimbus round his head. The cere flesh about his nostrils was supposedly yellow, as were the irises of his eyes. But that luminous eye (his main feature; it glared out, a focus to all the rest of him, from under frowning brows, the optic of an insane assassin) was genuinely luminous, like the paint on the hands of a wrist watch. Luminous paint, phosphorus: it was blue really, just as much as it was yellow. So the sunlight on Gos took a blue tinge from the hairy whiskers which he wore about his cere and eyelid, carried it on to the eye itself, haloed the whole head in a tint exquisitely elusive, of bird flesh — neither blue nor yellow.
    Gos concentrated his attention backward, without looking round, and dipped the tip of his tail in the extraordinary medium. It was fun. He stood and considered the matter, rousing his feathers again. When he roused he looked exactly like a fir-cone. In other manifestations he sometimes would hunch himself up like a penguin, when he was hungry, or go soft like an owl, when he was sleepy.
    Now, taking me so much by surprise that I could scarcely keep from laughing, the absurd princeling blew out all his feathers, lifted his tail in the air, and, like an old lady sitting down in a tram or lifting her bustle to get at a purse among the petticoats, sat down suddenly, shiftily, luxuriously, in the puddle. I had never seen a bird sit down before, for the gesture was quite unlike the laying hen’s. With ludicrous rapture Gos squatted in the puddle, got up, and, putting his head between his legs, looked at himself from underneath. It was the concentration of attention backward, the strange mixture of pride and affection and anxiety for these parts, the ungainly and somewhat private motion with which he immersed the proud posterior: it was these, and the indignity. The infant Tarquin had suddenly become a charlady at Margate.
Tuesday
    It seemed that we were beginning to turn the corner at last. The principle of regulating the hawk’s conduct through his belly was becoming clearer every night. I had a plan now by which I kept him in the mews every other day,