Free Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike Page B

his master, his queen, and the gyrfalcon, as if members all of one exalted crew. In a scythed stretch of near meadow he and his grandson, Ljot, were engaged, Feng explained, in keeping a third falcon, a black-and-russet sparrow hawk named Jezebel, primed for a hunt by setting her upon field mice they had caught and crippled, twisting and cracking one leg to slow them. For Gerutha’s amusementthey demonstrated: Ljot, a thin-limbed, limping child with white lashes and a milky stare, eased from a sack and released a trembling dun body that propelled itself furiously, hopping and zigzagging in its maimed state, for the cover of deep grass. Just as cover seemed attained, Thord released the bird, who in a dark gust sailed and dipped and in an instant quelled the hapless small creature, which her talons then let fall to the ground.
    “Sparrow hawks do not stoop from a height,” Feng explained to her. “They glide and snatch by stealth.”
    “And appear to be too sated to eat what they kill,” she said, growing accustomed enough to Feng to dare a note of chastisement.
    “She leaves it for her masters. She has been trained to eat nothing but what comes from a human hand. Now let us show you how Jochebed hunts cranes.”
    A lure had been made of two blue crane’s wings tied together with a horsehide thong. The child brought this clumsy contraption from a shed beside the mews and carried it off a distance on the scythed stretch. Thord, making a rattling parental noise at the back of his throat, took the falcon on his gloved fist and with a swift twirl of his other hand knotted a thin leash into the rings at the ends of the jesses. Still with that hand he pulled off her hood by its scarlet tassel.
    The hawk’s eye! It was bigger than Gerutha could have imagined, blacker and more gleaming—a pearl of pure night. Or so she thought until the gyrfalcon twitched her head into an angle of sunlight and a many-rayed flower of gold and brown was revealed beneath the transparentcornea. Jochebed’s glistening flat head was so finely feathered it seemed bald, and a pepper of fine markings patterned her snowy neck feathers. The hook-beaked head trembled and twitched as the eye took them in, scanning the assembled faces for prey. When the eye seemed to fasten on Gerutha’s, the Queen felt her breath snatched. Thus death would not overlook even her, as in her girlhood she had once blithely imagined, the world seeming then one endless morning.
    “Look away, my lady,” the old falconer softly pleaded. “A strange human face is poison to them, until they are thoroughly manned.”
    Gerutha flinched, hurt by the admonition, for in truth she had been accustomed since infancy to be admired. She glanced sideways toward Feng, but he was intent on the business of falconry, his dark gaze as implacable as Jochebed’s.
    Limping, whistling, Ljot whirled the lure so it battered the air; it was touching to see him run, so raggedly and earnestly, his white face flashing as he kept looking back. He set the clumsily flapping device at the edge of the tall grass half a bowshot away, and crouched out of sight. A weak, moist, insistent whistling arose from where he crouched. Feng explained in Gerutha’s ear that the whistle had been fashioned by slitting a dried crane’s larynx. Thord released the falcon; it hurtled through the air trailing behind it a thin cord, the creance, attached to the leash. Thord, making that throaty rattling noise in his excitement, let the cord play out as the bird flew; Gerutha heard it hiss in the grass. Jochebed, feet flared,landed on the mockery of the blue-winged crane. Ljot popped from hiding holding out as reward a furry leg of fresh-killed rabbit. While the falcon fed, the boy gathered the jesses and pulled them tight. The falcon was reunited with old Thord, who stroked with a stiff feather her cruel fleshless feet, her hooked beak with bits of rabbit fur blood-stuck to it. Feng explained in Gerutha’s ear how, bit by