The Peregrine: 50th Anniversary Edition: Afterword by Robert Macfarlane. Robert MacFarlane

cannot envisage this freedom of the eye. The peregrine sees and remembers patterns we do not know exist: the neat squares of orchard and woodland, the endlessly varying quadrilateral shapes of fields. He finds his way across the land by a succession of remembered symmetries. But what does he understand? Does he really ‘know’ that an object that increases in size is moving towards him? Or is it that he believes in the size he sees, so that a distant man is too small to be frightening but a man near is a man huge and therefore terrifying? He may live in a world of endless pulsations, of objects forever contracting or dilating in size. Aimed at a distant bird, a flutter of white wings, he may feel – as it spreads out beneath him like a stain of white – that he can never fail to strike. Everything he is has been evolved to link the targeting eye to the striking talon.

THE HUNTING LIFE

      October 1st

      Autumn rises into the bright sky. Corn is down. Fields shine after harvest.

      Over orchards smelling of vinegary windfalls, busy with tits and bullfinches, a peregrine glides to a perch in a river-bank alder. River shadows ripple on the spare, haunted face of the hawk in the water. They cross the cold eyes of the watching heron. Sunlight glints. The heron blinds the white river cornea with the spear of his bill. The hawk flies quickly upward to the breaking clouds.

      Swerving and twisting away from the misty lower air, he rises to the first faint warmth of the sun, feels delicately for winghold on the sheer fall of sky. He is a tiercel, lean and long and supple-winged, the first of the year. He is the colour of yellow ochre sand and reddish-brown gravel. His big, brown, spaniel eyes shine wet in the sunlight, like circles of raw liver, embedded in the darker matt brown of the moustachial mask. He sweeps away to the west, following the gleaming curve of water. Laboriously I follow his trail of rising plover.

      Swallows and martins call sharply, fly low; jays and magpies lurk and mutter in hedges; blackbirds splutter and scold. Where the valley widens, the flat fields are vibrant with tractors. Gulls and lapwings are following the plough. The sun shines from a clear sky flecked with high cirrus. The wind is moving round to the north. By the sudden calling of red-legged partridges and the clattering rise of woodpigeons, I know that the hawk is soaring and drifting southward along the woodland ridge. He is too high to be seen. I stay near the river, hoping he will come back into the wind. Crows in the elms are cursing and bobbing. Jackdaws cackle up from the hill, scatter, spiral away, till they are far out and small and silent in blue depths of sky. The hawk comes down to the river, a mile to the east; disappears into trees he left two hours before.

      Young peregrines are fascinated by the endless pouring up and drifting down of the white plume of gulls at the brown wake of the plough. While the autumn ploughing lasts, they will follow the white-bannered tractors from field to field across the valley. They seldom attack. They just like to watch.

      That is what the tiercel was doing when I found him again in the alder. He did not move from his perch till one o’clock, when the tractor driver went home to his lunch and gulls settled to sleep in the furrows. Jays were screeching in oaks near the river. They were looking for acorns to bury in the wood. The peregrine heard them, watched their wings flashing white between the leaves. He flew steeply up into the wind, and began to soar. Turning, drifting, swaying, he circled up towards the burning clouds and the cool swathes of sky. I lowered the binoculars to rest my aching arms. As though released, the hawk swept higher and was gone. I scanned the long white spines of cirrus for his thin dark crescent shape, but could not find it. Faint as a whisper, his harsh exultant cry came drifting down.

      The jays were silent. One flew heavily up, carrying an acorn in its wide-open bill. Leaving the cover of the trees, it rose high above the meadows, making for the hillside wood four hundred yards away. I could see the big acorn bulging its mandibles apart, like a lemon stuffed in the mouth of a boar’s head. There was a sibilant purring sound, like the distant drumming of a snipe. Something blurred and hissed behind the jay, which seemed suddenly to trip and stumble on the air. The acorn spurted out of its bill, like the cork out of a bottle. The jay fell all lopsidedly and threshing, as though it were having a fit. The ground killed it. The peregrine swooped, and carried the dead bird to an oak. There he plucked and ate it, gulping the flesh hastily down, till only the wings, breast-bone, and tail were left.

      Gluttonous, hoarding jay; he should have hedge-hopped and lurched from tree to tree in his usual furtive manner. He should never have bared the white flashes of his wings and rump to the watching sky. He was too vivid a mark, as he dazzled slowly across the green water-meadows.

      The hawk flew to a dead tree, and slept. At dusk he flew east towards his roosting place.

      Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.

      October 3rd

      Inland stagnant under fog. On the coast: hot sun and cooling breeze, the North Sea flat and shining. Fields of skylarks, singing, chasing, flashing in the sun. Saltings ringing with the redshanks’ cry. Shooting, at high tide. Shimmering columns of waders rising from the mud-flats, shaking out across the saltings. White beaches under haze. Waders flashing on the sea like spray, firing the dusty inland fields.

      Most of the smaller waders settled on the shell beach: grey plover, knot, turnstone, ringed plover, sanderling. All faced different ways, sleeping, preening, watching, sharp shadowed on the dazzling gritty whiteness of the beach. Dunlin perched on the tips of marsh plants, just above the surface of the tide. They faced the breeze; stolid, patient, swaying uneasily. There was room for them on the beach, but they would not fly.

      Five hundred oystercatchers came down from the south; pied brilliance, whistling through pink bills like sticks of rock. Black legs of sanderling ran on the white beach. A curlew sandpiper stood apart; delicate, foal-like, sea rippling behind it, soft eyes closing in the roan of its face. The tide ebbed. Waders swam in the heat-haze, like watery reflections moored to still, black shadows.

      Far out at sea, gulls called. One by one, the larks stopped singing. Waders sank into their shadows, and crouched small. A falcon peregrine, sable on a white shield of sky, circled over from the sea. She slowed, and drifted aimlessly, as though the air above the land was thick and heavy. She dropped. The beaches flared and roared with salvoes of white wings. The sky shredded up, was torn by whirling birds. The falcon rose and fell, like a black billhook in splinters of white wood. She slashed and ripped the air, but could not strike. Tiring, she flew inland. Waders floated down. Cawing rooks flew out to feed on plains of mud.

      October 5th

      A kestrel hovered beside the brook that separates the flat river plain from the wooded hill. He sank slowly down into stubble, lowering like a threaded spider from the web his wings had spun.

      East of the brook, a green orchard rises to the skyline. A peregrine circled high above it, and began to hover. He advanced into the wind, hovering every fifty yards, sometimes staying motionless for a minute or more. The strong west wind was rising to a gale, bending branches, threshing leaves. The sun had gone, and clouds were deepening. The western horizon pricked out black and thorny. Rain was coming. Colour ebbed to brilliant chiaroscuro. Between the narrow edges of his long, level wings, the hawk’s down-bent head looked round and bulky as an owl’s. A moorhen called, and tinkling goldfinches hid silently in thistles. Magpies hopped into the longer grass, with deep-flexing frog-like bounds. When the orchard ended, the hawk veered away to the north. He would not cross the brook while I was there.