It was this that became The Goshawk, one of modern literature s most memorable and surprising encounters with the wilderness as it exists both within us and without. White kept a daybook describing his volatile relationship with Gos at once a tale of obsession, a comedy of errors, and a hymn to the hawk. Slowly man and bird entered a state of delirium and intoxication, of attraction and repulsion that looks very much like love. Gos, as White named the bird, was ferocious and Gos was free, and White had no idea how to break him in beyond the ancient and, though he did not know it, long superseded practice of depriving him of sleep, which meant that he, White, also went without rest. Immediately, White wrote to Germany to acquire a young goshawk. The word feral has a kind of magical potency which allied itself to two other words, ferocious and free.
A particular sentence the bird reverted to a feral state seized his imagination, and, White later wrote, A longing came to my mind that I should be able to do this myself. White, the author of The Once and Future King and Mistress Masham’s Repose, was a young writer who found himself rifling through old handbooks of falconry. What is it that binds human beings to other animals? T.
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