It flies deeper and deeper into the woods. Kay soon goes off in a fit of pique, leaving the mild, anxious, loyal Wart to try to catch the bird. “Up went the hawk,” White writes, “swooping like a child flung high in a swing, until the wings folded and he was sitting in a tree.” He throws the bird from his glove before it is ready, and for a moment it hangs there, a confusion of feathers and air and instinct. White’s six-hundred-and-forty-page medieval epic, “The Once and Future King.” We have already learned, on page 1, that the boys practice hawking every week, but now it becomes clear that Kay is bad at it. And this one is: we are six pages into T. It is a goshawk, a huge bird with golden eyes, like something out of a legend.
At present, in an arrangement that is typical, the Wart is trudging along carrying a dead creature to serve as a lure, while Kay, walking in front of him, carries the hawk. For now, he is Kay’s inferior: younger, adopted, of unknown lineage, saddled by the older child with the unfortunate nickname the Wart. The other boy will grow up to be a king, but he doesn’t know that yet. One of these boys belongs to that class: his father is a knight, and he will grow up to be one, too. The year is 500 A.D., give or take, when young men of a certain social class fly hawks for sport. Photograph by Christina McLeish / Courtesy Grove Atlantic Haunted by her father’s death, Helen Macdonald kept company with a bird of prey.
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