The cold weather means the lieutenant's trophies have not yet started to smell. I leave them and the furry flag to their fixed contemplation of all things pendulous and pending,nd walk along the serried summit of the castle.

From these brave battlements with a chosen bird of prey I used to fly my spirit free. From this quarried perch, I as much as the quarry they seized was gripped by them, and through those sleek carnivores, swift death's craftsmen, I felt that I partook of their airborne, slicing skill, and saw, in that stooping instant of mortality, a kind of ephemeral persistence. Here were the old rules, written across the sky in dark, gliding purpose, in curved lines of flight, in the panicking dips and flips and desperate lunges, dives and sprints of the target, all answered by instant flicks and turns executed by the following, closing hawk. Here was the sudden buffeting connection sometimes, close enough, you heard the thud of talons hitting flesh the small puff of feathers that hung upon the air, then the long, corkscrewing fall, the raptor's wings scrabbling for purchase in the air, its prey limp or struggling weakly, also flapping, and the whole, this binary avian creation one dead or dying, the other more alive than ever before, as though transfused that death melded twin secured by claw and tendon, rotating about their shared axis as they dropped locked together, drizzling feathers, distributing the game's last plaintive cries and then falling finally to field, lawn or wood.

The dogs were trained to frighten off the hawks, then with their warm cargo come running back to the castle, across the stone moat bridge, through the courtyard, up the winding stair and out on to the battlements, a trail of feathers and blood behind them on the spiralled steps.

With those surrogate hunters I sought to be part of that ruthlessly elegant struggle of life and death, evolution and selection, predator and prey. I believed I might, through them, withstand the air's stern siege and the slow weathering of time and the onward tramp of age, by meeting it with no cloud's means giving way and giving in but a carving use instead; a fixity of vision and of grasp that would let me so delegated, unreduced stand, connected and defined.