num_pages: 215
description: What is it that binds human beings to other animals? T.H. 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. 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. The word 'feral' has a kind of magical potency which allied itself to two other words 'ferocious' and 'free.' Immediately White wrote to Germany to acquire a young goshawk. 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and Gos was free and White had no idea how to break him in beyond the ancient (and though he did not know it long superseded) practice of depriving him of sleep which meant that he White also went without rest. Slowly man and bird entered a state of delirium and intoxication of attraction and repulsion that looks very much like love. 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. 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.
language: English
title: The Goshawk
publisher: NYRB