October 22, 2009
The Peregrine by J.A. Baker is the most beautiful piece of nature writing I have ever read. It is the account of the six months Baker spent following a pair of peregrine falcons along their hunting routes in the east midlands English countryside, but it is more than that: it is an artistically precise and penetrating rendering of a certain place in time, and a shatteringly lovely and loving exposition of what one man felt and saw in that place at that time.
From October through April Baker became an almost constant observer of the peregrines, tracking down and recording their flying techniques, their habits, and their kills (in great detail) and living deeply within the physical, natural world the birds inhabited. There are no other humans in the book, other than a few sightings by Baker of hunters and farmers, and yet the book is far from a solitary adventure. Every day Baker is accompanied by a cast of hundreds. All the birds of the east midlands coastline and inland, as well as its mammal inhabitants, are there with him as he tracks up and down, back and forth, or sits quietly, for long periods of time, equipped only with his binoculars and his unquenchable patience of observation.
Baker writes in prose that shifts easily from lyrical to straightforward to humorous to majestic. He places us firmly beside him, fellow observers not only of the magnificent peregrines, but of all the wildlife around us. While I tended to blanch a bit at the descriptions of the hawks' kills, Baker explains that "no flesh-eating creature is more efficient, or more merciful, than the peregrine. It is not deliberately merciful; it simply does what it is designed to do." Either piercing the chest of the prey with its back claw, or breaking the prey's neck with its bill, the kill is quick. The hunt itself is a longer affair, one that the peregrine warms up for with almost playful swoops and stoops across the sky. I was enthralled by the descriptions of their flying: "to the north the falcon tilted downward and slid slowly through the sun and shadow towards the earth. As her wings swept up and back, she glided faster. And then faster, with her whole body flattened and compressed. Bending over in a splendid arc, she plunged to earth....then she was gone beyond elms and hedges and far buildings." I understood completely what Baker felt when a hawk suddenly surprises him, flying past: "I was lifted to joy on the surge of his wings."
Baker is gifted in his ability to describe the hawks again and again, never in the same way but always consistent with their salient features of shape and color. He writes of spotting a peregrine: "between branches, I saw his bronze-brown back gleaming in the yellow sunlight as he perched on an oak. He shone like a huge, inverted, golden pear." Later, a peregrine shines "in the amber light, every feather sleek and burnished or ripplingi n the breeze... He shone in the network of contorted branches like a splendid copper vessel splashed with gold."
As admiringly as Baker writes about the peregrines, and as identified with them as he becomes ("Wherever he goes this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified"), he does not ignore the many other birds and mammals that are his everyday crowds. He writes of "a wren, in sunlight among fallen leaves in a dry ditch" seeming "suddenly divine, like a small brown priest in a parish of dead leaves and wintry hedges, devoted till death." His description of a heron is perfect: "His legs reached down with a slow pedalling movement, like a man descending through the trap-door of a loft and feeling for a ladder with his feet. He touched the topmost twig, fumbled his spidery toes around it, gradually deflated himself down onto the long stilts of his legs, hunched and crumpling like a broken parasol." Coming upon a long-tailed field mouse, he describes how the tiny creature is "felted with a soft moss of green-brown fur....His long delicate ears were like hands unfolding; his huge, night-seeing eyes were opaque and dark." He writes of the call of an owl's "vibrant groan: a long sensitive pause is held till almost unbearable; then he looses the strung bubbles of his tremulous hollow song." That is gorgeous writing.
The most beautiful parts of the book, for me, where his descriptions of place and time: "As the sun rose, the fog shredded and whirled and died away under bushes and hedges. By eleven o'clock the sun was shining from the centre of a great blue circle. Fog burned outwards from its edge, like a dwindling white corona. Colour flamed up from the kindled land." I was made breathless by his lovely rendition of dusk:
"Cold air rises from the ground as the sun goes down. The eye-burning clarity of the light intensifies. The southern rim of the sky glows to a deeper blue, to pale violet, to purple, then thins to grey. Slowly the wind falls, and the still air begins to freeze. The solid eastern ridge is black; it has a bloom on it like the dust on the skin of a grape. The west flares briefly. The long, cold amber of the afterglow casts clear black lunar shadows. There is an animal mystery in the light that sets upon the fields like a frozen muscle that will flex and wake at sunrise."
I took a little pass around my own patch of frosty green early this morning. It offers nothing on the scale of the midlands traversed by Baker every day for months, but nevertheless, for having seen his patch through his eyes, my own backyard wears a burnished sheen this morning, a patina of wildness and beauty for which I am grateful.
|
|
