I may say at once that hawking, particularly in this form, does not give
me much pleasure. There is something magnificent in the flight of the
falcon when it is released and flung towards its prey, but the odds are
too heavy in its favour and the whimperings of the doomed quarry strike
a chill in the heart. We flew our hawks at duck and plovers, and missed
none. Often the first swoop failed, but the deadly implacable pursuer
was instantly ready to swoop again, and rarely was a third manoeuvre
necessary. Man, under the influence of the excitement of the chase, is
the same all the world over, and there was no difference between these
Indians moving swiftly to intervene between the hawk and its stricken
prey and an English boy running to retrieve his rabbit. Their animation
and triumph--even their shouts and cries--were alike.
And so we crossed field after field on our gentle steeds--and no one
admires gentleness in a horse more than I--stopping only to watch
another tragedy of the air, or to look across the river to Delhi and see
the Fort under new conditions. All this country I had so often looked
down upon from those high massive walls, standing in one of the lovely
windows of Shah Jahan's earthly paradise; and now the scene was
reversed, and I began to take more delight in it than in the sport. But
at a pond to which we next came there was enacted a drama so absorbing
that everything else was forgotten, even the heat of the sun.
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