Run, rabbit run
Jeremy Clarke
As I came around the corner from the gents’ lavatory, head down, concentrating on rebuttoning my flies, a manual skill I’ve yet to master completely, I accidentally barged into a man with a hawk perched on his arm. He was a calm, friendly man of about my age. His hawk was magnificently liveried in brown and black. It was a male Harris hawk. The man stroked the bird and spoke kindly to it to reassure it. Did he hunt with it? I asked. Well, he was only two years old, he said, and he’d been ill for a long time. But he was thinking of trying it on rabbits.
I’d once seen a Harris hawk being flown at rabbits. Pressing home a furious attack, the hawk pursued a retreating rabbit right down a hole and got stuck about a foot underground. It tried to fly back out, but each time it opened its wings it became more wedged in. The bird didn’t have the sense to keep its wings folded and walk out. I was ferreting the hedge with the late Mr Mark Allen, a well-known ferreting man, at the time. The deadly intent of the hawk’s swooping attack, and its impotent rage at finding itself stuck in a hole, made us laugh. Mr Allen said it was one of the funniest things he’d ever seen.
The gents’ lavatory outside which we had collided was in the grounds of an animalrescue centre. It was their annual open day. I was a visitor and the chap with the hawk was there with his falconry club, he said, which was putting on an exhibition.
I warned him not to broadcast his intention too widely as the women that run the place are implacably opposed to hunting of any sort. I knew this to my cost because I’d once fallen in love with a sibling pair of whippet cross bedlington lurchers I’d seen at the centre. I’d gone into the office and said I’d like them, and they asked me some questions about my life and daily routine and gave me a preliminary form to fill in. They were all smiles and approbation. And then I foolishly boasted that I had permission from several local farmers to lamp rabbits on their land and that the lurchers would get all the exercise they could possibly need. You should have seen their faces. If I’d said I’d chosen the dogs because I intended to sexually abuse then strangle, cook and eat them for my supper, they probably wouldn’t have taken it half as badly. The form I was filling in was withdrawn from under the tip of the Biro. The manager spoke quietly, firmly and slightly huskily. Because they spent a lot of their valuable time, money and effort on rehoming rabbits, she said, they could not therefore countenance a dog to be rehomed then used to kill as many rabbits as possible. And that was it. Good afternoon.
Before going down to the little festive arena in which there was a cluster of fundraising stalls, I took a stroll around the rescued dogs’ accommodation block. Each the dog was in its own cement-floored, glassfronted, spotlessly clean pen. At eye level, there was a sheet of A4 detailing the animal’s name, age, breed, likes, dislikes, personal foibles, known history (most often a picaresque one) and finally the fairly crucial question for a dog that might be set in its ways: ‘Does Barney/Willow/Duke/like cats?’ This was the question that Mr Allen would always ask anyone boasting about how hard their terrier was, oddly enough. Mr Allen’s other local reputation as an unrepentant old-school badger-digging man meant that he heard a lot of bragging of this nature. If he could be bothered, he’d innocently ask, ‘Does he kill cats?’ It was his litmus test.
Of the 20 or so dogs currently residing at the rescue centre, only Tyson, a stocky, scarfaced English bull terrier cross Staffordshire bull terrier, disliked cats enough to try to kill them. The author of Tyson’s CV didn’t actually come right out and say this, however. He was trying to look on the bright side. Tyson’s life had been difficult enough already. He needed help and understanding, not negative criticism. So under the heading ‘Does Tyson like cats?’ it said ‘Not really.’ Leaving the dog compound, I unexpectedly found myself in the rescued rabbits section. Mr Allen would have laughed at that if he’d seen it, too. There were about a dozen bunny-wunnies, as he called them, and each was endowed with a luxurious hutch and spacious run, and they were all stuffing their faces with fresh veg. They looked as if they couldn’t believe their luck. Later on, when I again saw my friend with the Harris hawk over at the falconry tent, I made the suggestion that he sneak over to the rabbit section and get his hawk started with a few easy ones.
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