Run, rabbit run

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.