Death invites beauty to dance

She will always track me down. There is no place I can go where she will not find me. In her own good time. Never when I call.

How many times has the peregrine falcon come into my life? Often enough as a distant silhouette, an unmistakably muscular phrase in the symphony of birds. But a handful of times, over many decades, she has come to me with intent, bringing her lightning bolt, her rod of iron and the sound of the air being torn like linen.

These micro-bursts of peregrine last for only a few seconds, half a minute at most. In all my long years only a cumulative minute or two of close contact with the essence of falcon. But my life is just a washing line strung between birth and death, and these encounters are the prop poles which hold up the sagging string. They keep the few tatty rags that I have hung on the line from dragging in the dirt.

She comes only when she thinks best.

During my second-year summer break from Oxford’s undergraduate pressure-cooker, reeling under the bombardment of barren careers advice, I washed up on a loch in the far north-west of Scotland. Wading out to an archipelago of tiny islands, sheep-free and densely thicketed, I hoped to find a long-hidden fortress. Instead, I came across a party of thirty or more Black-headed Gulls. Bathing and gossiping, they kept their distance and pretended not to notice me.

The sky pirate bottomed out of her stoop about ten metres off my right shoulder and came for them at wave-top. Her flightpath was a complex, elegant equation, yearning for its own solution. Yet somehow the pell-mell of gull-squabble must have confused her and she pulled up empty-handed, glanced over her shoulder to re-acquire but then, conscious of her dignity, thought better of it.

As she re-gained height - flap, circle, drift-with-the-wind – her being in the world whispered a simple command. ‘Fly. That is what you are for.’

Many years later she found me in mountain wave over the Cairngorms in a dazzling white sailplane, climbing the front of a body-building colossus of lenticular cloud, approaching ten thousand feet and about to go on oxygen. Viewed close up, these gentle reticent clouds are wilful waterfalls, pounding skywards. She came down fast on my port side, matched her speed with mine and turned her head. The shutter behind her eyes closed like a tailor’s shears, capturing a single image which confirmed all she already suspected: that I was inedible, fragile, fit only for the carrion eaters of the mountainside if the few remaining gaps in the cloud should unexpectedly close in beneath me. Her black abyssal eyes said, ‘I am not your salvation. That is in your hands alone.’ Then she folded her wings and plummeted out of sight.

Yesterday morning she found me here in Cumbria, in my last refuge, approaching old age in full retreat from the soured and curdling world of mankind. Routed by the clicking counter that stood at three billion when I was born and now approaches eight. The tsunami of us, against which no defence can stand, no measures can be taken.

I perch on Mallerstang Edge, high above the valley where I live, and try to look long, try to see the path ahead through the eyes of the Celts and the Norse who have stood on this edge before me. I see only a solitary wood pigeon approaching, flying straight and level, taking a shortcut over the tops. I tut in professional disapproval. Never fly straight and level for more than a few seconds in a combat environment.

I hear her first. With a noise like a rusty zipper the sky opens its aiming eye and fires down the great grey bullet of peregrine. She hits the pigeon suicidally hard, slamming it into the ground. It bounces twice, flailing forward like a bundle of rags. But the flacon’s talons have failed to extract more than a down payment of thick powder-grey plumage. So there they sit, the peregrine and the pigeon, each enthroned on their own tussock of sphagnum. Stunned. Winded. Staring at each other, perplexed.  

A trail of soft pale down from the pigeon’s flank hangs in the calm air like a bridal train. The falcon is reminding me of a lesson I once learnt.

That day there had been an infinite blue-sky dome from the mountains of Kurdistan to the edge of the Red Sea, from the Gulf to the Levant. The Tigris glistened four miles below, threading its way between palm groves and the scars of a dozen conflicts fought over three millennia. I was at home, in the cockpit of the beloved war-horse that had been mine to groom and ride for twenty years. The air I was breathing, so they told me, smelt of oxygen-mask latex and hot avionics, all overlain with a watercolour wash of AVTUR. I didn’t perceive any of it. After thousands of hours sat just so, one hand on the throttles, the other on the intricate sword-hilt that is a fighter-bomber’s control column, my sense of smell had long since set this atmosphere as the neutral default.    

We are headed north to Amarah. Armed reconnaissance, a pair of British Tornados, a pilot and a navigator in each, with F-16s of the Alabama Guard flying shotgun, way up there in the blue. Everything is so damned quiet that it buzzes. ‘Missile Launch,’ the calm, southern-states voice says into our helmets. A brief pause to accommodate our incredulity. Then, ‘Missile launch, your left eight.’ Things happen around me. My left hand urges the throttles forward into reheat. My right hand rolls us most of the way inverted and pulls. Chaff blooms behind us and our electronics scream ‘fuck off!’ at their electronics, over and over. Intercom, radios, alarms and klaxons descend into bedlam. I sit in the quietude of a present on pause, and search.

Then I see them. Their long billowing trails of pearly satin are by now stretching out more than a mile below them, growing longer by the second. They are just two tiny black specks of pepper at the head of the train. They are missiles the size of telegraph poles, at twice the speed of sound. A handful of heartbeats more and the frozen isolation of altitude is shattered as they pass through our level, continue for a mile above us, hook over and burst. Two white blossoms like hybrid scabious sit delicately on top of sun-glittering stems, thirty thousand feet tall. I am stunned by their beauty. Winded. The towering, transitory sculpture and I stare at each other, perplexed.     

The brief moment snaps. The hard manoeuvring has cost us altitude and we may be ambushed by more agile short-range systems. In flight there is nowhere to hide.

On top of Mallerstang Edge the pigeon, bruised but unbroken, has re-booted, struggles airborne and makes a dash for the cliff-top, hoping for a long drop to salvation in the valley below.

The falcon and I both know that this may be the last time in my life that she comes to me. She is unmoved. ‘Remember,’ she says, as she takes off in pursuit, ‘beauty is not concocted from love alone. That would be a cloying confection. All great beauty has a price. It only remains to ask if you are willing to pay it.’

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