Books for Dungeon Masters: The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker

I recently picked up the audio reading of J.A. Baker's The Peregrine on the recommendation of this blog. The book, published in 1967, won the Duff Cooper Prize the same year. It concerns the watching of peregrine falcons in England, and condenses ten years of observation into a readily digestible account. I doubt my readers have any interest in birdwatching (neither do I), but you should pick it up anyway for two reasons. 

First, the prose is excellent, especially in its use of creative metaphor and simile, and I believe any game master would benefit from reading it and picking up a couple turns of phrase. His description of landscapes, if cut down a bit, would make for spectacular opening narration. 

Second, it may inspire you to think more deeply of the behavior of natural and supernatural animals in your world. I imagine his words on the peregrine applied, to say, a giant eagle or even a roc, and the creature becomes so much more fantastical. What kind of lake might a giant raptor prefer in order to bathe itself, how does it spend its day in anticipation of a hunt, how does it play, how does it treat its kill? The thought of a creature that might strike from the blue, not out of territoriality or hunger, but out of cruel play, is so much more engaging. 

Of the country landscape and the nightjar, he wrote: 

"There is always a sense of loss, a feeling of being forgotten. There is nothing else here; no castles, no ancient monuments, no hills like green clouds. It is just a curve of the earth, a rawness of winter fields. Dim, flat, desolate lands that cauterise all sorrow. I have always longed to be a part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence, as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to the town as a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival. 

I came late to the love of birds. For years I saw them only as a tremor at the edge of vision. They know suffering and joy in simple states not possible for us. Their lives quicken and warm to a pulse our hearts can never reach. They race to oblivion. They're old before we have finished growing. 

The first bird I searched for was the nightjar, which used to nest in the valley. Its song is like the sound of a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask. It's an odorous sound, with a bouquet that rises to the quiet sky. In the glare of day it would seem thinner and drier, but dusk mellows it and gives it vintage. If a song could smell, this song would smell of crushed grapes and almonds and dark wood. The sound spills out and none of it is lost, the whole wood brims with it. Then it stops, suddenly, unexpectedly, but the ear hears it still, a prolonged and fading echo draining and winding out of the surrounding trees. Into the deep stillness between the early stars and the long afterglow, the nightjar leaps up joyfully, it glides and flutters, dances and bounces, lightly, silently, away."

Of sparrow hawks:

"Sparrow hawks were always near me in the dusk, like something that I meant to say, but could never quite remember ... They lived a fugitive, guerrilla life. In all the overgrown, neglected places the frail bones of generations of sparrow hawks are sifting down now into the deep humus of the woods. They were a banished race of beautiful barbarians, and when they died they could not be replaced."

Of the peregrine:

"He re-enacts the whole process of learning to kill that he went through when he first left the eyrie. The first short, tentative flights, the longer, more confident ones, the playful mock attacks at inanimate objects such as falling leaves or drifting feathers, the games with other birds changing to a pretense or attack, and then to the first serious attempt to kill. True hunting may be a comparatively brief process at the end of this long re-enactment of the hawk's adolescence.

Hunting is always preceded by some form of play. The hawk may feint at partridges, harass jackdaws or lapwings, skirmish with crows. Sometimes, without warning, he will suddenly kill. Afterwards, he seems baffled by what he's done, and he may leave the kill where it fell and return to it later when he is genuinely hunting. Even when he is hungry, and has killed in anger, he may sit beside his prey for ten to fifteen minutes before starting to feed. In these cases the dead bird is usually unmarked, and the hawk seems to be puzzled by it. He nudges it idly with his bill. When blood flows, he feeds at once."

Of watching a peregrine dive:

"He hovered, and stayed still, striding on the crumbling columns of air, curved wings jerking and flexing. Five minutes he stayed there, fixed like a barb in the blue flesh of the sky. His body was still and rigid, his head turned from side to side, his tail fanned open and shut, his wings whipped and shuddered like canvas in the lash of the wind. He side-slipped to his left, paused, then glided round and down into what could only be the beginning of a tremendous stoop. There is no mistaking the menace of that first easy drifting fall. Smoothly, at an angle of fifty degrees, he descended; not slowly, but controlling his speed; gracefully, beautifully balanced. There was no abrupt change. The angle of his fall became gradually steeper till there was no angle left, but only a perfect arc. He curved over and slowly revolved, as though for delight, glorying in anticipation of the dive to come. His feet opened and gleamed golden, clutching up towards the sun. He rolled over, and they dulled, and turned towards the ground beneath, and closed again. For a thousand feet he fell, and curved, and slowly turned, and tilted upright. Then his speed increased, and he dropped vertically down. He had another thousand feet to fall, but now he fell sheer, shimmering down through dazzling sunlight, heart-shaped, like a heart in flames. He became smaller and darker, diving down from the sun. The partridge in the snow beneath looked up at the black heart dilating down upon him, and heard a hiss of wings rising to a roar. In ten seconds the hawk was down, and the whole splendid fabric, the arched reredos and immense fan-vaulting of his flight, was consumed and lost in the fiery maelstrom of the sky.

And for the partridge there was the sun suddenly shut out, the foul flailing blackness spreading wings above, the roar ceasing, the blazing knives driving in, the terrible white face descending, hooked and masked and horned and staring-eyed. And then the back-breaking agony beginning, and snow scattering from scuffling feet, and show filling the bill’s wide silent scream, till the merciful needle of the hawk’s beak notched in the straining neck and jerked the shuddering life away.

And for the hawk, resting now on the soft flaccid bulk of his prey, there was the rip and tear of choking feathers, and hot blood dripping from the hook of his beak, and rage dying slowly to a small hard core within.

And for the watcher, sheltered for centuries from such hunger and such rage, such agony and such fear, there is the memory of that sabring fall from the sky, and the vicarious joy of the guiltless hunter who kills only through his familiar, and wills him to be fed."

I've only just started the book and immediately felt the need to share it with others; I have no higher recommendation. The audio version I picked up is read by David Attenborough, who brings a spectacular vocal quality to the text. Pick it up on your platform and venue of choice.