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I recently had the
great experience of hiking  with a real live falconer. It was actually a woman friend who raised and
trained falcons for a living. She was quite a sight, on a large black horse, holding her
falcon with a heavy gauntlet on her left hand. The falcon had jesses, or leg straps, and a rufer, or leather eye hood
over its head. They're used for hunting, but my friend was actually training her bird to
"hunt for show", a very new and rare technique, wherein the bird finds its prey,
but does not actually kill it. To train a falcon to do this takes a very special bird to
be able to control themselves.
After raising literally hundreds of birds,
she finally found one that she was able to work with. When I met her, my friend was
"game hunting" pheasant with this very special bird. She released the bird for
the pursuit. It soared into the sky, hovered in the air until the quarry appeared, then
plummeted at the prey with terrific speed. Usually, at this point, the falcon strikes a
blow so strong that it kills the prey at once. But amazingly this bird, when it contacted
its prey, simply jostled it, then flew back to its master.
I was so taken by the experience that I
decided to make a knife for this amazingly rare event. I designed a blade that represented
the magnificent bird in flight, and for the handle, I forged two different types of
material into one. A smooth, almost peaceful Poca-wood and a dynamic and powerful stag
horn.
Fused together they represent both the
power of the hunter bird, and its ability, once it has shown its skill, to have such
amazing control that it can stop its plunge, and give its prey a harmless passing
"nudge". Perhaps this knife represents a good lesson for everyone… that
it's more important to know you have the power than to keep on proving it to others.
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