colour that you can imagine – vivid blue, gentian and red, green, yellow and ochre. I thought at first the wool and cloth dyers had been at work there, but when we walked up to them we saw that the pools contained not water but boiling mud that glooped and bubbled like a thick soup on a cooking fire. Then suddenly behind us a jet of pure, clear water shot high into the air straight out of the ground and fell to earth again, leaving behind nothing but a cloud of steam. As we walked further, we came across more pools of boiling mud and found to our horror that the earth was falling away beneath our feet with every step. Terrified of plunging down, we ran for higher ground.
But the hills and high ridges were not without their hazards either, for we often had to cross wide rivers of loose shale that threatened to sweep us down the hillside. Hinrik showed us how to drop on our hands and knees and dig with a stick a few inches beneath the shale to find the firm rock on which we could crawl across. I copied him and Fausto followed, but Vítor and Marcos were still vying with each other and neither would humiliate himself by kneeling, until Vítor, trying to walk across it, slipped on the loose stone and was carried halfway down the hill by it before he could stop. He soon learned to crawl then. But it was slow, painful work and our knees and hands were cut and bruised by the end of it.
Each time I could safely drag my gaze from the ground I was searching the skies for the falcons, but though I saw many waterfowl winging their way between the rivers and lakes, and even a tiny merlin, I didn’t see a single white falcon, nor its prey the ptarmigan. Whenever I could safely do so, out of earshot of the others, I asked Hinrik where the ptarmigan were. Had he seen any? When did he think we would see some? The poor lad began to look alarmed every time I approached.
‘They are not here,’ he said wearily each time. ‘I told you. In the mountains. High in the mountains.’
‘But if you see one you will show me at once,’ I begged him.
‘I can show you duck. They are good to eat too.’
But we didn’t catch any duck either.
All the time we were walking, and when we sat around the camp fire at night I was constantly planning how I might capture a wild falcon, for I knew I might only get one chance. If I could find them I wanted to take two sore birds, those in their first year of life. They were easy to distinguish because before they went through their first moult their plumage was much darker. But after the first moult it was much harder to tell the age of a falcon from a distance. If I captured one that was too old, the chances were it would not survive the long sea journey home and all this effort would be for nothing. But perhaps I would have no choice but to take whatever I could.
I knew how to take passage birds, those birds migrating south in the autumn. Ever since I had been old enough to sit still, my father had taken me out to the plains in Portugal to wait for the kites and harriers, eagles, buzzards and falcons to arrive. There he built elaborate hides out of sods and set up nets and poles with live pigeons as bait, wooden falcons as decoys, and tethered shrikes that would give warning of the approaching bird of prey.
We would wait in silence in the hide from dawn until dusk, never taking our eyes from the shrikes. ‘Patience,’ said my father, ‘is the most important skill a falconer must master.’ When the shrikes became agitated my father would know exactly which bird of prey was approaching. If they bated and flapped on their perches, it was a buzzard. If they ran out of their hiding places with cries of alarm, it was a sparrowhawk or falcon, and if they moved slowly, a kite, eagle or harrier. If the approaching bird was one my father wanted, he would release a tethered pigeon, and once the hawk had fastened on to it, he could pull them both into his net.
But I could not set traps like my father. He knew exactly