Hunting for a Hunter

 

During our childhood, my brother loved birds, mostly as pets. Flying birds cannot excite a child like they stimulate the poets. He fancied catching a hawk and carry it as his pet. A boy with a hawk surely would go as the undisputed leader of the neighborhood urchins.

Shikra is a relatively smaller bird of prey. The wilderness around the village was yet to be tamed. It meant we had many shikras in the sky during those days. The bird hovered in the air—at one point in the sky like a helicopter—as it took aim at some field rat among the bunch-grass, sedge and shrubbery around the village pond.

The majestic hunter caught my brother’s fancy. He mustered up his band. They observed that the small hawk suddenly swooped down, literally fell over the rat. There would be a scuffle of few seconds before it took to air again with its take-away. And here the band of boys smelt a chance. They procured a big, wicker-worked fodder basin used to feed cattle. They planned to hide among the bushes and drop the instrument made of mulberry switches and canes over the hunter, while it struggled on the ground to tame its prey.

The thing was thrown hundreds of times over a period of weeks. And finally they had the catch. The cattle feed basin landed on an impressive cluster of bushes. The hawk made a timely escape. As they approached to retrieve their hunting gear, a big black snake hissed from under it. A snake being too much for a pet, they ran away leaving the snake with its nice kennel. An elder person had to go and fetch the thing after the snake had rejected its new home, finding it reeking with cattle saliva and sunlight filtering through the narrow chinks.