FOOTNOTES:
[633] It is not clear what the author means by “lion with a buffalo.” The hunting leopard is trained in other countries besides India to take antelope and gazelle.
[634] By this title the Shiʿahs refer to ʿAlī. The writer was undoubtedly a Shiʿah. The Sunnis of the present day, but not the Shiʿahs, style the Sultan of Turkey “Commander of the Faithful.”
[635] Garm-sīr va sard-sīr, “hot regions and cold.” Tabrīz, T̤ihrān and parts of Iṣfahān are sard-sīr. The city of Iṣfahān and of Shīrāz are “middling.”
[636] Shimāl, “North,” is the name given to the prevalent wind in Baghdad and in the Persian Gulf.
[637] The wall would naturally be of mud or of sun-dried bricks and would cost little.
[638] Sakū is a “wooden bench, a garden seat”; or as here a “mud platform.”
The author has not expressed himself at all clearly or else there are omissions in the text. The passage might mean that the platforms should be forty inches apart or be forty inches high.
[639] “Weathering” is placing hawks, usually unhooded, in the open air on blocks. Eastern falconers do not “weather” their hawks, as during the hawking season the hawks are on their fists in the open air many hours.
[640] I have never seen a saker eat stones.
[641] Ṣafrā, “yellow bile,” one of the four humours of the body.
[642] In the plains of India, hawks during the moult should not be so gorged, at least not during the four or five months of hot weather. Hawks that are kept too fat will not moult properly. Further they should be fed only once in the day, and that in the morning. If gorged in the evening, their rest is affected, and they do not get the benefit of the slight coolness of the night.
[643] I one year, in Kohat, India, tried moulting a young (chūz) peregrine in a large outhouse, high and roomy. The hawk did not moult at all, and frequently got so fat and heavy that she was unable to fly up to her perch until her food was reduced for a day or two. However, falconers in England recommend keeping a moulting hawk loose in a loft.
CHAPTER XL
REMEDIES FOR SLOW MOULTING
Moulting hawks are of two kinds; the one “generous,” the other “miserly.” The “generous” are those that moult quickly; the “miserly” those that positively refuse to part with their feathers. Should you happen to have a hawk of the latter description and wish to make it moult quickly, then:—
Receipt: procure a snake; hold its head and tail together in one hand, and then chop off, with one blow, about four fingers’ breadth of its extremities; skin it, and give your hawk a little of its flesh.[644] Item: feed your hawk a few days on the flesh of the hoopoe.[645] Item: give your hawk daily, concealed in a thin slice of meat, one ant-lion with three of the saliva-glands of sheep.[646] Item: dry and grind up some hornets,[647] and for three alternate days sprinkle this powder on your hawk’s meat. Item: reduce your hawk’s food for three or four days, so that she may lose a little flesh. Grind[648] up the skin of a snake, and twice a day give some of this to her with her meat. She will quickly cast her feathers.[649] Item: dry, in the shade, several saliva-glands taken from the necks of sheep. Grind one before feeding and mix it with her meat. She will soon cast her feathers. Item: during the space of six days, feed her thrice on the flesh of a nine- or ten-day-old puppy. She will quickly cast and renew her feathers. This receipt is specially beneficial in the case of long-winged hawks, particularly so in the case of the peregrine, which moults better than any other kind of hawk, for it moults quite two months earlier than other hawks.[650]