As soon as these people have in this manner completed the training and have killed the gazelle under the hawk, they, owing to their lack of understanding, cast off four or five chark͟h at a wild gazelle, and slip five or six greyhounds. God knows whether they ever kill anything. If they do, it is not skill; if they do not, it is utter bungling.
If the hawks take the quarry no credit is due;
Their failure we must as incompetence view.
If you look at the methods of sport of these Turks
In everything bungling and botchery lurks.
Now the system of the falconers of Bag͟hdād, Chaʿb[524] and Muʿammara[525] (in which places this ancient flight with the eyess or passage saker was first “invented”) is wholly distinct and apart from that of the Turkistānīs and K͟hurāsānīs; for the former, even at a herd of two hundred gazelle, fly only a single bālābān succoured by a couple of greyhounds[526]; but so well trained and intelligent are the hounds that even if a thousand gazelles come in front of them, they will seize only that one at which the hawk is stooping.
The skill of these latter people, however, is confined to training chark͟h and bālābān to gazelle, hubara, and hare, and they practise no other flight. Skill is shown by practising every form of sport.[527]
FOOTNOTES:
[489] From the Gulistān: Chapter I, St. 40.
[490] Kavāzha, in modern colloquial, “clamour.”