What is it that binds human beings to other animals? T. H. White, the author of The Once and Future King and Mistress Mashams Repose, was a young writer who found himself rifling through old handbooks of falconry. A particular sentence—the bird reverted to a feral state—seized his imagination, and, White later wrote, A longing came to my mind that I should be able to do this myself. The word feral has a kind of magical potency which allied itself to two other words, ferocious and free. Immediately, White wrote to Germany to acquire a young goshawk. Gos, as White named the bird, was ferocious and Gos was free, and White had no idea how to break him in beyond the ancient and, though he did not know it, long superseded practice of depriving him of sleep, which meant that he, White, also went without rest.
