"Falconer, Heil"

Ankle-deep in the heather of a north German moor, the green-clad hunter carefully quartered the area until he found a rabbit hole. Noting fresh tracks, he solemnly commented: "Das ist gut." From a leather pouch on his hip he brought out a sleek, sausage-shaped ferret named Mookie. The three tiny bells on his neck tinkling, Mookie was launched down the rabbit hole. The Jagermeister (hunt master) watched intently as Mookie's master raised his gauntleted left arm and spoke soothingly to the malevolent-looking hawk tethered to his wrist. "Steady, Diana. Steady, pretty girl," whispered the hunter. Diana's pale yellow eyes glared balefully at her master.

Mookie, out of sight, worked efficiently. Suddenly, a rabbit bounded out of a nearby hole and fled across the heather in a series of bobtailed bounces, heading straight for a patch of scrub fir trees. Diana spotted the quarry almost instantly. When the rabbit was about 75 yards away, Falconer Wolfgang Stehle suddenly called "Habicht frei" (Hawk free) and released the thong which bound straining Diana to his. wrist. Wings pounding for quick altitude, Diana flashed after the rabbit. Closing fast, she wheeled into a vertical bank between two fir trees and plummeted downward for the strike.

The Deadly Trio. By the time Stehle arrived at the scene of the kill, Diana had the rabbit pinned, one foot on its back, the other on its head, her wings tenting the prey. She whimpered excitedly while Stehle distracted her with a spare piece of rabbit meat and took the kill from her claws. The rabbit was pouched and Diana was re-thonged. Ferret Mookie stayed underground while the hawk was airborne, but he quickly emerged and was re-pocketed to await the next assignment.

Then the Jagermeister solemnly cut a fir twig, placed it in the crease of his green hat, bowed to Stehle and pronounced "Falconer, Heil." Stehle, in turn, bowed, accepted the twig and placed it under the band of his own hat. In two days of competition, with 18 stylish kills, the deadly hunting trio of Stehle, Diana and Mookie successfully defended the title in the international competition sponsored by the Order of German Falconers.

The Flight's the Thing. More than 100 falconers (a generic term applied to all those who hunt with birds) from Germany, France, Belgium, Holland and Great Britain had entered the trials. They brought birds of half a dozen varieties, ranging from peregrines, which dive at pheasant and pigeons at speeds as high as 200 m.p.h., to a somewhat elderly eagle, especially trained (for Hermann Goring) as a fox killer.

On the final day last week some 5,000 spectators from Bremen and Hamburg gathered to watch an exhibition of the birds at work. The fox-killing eagle made an ungainly strike at a fox fur dragged across the meadow (the local S.P.C.A. frowned on live bait). Stehle, a University of Cologne medical student, sent Diana off to three fast strikes while the crowd applauded the championship team. In competition, Diana had made twelve more kills than her closest rival, but Stehle deprecated that record. "It's not the number of kills that counts. We falconers don't care so much about that. It's the flight that's the thing, the way the bird does her work. This is pure sport." Little Mookie, who had done a ferret's if not a lion's share of the work, was not on hand to take part in the exhibition or share in the crowd's applause. He was nursing a rabbit-bitten nose.

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