Chapter XLVII On Epilepsy
If your hawk have epilepsy—and I have owned and seen many epileptic hawks—when you fly her she will perhaps take the quarry, but just before you come up to render her assistance, she will let go, fall on her back, and utter strange cries in an unnatural voice; her wings and tail will be agitated, and there will be a flow of water from her mouth. Unless seized and “mailed,” she will not cease from her distressing struggles. In half an hour, perhaps, she will recover.
I once had a passage-saker, a very fine heron-hawk, that was so afflicted. One day in Qizil Rubāt̤673 I flew her at a heron and both birds went ringing up high. Suddenly the fit attacked my hawk, and as though a bullet had struck her she fell to earth, turning over and over. She never recovered from her injuries.
Treatment: pound and mix together half a mis̤qāl674 of sal-ammoniac and half a mis̤qāl of sugar-candy, and make into a small round parcel like the little packages of sacred earth.675 Have ready by your side cold water, luke-warm water, a squab, and a chicken-poult, for any delay or negligence is dangerous. In the morning, after sunrise, cast your hawk; make ten or twenty holes with a needle in the paper packet so that the contents may act quickly; put it down the hawk’s throat, and then give her a few bits of meat the size of a pea, to induce her to “put over,” so that the medicine may reach the lower stomach;676 then set her on her perch to rest. In half an hour she will vomit. At the first vomit, it sometimes happens that she casts up two or three dead white worms, but this is not always the case. At the second or third vomiting, she will cast up the medicine packet, and also a “purse”677 of yellow fat. After she has cast up these two things she will vomit no more. Now cast your hawk, and pour a good deal of tepid water down her throat,678 and release her. Wait till she has twice muted and then again cast her, and this time pour cold water down her throat. Then set her on her perch. After she has muted once, cut the throat of the squab (or of the poult), and let her eat half of—that is, one side of—the breast,679 but no feathers. If she is much out of sorts and won’t feed, pour the warm blood down her throat as it issues from the cut throat, and, chopping up the heart into bits, put them also down her throat; then after a little, when she has recovered, give her some of the breast. This treatment will cure her epilepsy. Item: brand680 her neck with a line, at the junction of the body, and vary her food every day, so that she may become as fat and stout681 as a hawk in the mew. The disease will disappear. Item: get a sufficient quantity of olive oil and a little manna. Slay a cockerel, pull off the skin of the thigh whole, and fill the empty skin with the manna, the olive oil, and some old and whitened droppings of a dog. Please God, this will prove a perfect cure.
Footnotes
673 Qizil Rubāt̤ is on the road from Bag͟hdād to K͟hāniqān or K͟hānijīn, about seventy-three miles distant from the former and seventeen from the latter: both places are in Turkish territory.
674 Mis̤qāl: 24 muk͟hud = 1 mis̤qāl = nearly ⅙ oz. avoirdupois.
675 Basta-yi turbat is a small amount of earth from Qarbalā, from the grave of Imām Ḥusayn: it is tied up in a little bit of cloth and makes a packet about the size of a 12-bore bullet, or less.
676 K͟hizāna.
677 Kīsa, “purse”: the same word is used by Panjab falconers.
678 About three dessert-spoonfuls should be given. After this, or similar physicing, an Indian falconer fills the hawk’s crop with water by inserting a tube (usually the shank-bone of a crane or heron, made smooth at the ends) into the crop, filling his own mouth with water and letting it flow through the tube into the crop. Peregrines and Shāhīns will usually drink of their own accord.
679 Yak sīna, the yak bag͟hal of Panjab falconers.
680 Easterns have a passion for branding things.
681 Chāq u farbih. Chāq, T., means “stout, healthy, well,” and of a stallion “ready to cover.”