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 Rubāt̤_[673] 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 _mis̤qāl_[674] 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_: brand[680] 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 stout[681] 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.”