H Is For Hawk

Mabel enters a mood falconers call being in yarak, a Turkish phrase which refers to a hawk’s restlessness, particularly when it is in a killing mood. Mabel is very tense, and this feeling transfers over to her trainer. Tension also arises because Mabel is a young and inexperienced hawk, and MacDonald is still working on their training bond. Mabel misses more quarries than she catches.

After one grueling session, MacDonald dresses up and goes out to attend an art opening. She is surprised to see a full-sized bird observation shelter in the gallery space, within which one can peer out to see the projection of a real condor habitat in California. MacDonald finds herself impatient with the spectacle, while acknowledging that the art is a deft commentary on the diminishing wildness of the California Condor. She notes that, as wild animals become more endangered, they correspondingly become less real and meaningful to the human imagination. Mabel is not simply a killer hawk to MacDonald, but a playful animal with various moods. Her imagination reverts to her father’s death, and how he will never again be as real to her as when he was alive.

Soon after, Mabel successfully catches a pheasant. MacDonald is unexpectedly touched by Mabel’s youth and inexperience as she unsuccessfully attempts to strip the pheasant and looks to her trainer for guidance. She strips the pheasant and tearfully watches Mabel eat.

White’s writing reveals that he tries everything he can to lure Gos back to his barn. He sets traps all over the surrounding country and follows leads wherever he finds them. He asks the breeder who sent him Gos to send him another hawk, even though it is late in the season, and he is unlikely to receive a young hawk. Though White never served in the military, he had a fear of warplanes, and developed a fascination with flying because of that fear. His imagination also allowed him to take on a similar reverence for authoritarians. White’s most formative memories were of playing free of the influence of his violently quarreling parents and so, politics aside, White preferred the company of his barn and his temporary and lonely obsessions.

MacDonald finishes her move while considering the speech she will give at her father’s memorial. She finds herself uncomfortable in the temporary house in which she's living. It is full of children’s toys and other people’s photographs. She stays in contact with her family, but always with her mind on Mabel’s hunting. A trainer’s routine is to fetch, prepare, and store anything a hawk’s caught so as not to overfeed it. As she prepares a rabbit in this way, she hears the low rumbling of a bomber flying past on a test run. Her instinct is to fear the plane, but she is surprised to see that Mabel exhibits no fear at all. She thinks of the difficulties of life for a bomber pilot and crew. Far from feeling the commanding heights of a bombing run, the crew carried out much of its wartime work in either boredom or fear. Her father taught her to spot types of planes from the ground, owing to his experience of being a boy in Britain during World War II. He, too, conquered his fear of planes by learning everything he could about flight.

MacDonald considers why she spends her time assisting Mabel with her kills. Without a hawk, MacDonald is loath to so much as harm an insect, but by Mabel’s side, she professionally butchers and dismembers her kills. Falconry provides MacDonald with a meaning and direction devoid of emotion. Nevertheless, she feels for the animals, especially those which Mabel injures and which she must put out of their misery. It is a way for her to feel the “sorrow of all deaths” and also to harden her heart toward the concept (197). One day, she comes across a group of people worrying over a rabbit suffering from myxomatosis, a disease specific to rabbits which quickly leads to a painful death. She recounts that in the 1950’s, myxomatosis killed 95 per cent of the rabbit population in Britain. She puts the rabbit out of its misery while considering the environmental impact of pesticides, global warming, and potential nuclear war.

She recounts J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine, a book about falconry and the environment written in 1967. The tone of the book is elegiac, aware of the precarity of the natural world, and of the birds within it, in the face of encroaching human-made devastation. Whereas White describes a struggle with nature on which man is in an equal footing, Baker adopts a tone of terrifying resignation.

She recalls visiting the president of the British Falconer’s Club. At his house, he shows her a taxidermized hawk awarded in 1937 to representatives of the club for participation in an International Hunting Exhibition in Germany. It was a gift from Herman Gӧring, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, and culturally wrapped up in British attempts at appeasement with the Nazi party of Germany. Britain was the only other country represented at the exhibition, reflecting the dark political reality of Britain’s past as the last country willing to consider appeasement with the Nazis. MacDonald’s friend is deeply ashamed of the trophy and keeps it out of sight, hidden in a far recess of a cabinet.

MacDonald further notes that White and Goring shared a breeder, and that it’s likely that the hawks Goring used to train with were from the same brood as Gos. White’s request to care for a new hawk after his disaster with Gos is answered with Cully, a badly groomed hawk with broken feathers, barely able to fly. Nevertheless, White experiences a few successes with Cully, and triumphs in the killing of a rabbit soon after.

The owner of the land on which Stuart and MacDonald train their hawks has requested the trainers' presence for an Apple Day festival: The birds will be on display but not flown. Mabel behaves, except for the nervous and embarrassing tic of wanting to stand on one leg while on MacDonald’s glove. MacDonald enjoys the sights of the festival, and marvels at the variety of apples on display. She meets a father with a child in tow who says he always wished he could become a falconer.

Later, MacDonald attempts to fly Mabel. The trainer has a raging migraine, while Mabel enters a deadly state of trance. Strangely, Mabel ignores a group of rabbits just five yards away in favor of something spotted across the field. Mabel takes off, disappearing from MacDonald’s sight. When She finally locates the hawk, she finds her awkwardly pressed against the ground, grasping at a rabbit that’s gone down a warren. MacDonald helps Mabel pull the rabbit out and a massacre ensues.

MacDonald continues to dissociate from the outside world, snapping too only during intense moments with Mabel, such as the time when Mabel grasped her fist hard enough to draw blood, or another time when Mabel mistook MacDonald’s head for a pheasant and rushed at it, again drawing blood. At these moments, MacDonald believes there is some flaw in herself making Mabel misbehave. She cites a sociologist who lived among the Yukaghir, and who recorded that the members of that community believed that human beings could take on the aspect of animals by wearing their skins. In a similar, solitary way, MacDonald believes that she has turned herself into something hawklike.

Though MacDonald has spoken in public several times in the past, nothing prepares her for speaking at her father’s funeral. As nervous as she is, however, she is heartened to see hundreds of faces in the crowd, all people whom her father’s life touched. She finds speaking to them easier than she’d expected. Throughout the day, MacDonald lives with her and other’s memories of her father. She remembers her father’s love of planes and meets a younger photographer who was set on the course of his profession by her father. The party shares many drinks, and MacDonald leaves the service with a feeling of joy. On her way home, she considers that she has been spending too much time away from human company. This has reflected in her training of her hawk, who has been as miserable as her trainer has been.

When MacDonald gets home, she feeds Mabel a whole pigeon, flying weight be damned. As she watches Mabel tear the pigeon apart, she considers White and his lost hawk. There was never a point in the book in which White could know definitively when Gos had died. Per the narrative, Gos was forever lost but filled with potential still to hunt and be free. She likes to think of her father this way.