H Is For Hawk

After 10 days on antidepressants, MacDonald’s outlook has changed. She perceives Mabel from a human perspective and describes traces of human-like happiness in the hawk, as opposed to cold murderousness. Hunting with Mabel becomes a pleasure. As winter comes on, she finds herself reconnecting with old friends and making plans for the future. She loosens her restrictions as a falconer by raising Mabel’s weight and letting her fly further. MacDonald risks losing the hawk this way, but she finds the risk exhilarating. In one instance, however, Mabel leads her into a private estate where hunting is illegal. There, she kills a pheasant. It takes hours before MacDonald can coax Mabel back.

In the depths of winter, MacDonald pauses to note the beauties of both the city of Cambridge and the surrounding landscape. She seeks out vantages on hilltops and buildings where she can stop and admire the view. She has come to know the hill on which she’s been permitted to hunt very well; she knows where the quarry on the land lives, and where the land ends in human encroachment. As she allows Mabel to roam more widely, she comes to know the land better, not strictly in terms of a geographical map, but an emotional one, filled with memory.

MacDonald takes Mabel out for the first time in a week, after a cold spell that has kept them indoors. The experience is bracing, and Mabel is behaving without discipline. Against her better judgment, MacDonald allows Mabel to lunge for pheasant past a far-off hedge and disappear from sight. MacDonald scratches herself attempting to climb through the hedge but can’t see or hear Mabel on the other side. When she does find Mabel, it is off the land allotted for hunting. It takes several minutes and a battle of wills in the bitter cold before Mabel returns to MacDonald’s hand.

White’s plans for The Goshawk, revealed by his notes, were to have included long disquisitions on memory, history, aristocracy and matters of the heart. When Gos flew away, the scope of the book narrowed, yet some of the material from those notes made its way into The Sword in the Stone, particularly in a segment in which Sir Kay brings Wart out to do some falconry. Wart’s lack of experience frustrates him. He follows the hawk into a wild forest, and there finds Merlin the magician. As described, Merlin is much like White himself. The things Merlin keeps in his cottage are identical to the things White kept in his, including an owl named Archimedes. Merlin’s ability to live in and out of time and with one foot in the animal world represents an ideal for White, into whom he transferred his hopes and ideals.

MacDonald spends Christmas in Maine with her mother and her friends Scott and Erin, 3,000 miles away from Mabel and England. Her hosts are falconers and old friends. The history of falconry and of hunting is different in America and possesses no trace of class privilege or distinction as it does in England. Hunting in Maine is common, and many freezers contain with wild-caught venison. Hawks in America are caught and trained in their first year and then released into the wild as they get older. Unlike in England, American falconers must undergo testing to receive licenses.

MacDonald follows her friend Scott as he roams into and out of civilized areas, to go hunting with his redtailed hawk for squirrels. His hawk catches a squirrel after an exhilarating chase through populated backlots and MacDonald marvels at this style of devil-may-care falconry. She finds in this example a means of reconciling nature with civilization.

As she wanders the beachfront of Maine, MacDonald feels reluctant to return home. She enjoys the sense of community with her friends in America. One of her friends surprises her with a local tradition by hauling the Christmas tree out to the yard and setting it on fire. The tree lights up explosively and just as quickly burns away, which MacDonald finds cathartic. When she returns to England, she is happy to see her friends and Mabel.

She reconstructs White’s efforts in august of 1939 to compile his notes into the book that would become The Goshawk. In life, he was actively considering enlisting in the war, and had seen the death of Cully, his second hawk after Gos, who got caught in some fencing and hanged himself. He now owned two new birds of prey. In spite of these conflagrations, he set his mind on writing a book about hawking with real literary value.

MacDonald enjoys her time with Mabel through the winter, moving her closer to the woods in her allotment of hunting land. Mabel is very responsive during this time and understands MacDonald’s cues. As they hunt, MacDonald enjoys new aspects of the landscape, describing it with the zest of someone with a new lease on life. Upon seeing a wide chalk flat, she feels deeply connected to English history and pre-history, and to the writers and thinkers who helped to define that history to the modern imagination. At the same time, the landscape looks alien to her. She attempts and fails to inch closer to a group of watching deer, who bound away at her approach.

Returning home, she greets well-wishers who have become familiar with the unusual sight of MacDonald and Mabel. The locals also recognize the beauty of the nearby landscape, and it is a frequent topic of conversation. One man, however, uses the occasion to disparage immigrants. This turns MacDonald’s mood toward the worse, and she begins thinking again of Herman Goring and his interest in hawks and pre-history, and how damaging modern reinterpretations of history can be. She considers the many extinct species in the English landscape and considers the limitations of human lives.

Later that evening, she looks through her father’s notes, and considers his obsession with sighting and recording overhead planes. She connects it with the post-war habit of scavenging and making do with found materials. Plane watching was a version of that activity which expanded her father’s shrinking world. She finds that her grief for her father has transformed into something interpretable as strengthening love and regard.

As spring arrives, MacDonald becomes apprehensive. Soon, Mabel will move into an aviary to molt. Eager to get in time for falconry, she takes Mabel out for an hour before meeting a teaching engagement. Everything goes wrong from there. Mabel is reluctant to return to MacDonald, who has left key tracking equipment back in her car. Mabel circles toward a wildlife protection area and begins hunting pheasant where she shouldn’t. In a pheasant release pen, Mabel kills two pheasants in one swoop. Distracted and eager to get rid of the evidence of her poaching, MacDonald injures her hand with a deep cut while rendering the kill. She drives to Stuart and Mandy’s house, where they dress her wound, leaving a scar.

Sometime later, she takes The Goshawk off the shelf and thumbs through it. Her eye catches on those passages where White describes Gos as a driven murderer, comparing her to tyrants of the prehistoric and civilized past. In this way, White repeats the mistakes of Herman Goring and others in sentimentalizing the hawk for nefarious and inhuman purposes. Her experience has taught her that one cannot make such comparison between hawks and people. To have a healthy relationship with a hawk is to understand the difference between a bird of prey and its trainer.

In late February, MacDonald prepares to bring Mabel to an aviary run by a good friend and fellow falconer. In the aviary, Mabel will molt, replacing old feathers with newer, stronger feathers. This will involve a separation of several months. In preparation, MacDonald has been fattening Mabel up with as much food as she can eat. As a result, Mabel becomes a little testy around strangers and a little less responsive to training. MacDonald, for her part, has had to store up her emotional energy in order to let Mabel go. The night before taking Mabel to the aviary, MacDonald sleeps restlessly, interrupted by the unexpected shaking of her bed at one in the morning. It is a rare minor earthquake. The earthquake upsets MacDonald, awakening childhood fears of an apocalypse. But when she runs down to check on Mabel, she is surprised to find that Mabel is perfectly calm.

The next day, MacDonald introduces Mabel to her new home. It is a very well-appointed aviary, and MacDonald is sure that Mabel will be comfortable there. After saying her good-byes, she returns to the house and has tea with her friend. He is a fellow falconer who is empathetic to MacDonald’s feelings, and MacDonald revels in his humanity.

MacDonald needed to conduct extra research in order to include T.H. White in her book. She conducted most of this research in the professional, comfortable, and air-conditioned space of the Harry Ransom Library in Austin, Texas. Though this gave her access to Whites notes and books, in Texas, MacDonald felt detached and distant from White’s experience. One summer, she decides to go to Stowe, to the school and city where White taught and wrote The Goshawk. She finds the landscape awe-inspiring but finds the architecture annoying because it symbolizes centuries of aristocratic privilege. She is, however, touched by the cottage in which White trained Gos, and for a moment she feels the desire to bring the dead back to life again.