H Is For Hawk

As she performs her first carriage with Mabel in the evening, MacDonald is surprised by the intensity of sensation she feels for the outdoor world. Attuned as she is to Mabel’s senses, she notices more about the world than she ever has before. As she walks, she occupies Mabel with a piece of tiring–that is, a piece of tough, sinewy meat meant to keep her hawk occupied. Though she has a tendency now to shun people, part of Mabel’s training is to get her used to people, and so MacDonald takes Mabel close to several passersby. People react with typical exclamations and wonder at the wild creature, and so Mabel bates several times during the walk. Bicycles seem especially alarming to Mabel.

On a second daytime expedition out of the house, Mabel seems tense, but doesn’t bate as often. Again, MacDonald sees the world through her eyes, and notices how small pets and pigeons grab the hawk’s hungry attention.

By contrast to MacDonald’s careful perambulations with Mabel, White took Gos out on walks from the first day, without any feeling at all for pacing or empathy. He brought Gos near speeding motorcars, family members, children, and barking dogs. The hawk continually bated, to White’s annoyance and confusion. His books never specified why one should carry the hawk should, only that one should. Long walks through the countryside were fashionable in White’s day, linked to romantic notions of a pre-industrial England. In The Goshawk, White writes beautifully about his landscape walks with Gos, and about the connection his hawk gave him to falconers of the past. He imagines the lives of people of the past and compares them with rural villagers of his time.

With these memories come some of MacDonald’s own memories, including an especially painful remembrance of the day she learned her father died, and of inheriting his last roll of film, filled with the last photos he had taken.

On a difficult day with Mabel, MacDonald attempts to teach her to jump to her arm. As the hawk learns, it lands on MacDonald’s arm repeatedly with terrible force. At other times, the hawk requires constant vigilance. The work is exhausting and rewarding.

The hawk opens up the personalities of others who meet her. She meets a man from Kazakhstan, where falconry culture is widespread. She means a man from Mexico who feels a kinship with Mabel because “we are outsiders” (110). She meets another trainer who, to MacDonalds shock, believes that she is having success in Mabel’s training only because of their match in gender. MacDonald recounts an entire literature of falconry that describes both male and female hawks as “sulky,” a word often reserved for strong-willed human women (111). Going back further in the literature, however, she finds a different gendered description of hawks. In a 1615 text, for instance, hawks are animals to be courted, like female royalty. By contrast, MacDonald finds Mabel to be a quick study, and open to sessions of play.

MacDonald asserts that White, naturally, shared this disposition to think of hawks as being like difficult women, a relationship which his suppressed same-sex attraction made even more complex. He soon interpreted the small, select group of men who perfected falconry as being akin to the private society of gay people he would not allow himself to enter. The ancient history of falconry gave him an innocuous connection to the past that legal restriction and harassment severed for gay people. This link to the ancient past, says MacDonald, is the historical allure of falconry for many outsiders interested in the subject. It runs parallel to the history known to those who fit safely within the mainstream of society.

Returning home from a walk, MacDonald is delighted to see Mabel splash playfully in the rain.

MacDonald describes White’s fumbling through attitudes of certainty and uncertainty as he weighs the relative importance of food in Mabel’s training. Still, he undermines the good effects of his training by his own impatience, often tugging at Gos’s leash and overfeeding him.

Mabel reaches her flying weight, and with that comes a notable improvement in her training. For centuries, falconers judged the weight of their hawks through sheer intuition, noticing their turn ratios and responsiveness. In the modern era, falconers can also use fine—tuned scales, a “brute measure,” in MacDonald’s estimation, compared to the old ways (122). Nevertheless, MacDonald weighs her hawk obsessively. As MacDonald’s control over Mabel increases, her desire to be around others diminishes.

She rejects an offer to teach in Berlin, citing her father’s funeral arrangements. She will be without work in a couple of months. She thinks of the pivotal moment in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which Alice falls down the rabbit hole so slowly she has time to observe maps and the contents of cupboards hanging from the walls of the hole. She reduces her anxiety by focusing on her hawk with increased obsessiveness. She focuses on letting the hawk out and calling it back to her and increasing intervals of time and distance. By contrast, White’s flight training for Gos was emotionally draining, unplanned, and inconsistent.

MacDonald folds memories of her father into instances of hawk training. In the past, her father praised her for her curiosity and patience, qualities which for a falconer are essential. In the present, MacDonald receives an invitation from a university colleague to come and show off Mabel at a university luncheon. MacDonald agrees but feels as if her life as a research fellow is receding, along with the other elements of her personal and professional life. In the 1930’s, White struggles with a murder mystery he is writing about a humble schoolmaster, Dr. Prisonface. Throughout the novel, White satirizes Prisonface for being a proper English Gentleman who wants love and understanding but cannot find it.

MacDonald has a difficult time with Mabel, as Mabel runs out the line from her hand but then obstinately lands on the ground upon her return. They are on the grounds of Cambridge, and she is training Mabel is sight of a friend. Each failure affects MacDonald personally: she has wrapped her emotional state together with the hawk’s training. Every time the hawk returns to her hand, she personifies the hawk’s decision-making process as a happy one. Every time the hawk disobeys, she takes it as a sign of unhappiness and human longing for freedom. Her friend Stuart attributes the disobedience to diet and suggests feeding Mabel something less rich. She frustrates Mabel by preventing her from bating at a group of defenseless moorhen chicks on university grounds. Soon, college security arrives and asks MacDonald what she’s doing on the grounds, but as they recognize one another professionally, security lets her go with a friendly warning.

As the days pass, MacDonald’s falconry notes begin to reflect a more personal frustration; mixed with her notes on weight and feeding regimens are notes of alienation and wishing people would leave her alone. She recognizes within herself a powerful undercurrent of rage. She begins focusing on things of no consequence, such as a woman removing the sticker of a bird from a bank window. Driving her father’s car, she finds herself getting into reckless scrapes and fender accidents. She absently drops plates and stubs her toe. Dissociated from her body when awake, she dreams of falconry at night.’

MacDonald tracks Mabel by outfitting her with a small bell and a micro transmitter. Nevertheless, MacDonald lives in fear that Mabel will fly away. Her mentor Stuart offers her help and encouragement, noting that while Mabel is calm, she is also slightly overweight. MacDonald has mixed feelings about being an apprentice to anyone, even someone she respects as much as Stuart. In White’s writing, he reflected a deep insecurity about mastering the art of falconry to the point that he made mastery the point of the exercise. It caused him repeated anxiety. Stuart takes her out to a large field and gives her a few pointers, and he helps her concentrate on the reality of her work with Mabel, pointing out the vagaries and beauties of gossamer threads on the field.

Earlier, on a trip to London to arrange things for her father’s public memorial service, MacDonald agreed to write and deliver a testimonial. She admits to Stuart that she has been feeling depressed, while not mentioning that she’s been letting essential things like bills and house cleaning slide. In repeated meetings with a kind and understanding Stuart, however, she begins to understand that Mabel is getting closer to her ideal weight and is beginning to fly better. MacDonald makes a commitment to becoming happier in order to better train her hawk.

MacDonald recounts that White had a sudden mania to catch a sparrowhawk during his training of Gos. He built unprofessional traps out in the field while neglecting his present duties as a trainer. When he returns to Gos, he is angry to find him at the top of a tree. He curses at the hawk to come down, but the hawk refuses to budge. When she first read The Goshawk as a child, MacDonald couldn’t comprehend White’s behavior. As an adult woman, she now has other men’s behaviors to compare with White’s and understands how men sometimes abandon those whose trust they’ve earned.

MacDonald continues to put off the day in which she’ll fly Mabel free. She spends time exercising the hawk on vertical jumps. Performing these vertical jumps in a public park, MacDonald attracts a small crowd of onlookers. She develops a fever and isolates for days, aware of her isolation but wary of it, as well. She is still avoiding people.

Mabel is flying on her creance very well. Near the end of summer Meadows understands that it is past time she intensified Mabe’s training by letting her fly free and trusting her to return. Mulling over her options, MacDonald goes to town for a coffee. It is the fall of 2008, and though she’s been avoiding the news and human connection, she can clearly see that there is a run on the nearby bank. In falconry, the vocabulary and formal trappings all serve to help the trainer forget that the hawk is an instrument of death. These trappings let her put aside her own grief about her father’s death while forestalling the crucial moment when she let Mabel fly and hunt freely.

Through neglect, White had allowed Gos to become wild again. He fell into despair. MacDonald speculates that White repeated Gos’s training not out of a desire to train his hawk but out of a Freudian desire to repeat and replay past failures. Exasperated, after a failed attempt at training, White tied Gos to his perch near the open door of his barn. Very soon after, Gos broke free and flew away.