H Is For Hawk

Still suffering from introversion, MacDonald spends her evenings playing rudimentary games of catch with Mabel. She longs for human company to even out Mabel’s wildness but feels helpless to break free. She sees a doctor about her depression, and after a thorough interrogation she receives a prescription for antidepressant medication. The immediate side effects are brain fog and exhaustion.

She recalls a 13th century English retelling of the myth of Orpheus called Sir Orfeo, which evolved to incorporate Celtic mythology. In this retelling, Orfeo is a king whose wife is kidnapped by the King of Faery and taken into a lost netherland. The king escapes into the wild to assuage his grief, allowing his hair and clothes to grow matted. After ten years, he spies his wife among a falconry hunting party, and he follows them back to the castle of the Faery King. In this, and in other stories, birds of prey lead grieving people into and out of the wilderness to mourn.

At a low point in White’s life, he created the character of Merlin in The Once and Future King as a spiritual guide with his own bird of prey, the owl Archimedes. Throughout the book, Merlin transforms young King Arthur (called “the Wart” as a young man) into various animals as a series of lessons in political governance.