H Is For Hawk

“Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how.”

In the wild, spotting goshawks is a great pleasure to birding enthusiasts because they are so rare. Like the grace MacDonald seeks throughout the book following her father’s death, it requires patience. During the memoir, MacDonald learns to stop trying to control both Mabel and her emotions, which is the most difficult part of her healing process.

“Elusive, spectacular, utterly at home, the fact of these British goshawks makes me happy. Their existence gives the lie to the thought that the wild is always something untouched by human hearts and hands. The wild can be human work.”

Though modern human encroachment has had a negative effect on the natural ecosystem, MacDonald sees opportunities for hope and rapprochement with the natural world through rewilding projects and conservation efforts. Once thought extinct, goshawks were reestablished on the English countryside due to human effort.

“The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane.”

Depression reorders one’s functional world, allowing one to work and participate in things, but sapping pleasure and energy away from those activities until they become hollow. For MacDonald, the depression of her grief manifested in her creating a strong front to keep up appearances for her friends and family while struggling and becoming increasingly emotionally tormented.

“They were clubbable men with battered Range Rovers and vowels that bespoke Eton and Oxford, and I was having the first uncomfortable inklings that while I wanted to be a falconer more than anything, it was possible that I might not be entirely like these men; that they might view me as a curiosity rather than a kindred spirit.”

The history of hunting in England coincides with the development of the English class system. In the past, land common property to be hunted upon for sustenance, but later, great swathes of land later became a pleasure ground for upper-class sport hunting. Falconry, though it has an ancient common tradition, is seen today as an aristocratic activity.

“Even so there was something about Mr. White that made him an ally of sorts; boys confided in him in a crisis, and they worshipped him for his insubordination and glamour. They knew he didn’t fit, not quite, with the rest of the masters at Stowe.”

White was a role model for his students who differed from the rigid definitions of class and masculinity that upper-class British life imposed on young men. MacDonald acknowledges the importance of White’s sexual orientation in shaping his outlook on life, falconry, and literature.

“She breathes hot hawk breath in my face. It smells of pepper and musk and burned stone. Her feathers are half-raised and her wings half-open, and her scaled yellow toes and curved black talons grip the glove tightly. It feels like I’m holding a flaming torch.”

During MacDonald’s depression, Mabel gives MacDonald a direct connection to a passionate, carefree life. For a time, the trainer externalizes her pain onto the hawk, allowing it to mediate her relationship to the world with direct and unpremeditated instinct.

“Putting a lens between himself and the world was a defense against more than physical danger: it shielded him from other things he had to photograph: awful things, tragic things: accidents, train crashes, the aftermath of city bombs.”

McDonald’s relationship to her hawk is in part guided by the example of her photojournalist father. He processed trauma by contextualizing it through the lens of his camera while she contextualizes the trauma of losing him through falconry.

“There is a nightmarish logic to White’s time with the hawk: the logic of a sadist who half-hates his hawk because he hates himself, who wants to hurt it because he loves it, but will not, and insists that it eats so that it will love him.”

According to MacDonald, White processes his own feelings about his violent and overbearing parents and his struggles with his sexual orientation by “parenting” the hawk in a manipulative, domineering way. He changes from being overattentive to neglectful based on emotional whims and feels deep insecurity about his relationship with the hawk, which he feels he must control but cannot.

“Everything about the hawk is tuned and turned to hunt and kill.” 

MacDonald often cites a truism among falconers that birds of prey are not affectionate animals but highly efficient killers who must have their natural inclinations honed to a point. MacDonald will later find this a terrible model for human behavior after trying to use the hawk as a model for emotional distance and savage indifference to others.

“The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.”

Although hawks are not good role models, the allure of the hawk, especially to people in pain, is undeniable. Though human beings are intellectually and emotionally complex, they often find refuge in the perceived simplicity of the natural world. 

“When I was small I’d loved falconry’s historical glamour. I treasured it in the same way children treasure the hope that they might be like the children in books: secretly magical, part of some deeper, mysterious world that makes them something out of the ordinary.”

Like White, MacDonald developed her proclivity for falconry in childhood. Where White and MacDonald differed was in letting go of their romanticized ideas about falconry. White could not, and his project was ultimately a failure, causing him great despair. MacDonald learned from his failures (and her own) and was able to develop a healthy relationship with her hawk.

“I could no more imagine a future than a hawk could. I didn’t need a career. I didn’t want one.” 

As MacDonald’s depression deepens, she finds it harder to keep up appearances and begins the dangerous process of identifying with her hawk. Her job and living situation begin to fall by the wayside as she obsesses over Mabel’s training, cutting herself off further from the people from whom she needs emotional support.

“It was hard, now, to distinguish between my heart and the hawk at all. When she sat twenty yards across the pitch part of me sat there too, as if someone had taken my heart and moved it that little distance.” 

In the depths of her depression, MacDonald completely associates her moods and physical state with the hawk. She is in an incredibly fragile emotional and psychological state, staking everything on an animal that only recognizes her because she is responsible for its feeding.

“I had miscalculated her flying weight for weeks. But the narcissism of the bereaved is very great. I thought that the reason the hawk had flown to me was because I had confessed how bad things were.”

Because she has transferred her emotional needs onto the hawk, MacDonald begins to make errors in judgment. These errors are not in spite of her connection to the hawk, but the direct consequences of it. The more of an emotional connection she creates with the hawk, the more she loses her objectivity.

“When I watched those men with goshawks put the dead pheasant in the bag all those years ago I saw a kind of ease that bespoke centuries of social privilege and sporting confidence.

MacDonald romanticizes the perceived ease with which the falconers she’s seen in her youth trained their hawks. Older and wiser, she now understands the cost of that training, and the serious risks that hunting brings to the hunter.

“She lived in the present only, and that was my refuge. My flight from death was on her barred and beating wings. But I had forgotten that the puzzle that was death was caught up in the hawk, and I was caught up in it too.”

To better train her hawk when Mabel is young, MacDonald must often kill and dismember Mabel’s quarry. This is brutal work, akin to figuring out how to live after the death of a loved one. It is another transference of her grief onto the act of hunting.

“The gap between me and the hawk is something I feel like a wound.”

As Mabel’s training sends her further and further afield, MacDonald envisions a time, coming soon, when the hawk will not be entirely dependent on its training. With that thought, she begins the difficult work of reconciling herself to her father’s death.

“I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing--not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of.”

As animals recede from people’s everyday lives and become pictures in books or objects of charity, they become abstractions. Abstractions do nothing to feed the necessary imaginative lives of human beings.

“Just as he’d fought with his fear of the aeroplane, so he had tussled with Gos. For Gos was the dark and immoral child of ancient German forests. He was a murderer. He had all the glamour of the dictator.”

White was a political conservative at a time when, across the globe, conservatism was transforming into violent fascism. White’s fascination with hawks connected to the misuse of bird-of-prey imagery in fascist iconography, and in the faulty transference of unnecessarily cruel ideology onto a supposedly “ruthless” natural world.

“Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.”

Soon after connecting to her father’s peers at his memorial, MacDonald’s emotional and mental state begins to improve. She comes to understand that her isolation from other people was a mistake. Human connection is as necessary for people as hunting is for the hawk.

“As a schoolboy he knew that the boys over whom he’d had authority would one day have authority over themselves. As a schoolmaster, too. And a falconer. Deep down he knew he was always training his charges for a time when they would be free.” 

Like MacDonald, White developed as an author and as a human being through his journey with falconry. The loss of his hawk makes him accustomed to loss, and he finds that independence is worth the pain of losing something dear to him.

“Something has changed inside me. Today it’s hard to slip into the exquisite, wordless sharpness of being a hawk. Or rather, the hawk seems more human today.”

As MacDonald undergoes therapy and self-examination, she no longer finds the hawk a good caretaker for her soul. In this way, she discovers that understanding the differences between hawks and human beings makes her a better trainer, as well.

“Goshawks are things of death and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all.”

Good trainers know not to sentimentalize their birds of prey, but an overreliance on this attitude can lead to a new form of sentimentalization; that of bitterness and a fetishization of inhumanity. MacDonald makes a point to separate the hunting and killing instincts of wild animals from any action, instinct, or emotion that is part of human nature.