Community Library Notes

“H is for Hawk” by Helen Macdonald is the story of how Macdonald trains her goshawk and deals with her grief over her father’s death. It’s a love story between human and animal. She speaks of her mentor, T.H. White, who lived in the 1930s and attempted to train his goshawk. He wrote a book about it, and also wrote the classic “The Once and Future King” about the boy, Arthur. White was afraid of people, and of himself. He loved animals and a few men.

Macdonald describes her father in loving terms. He was a news photographer who kept his camera lens between himself and others. It kept him from getting involved. Much as the hood over the head of Macdonald’s hawk’s head eliminated her fear of the human. White also wrote “The Goshawk” in which he described how he tried to make his bird eat. But he over-fed it and the bird was too full. He used no punishment or cruelty in the training. To keep her awake White walked and walked for days and nights. Patience is important, he says. The man suffers and so does the hawk.

Macdonald names her hawk Mabel for loveable. She’s well-mannered and it’s time to take her outside. Mabel looks all around and is not fazed by anything. Her hawk plays. She teaches Mabel to fly to her glove. She does it perfectly three times. Rapid response is the key to success. White tries hard not to be a coward. His mother told him to be brave. When his hawk flies fifty yards, White drinks himself silly that night. He writes a satire on the educational system as a way to burn away his old life as an educator.

Macdonald and her friend Stuart tie a bell to Mabel’s back feathers and a radio transmitter attaches her to Macdonald. Her hawk now flies fifty yards away from her fist and back repeatedly. But White’s Gos is gone from the barn where White has tethered her.

Macdonald takes her bird into the woods where they see rabbits and a pheasant. She lets the hawk go and after the sounds of a scuffle, there is silence. The hawk returns to her fist, flaked in mud and satiated. Macdonald knows this is why her hawk exists. She must move out of her old house and must write a memorial to her father. But she can’t think of that. She thinks instead, of the bomber pilot who had flown over her field seventy years before. Plane spotting had been her father’s obsession. She, too is a watcher. Hawks marry medievalism with the technology of modern war.

At her dad’s memorial, she tells the story of him at age 9 or 10. He saw a plane flying but didn’t know what it was. He photographed it with his Brownie and wrote down the registration number. The officials took his camera, removed the film, and threw away the page from his notebook. However, he looked at the next page and because he’d pressed hard with his pencil, the registration number of the strange aircraft was there. People came to her at the memorial and told her her father always got the picture he wanted.

Macdonald writes at length about “The Sword in the Stone” the story of Wart, the boy who becomes King Arthur. He’s always in danger. He finds Merlyn’s cottage and walks into it. It is White’s own cottage. Being Merlyn was White’s dream. Merlyn can bring the hawk back to the castle, and he does. White cannot. White wants to educate the boy to fight for “Right over Might.”

Macdonald’s Gos flies into a pheasant release pen and grabs two pheasants. Macdonald says she is a criminal. In the end, she learns that Mabel is not human. She leaves her at her friend Tony’s house where Mabel will live in a huge aviary during her molting season of three months. Macdonald goes to see White’s cottage. Then she leaves him behind. And she is not the hawk. It’s liberating.

Find this fascinating memoir, nature book, literary meditation on the new non-fiction shelf of your Mendocino Community Library.

The Mendocino Community Library is closed until further notice due to COVID-19.