I don’t usually read nonfiction, but “H Is for Hawk,” published in 2014, has everything you look for in a good novel: fascinating characters, emotional magnetism, a compelling story line and exquisite writing. The book is a memoir, a year in the life of the author in which her beloved father dies suddenly. In an effort to cope with her loss, she takes on the task of training a young goshawk she names Mable. So this is a book about loss and grief, but it’s also very much about the rich history of falconry and the author’s deep appreciation for the natural world.
The book is set in England, in and around the rolling meadows of Cambridge University, where Macdonald taught history and philosophy, and in the forested country of Brecklands, the broken lands, in southern Norfolk county, a fitting place for a broken heart and for the job of “breaking” a wild animal to one’s will.
Macdonald had been fascinated by falcons and falconry from the time she was a very little girl, and had read copiously about them. She saw her first goshawk when she was 12 years old and by then knew the language of the sport:
Jesses are the soft leather straps that fit through the leather anklets on a trained hawk’s legs. Singular, jess…. As a child I’d cleaved to falconry’s disconcertingly complex vocabulary. In my old books every part of a hawk was named: wings were sails, claws pounces, tail a train. Male hawks are a third smaller than the female so they are called tiercels, from the Latin tertius, for third. Young birds are eyasses, older birds passagers, adult trapped birds haggards. Half trained hawks fly on a long line called a creance. Hawks don’t wipe their beaks, they feak. When they defecate they mute. When they shake themselves they rouse.
Another important word is “bating”: “A ‘headlong dive of rage and terror, by which a leashed hawk leaps from the fist in a wild bid for freedom.’”
With the vocabulary in hand, we’re ready to follow Mable’s education. And Macdonald’s. The author has confined herself to her cottage and unplugged her phone. It will be just the two of them for weeks before they venture outside and become hunting partners. The freezer is stocked with chickens, rabbit and steak. It’s time to begin. Macdonald has put a piece of raw steak on her glove under the hawk’s feet. She removes the hood from Mable’s head.
Two wide, wild eyes stare at me for a fraction of a second, and then they are gone. Before the hawk can work out what the hell is happening she is trying to fly away as fast as possible. Brought up short by her jesses she twitters in high-pitched distress as the realisation of her hateful circumstances strikes. She can’t get away. I lift her back onto the glove. Under her feathers is sinew, and bone, and that fast beating heart. She bates…. I hate this. In these first few minutes there’s nothing you can do but accept that you are terrifying the hawk when it is the very opposite of everything you desire. After three more bates my heart is beating like a fitting beast, but she’s back on the glove, beak open, eyes blazing.
Macdonald’s task is to teach Mable—whose nature is wild, violent, even murderous—to trust her. How do you do that? “Here’s one thing I know from years of training hawks,” she tells us: “one of the things you must learn to do is become invisible. It’s what you do when a fresh hawk sits on your left fist with food beneath her feet, in a state of savage, defensive fear.” She goes on: “You empty your mind and become very still. You think of exactly nothing at all…. Your gloved fist squeezes the meat a fraction, and you feel the tiny imbalance of weight and you see out of the very corner of your vision that she’s looked down at it.”
Macdonald’s short chapters take us step by step through the hawk’s education: They go outside for the first time in late afternoon, and then at dusk after a rain. “She picks fitfully at her food, but mostly she stares, taut with reserve, about her. She follows bicycles with her eyes. She hunches ready to spring when people come too close. Children alarm her. She is unsure about dogs. Big dogs, that is. Small dogs fascinate her for other reasons.”
We are there when Mable makes her first kill, a pheasant. And all through this fearful story, another mesmerizing and tragic tale is braided into Macdonald’s. It is T. H. White’s, the gifted and troubled author of “The Sword in the Stone” and then “The Once and Future King.” But before he became famous for the legends of King Arthur, he wrote “The Goshawk,” about his own experience in trying to train a goshawk.
White was also looking to recover from great psychic pain. But his tragedy is one of obsession and misunderstanding. Obsession may be required in training a hawk, as it may be in becoming expert at anything. But White’s misunderstandings doomed his efforts, while Macdonald’s patience and comprehension succeeded. “H Is for Hawk” could as well be called “H Is for Healing.”
Doris Ober is the former managing editor of the “West Marin Review,” author of “The Dogtown Chronicles” and “The Alzheimer Years,” and an avid reader. She lives in Point Reyes Station.