H Is for Hawk

by Helen Macdonald

  Time passes. It’s now getting on for a thick, gloamy evening. Smoke is everywhere on the horizon. A yellow crescent moon tilts, out of focus, up there in something that looks like a plate of agar. Swimmy dusk. Bats flit. Trees gather darkness to themselves. Mabel’s swivel and leash are in my pocket, I have swapped her jesses for thin flying jesses that will not catch on twigs or branches, and I grip them tightly between my gloved fingers. I have walked, under Stuart’s instructions, to a triangle of rough ground just one side of a copse of trees. It is a thick patch of thistles and dry seedheads, and we trudge through it. I am mute with stress, enraged by what is happening and powerless to stop it. It is dark. What the hell am I doing? The hawk’s pupils are huge. Her eyes are almost completely black. I cannot believe how stupid this is. I want to go home. I want to go home. And Stuart starts beating up towards me, mushing the thistles and grasses with a stick to push any hidden rabbits or pheasants towards us so Mabel can see them. This is ridiculous. I don’t want to be here, and I don’t know why I’m letting this happen. I shouldn’t be loosing this hawk. I should just – there is a movement behind me and to my right, and the hawk peers, seeing something running, and then bates at the spot. Oh! And I let her go. And immediately I wish I had not. Suddenly my hawk is free. She flies powerfully for a few seconds, dips at whatever it was, which has gone, and then starts to fly in circles, sailing like a moth, a giant hawkmoth. She gains height. There is a terrible crepuscular hush. I can see her long head turning to look at me, and her tail fanning and flexing as she turns. I’m in some kind of fugue state. The gap between me and the hawk is something I feel like a wound. She is circling, and looking at me, and seems uncertain about coming back. Stuart is standing here. Christina is standing there. I am standing right here, shouting and whistling at the hawk. The dark, that she can fly in circles, that everything’s unclear: these things are discoveries for her. She’s trying to work out what to do. The new ground. The angle of incidence between up here and down there, where Helen’s hand and heart are.

  She finally pitches with her back to me on the apex of a young beech tree; the crown bends almost double under her weight. All I can see is her shape, all angles and shoulders, and I feel the confusion that animates her entirely. I call her. She leaps from her awkward perch and comes through dusk towards my upraised fist. All is too strange. She bounces off the glove, cutting it merely, and starts circling again. She ends up deeper in the wood, perched again – but, happily, facing my way. Through the gloom and the flocked leaves I can see her yellow nose, and something of her accipitrine crouch. I know her eyes are on me. So out goes the fist. I pile one chick, two chicks, three chicks on it. Whistle. Call. ‘Come on, Mabel!’, slapping my gloved hand in animate will.

  At this point, space-time is folded and scrunched into direct relations. Trigonometry. Goshawk glide-path to my fist, and Goshawk intentionality, which I am sure is also derivable in mathematical terms. My beating, horrified heart, and my soul feeling like water at four degrees; heavier than ice, falling to the bottom of the ocean.

  And suddenly, she is back on the glove, I feel soaked in iced water, and I cannot believe she’s not lost. I feel like White: a tyro, a fool, a beginner. An idiot. ‘Never mind,’ says Stuart. He knows I am in pieces. I catch the flash of his grin in the darkness. ‘She’s too high, and it’s getting dark. But you got her back, right? That’s always a good end to the day.’ I can barely speak. I croak a reply. The adrenalin fits and fizzes in my veins as I walk back to the car, and I’m still not sure how I managed to drive home.

  The air is dark and full of water. He is soaked to the skin. Gos is nowhere to be seen. He is tying pieces of rabbit to all the places where the hawk had been. They are like prayers, like the tattered ribbons pagans tie to winter twigs. His hands are very white against the coruscating green of the wind-blown bark of empty oaks. He has run out of rabbit. He has no lure. He has no meat but liver. He’ll ask Mrs Wheeler to buy some steak for him in Buckingham. Standing by the farmhouse door he listens. ‘Rooks observed to be mobbing, or a solitary crow sitting on the dead branch of some tree, cawing or jerking about uneasily, are an almost certain sign that the lost hawk is not far away,’1 he’d read in Blaine. Nothing. Then a single caw, loudly repeated. There. A couple of hundred yards away is a crow, circling the top of a tree, cursing at the bird beneath it. On the topmost branch sits Gos, tiny at that distance, his familiar blunt-shouldered form hunched against the gale. White runs to the tree and stands under it waving a piece of liver and a handkerchief as a lure while flashes of water spread on the further fields. The rain falls on the glades, avenues, and all the temples and obelisks of Stowe, and Gos sits there, imperious, indecisive, and horribly soaked, for White’s constant stroking had taken the waterproofing oil from his feathers. The gale buffets his perch. It is not comfortable here. It is not comfortable at all. He opens his wings, intending to fly down to the man with the food in his hand. He leaves the tree, turns in mid-air, starts to descend. White’s heart, beating. The hawk approaching. Then the wind fills his wings and pushes, and the hawk, who has no skill and does not know how to fly in a gale like this, is sucked away downwind and is gone.

  There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

  I was a lucky child. Until I saw that pheasant die in a winter hedge, all I knew of death came from books – and one kind in particular. I was looking at a whole shelf of them now. That morning I’d filled the car with boxes, put Mabel on her passenger-seat perch and driven back to my parents’ house for the weekend. My parents’ house. I supposed it was my mother’s house now. I had come back because I was preparing to move. A dear friend had offered me his house while he and his family went to China for a few months, and I was impossibly grateful to them, but the prospect of losing my beautiful college house was hateful. I stacked the boxes in the garage then sat with my mother in the kitchen while Mabel loafed and bathed and preened on the sunny lawn. We drank tea, reminisced, talked about Dad and times gone by. There was a lot of laughter. It was good to see her. But it was not easy to be there. We sat in chairs that Dad should be sitting in, drank from cups he had drunk from, and when I saw his careful handwriting on a note pinned by the back door it got too much. Much too much. I ran into my old room, sat on the little bed and hugged my knees, pain worming around inside my chest like a thing with a million tiny teeth and claws.

  I looked up at the top of my old bookshelves. There, dusty and unread for years, were all the animal books of my childhood. I’d loved these books. They were rich with wildness, escape and adventure. But I hated them too. Because they never had happy endings. Tarka the otter was killed by hounds. The falcons died of pesticide poisoning. A man with a spade beat to death the otter in Ring of Bright Water; vultures tore out the Red Pony’s eyes. The deer in The Yearling was shot, the dog in Old Yeller died. So did the spider in Charlotte’s Web and my favourite rabbit in Watership Down. I remember that awful dread as the number of pages shrank in each new animal book I read. I knew what would happen. And it happened every time. So I suppose it wasn’t a surprise to eight-year-old me that Gos snapped his leash and was lost in the wind and rain. I greeted it with sad resignation. But it was dreadful all the same.

  But I hadn’t trained a hawk then, and I had no understanding of loss. I did not know how White felt. Now I did. I sat on my bed and it pressed on my chest like a weight the size of a hill. I felt it. For the first time I understood that vast blankness that shuttered his heart in horror. ‘I cannot remember that my heart stopped beating at any particular time,’2 he wrote in his diary. ‘The blow was so stunning, so final after six weeks of u
nremitting faith, that it was tempered to me as being beyond my appreciation. Death will be like this, something too vast to hurt much or perhaps even to upset me.’

  His heart is torn in half. The pigeon in his hand is rigid with terror; it has turned from a bird to a thing of iron and feathers. Its red eye is blank, its little beak panting. He steels himself and throws it high in the air towards the hawk in the tree. The pigeon he’d bought to trap the hawks in the wood – such irony – rises up, trailing the creance behind it. Gos stoops upon it like a vast predatory butterfly, but then pulls away and swings into the next tree. White pulls the pigeon to earth, picks it up, follows, and throws it out again. He fishes for Gos with the pigeon as a fisherman casts lures for a pike. He has been doing this for a while now, and each time the hawk’s stoop brings it closer to the pigeon and White’s waiting hands. He bends to pick the pigeon from the ground, exhausted, wings spread, its flight feathers so wet they look like fraying pencils. He knows this terrified bird can barely fly. He knows that the next time he throws it into the air the hawk will catch it. Just one more time. But he cannot do it. He knows this pigeon. He had tamed it. It had sat companionably on his finger. It was his friend. His world is broken; he is breaking his Word. It is brute cruelty. He cannot do this any more. He remembers a passage in Blaine’s book on capturing hawks while they sleep, hugs the soaking pigeon to his breast and leaves Gos to nightfall. He returns with a ladder, a rope, a torch and the salmon rod he’d used once before to hook Gos down from a tree. He stands under the tree, trembling with hope of success, when Graham Wheeler, the farmer’s lad who had come to help, runs up. Gos takes fright and slips from the tree into darkness.

  For days he walks the Ridings and sees him, sometimes, soaring over the trees in distant, expanding circles. His soul is still tied up in the hawk. He can see that Gos is happy. He deserves to be free, thinks White, and wishes him well in his life in the wild. But death waits for Gos, White knows: his jesses and swivel, the accursed accoutrements of his former subjection, will get snagged on a branch, and he will struggle, and hang, and starve, and die. Should fate see fit to deliver the bird back into his hands, he vows, he should treat him differently: as a partner not his slave. His remorse is bitterly deep. He is lonely without Gos. He misremembers Blake. Love asketh but himself3 to please, To bind another to his delight, Joys in another’s loss of ease, And builds a hell in heaven’s despite.

  Later that afternoon I walked with Mabel up a narrow lane to a nearby farm. I’d had permission to fly my hawks there years ago. Did I still? Probably not. I didn’t care. There was something splendid in the thought that what I was doing was surreptitious, underhand, slightly criminal. I raised my binoculars and scanned the fields. No tractors, no farm-workers. No dog-walkers. No one out for an evening stroll. And so off we crept, Mabel and I, off to the top wood, where the rabbits used to be. We sneaked around the corner of a blackthorn thicket. There. About thirty yards away, a little way out from the margin of the wood: three of them in silhouette, ears glowing backlit by the sun, crouching to feed. And next to them, a cock pheasant, ankling his way slowly past.

  Grief had spurred me to fly the hawk, but now my grief was gone. Everything was gone except this quiet sylvan scene. Into which I intended to let slip havoc and murder. I stalked around the edge of the wood, crouching low, holding my breath. My attention was microscopically fierce. I’d become a thing of eyes and will alone. Mabel held her wings out from her sides, her head snaking, reptilian, eyes glowing. It felt like I was holding the bastard offspring of a flaming torch and an assault rifle. Soft grass underfoot. One hand out to steady myself, we picked our way around to the final corner. And then I slowly extended my gloved fist out from the screen of brush.

  The hawk left the fist with the recoil of a .303 rifle. I stepped out to watch. Saw a chain of events so fast they snapped into a comic strip: frame, frame, frame. Frame one: goshawk spluttering from the fist in bars and pinions and talons. Frame two: goshawk low to the ground, grass streaking along under her. Chocolate wings, beating strongly, hump-backed. Frame three: rabbits running. Frame four: the pheasant, too, crouching and running into the wood’s safe margin.

  But it wasn’t safe. Split-second, ink-starred decisions in the hawk’s tactical computer. She slewed round sling-shot style, heel-bow, soaking up g-force like a sponge. Closed her wings and was gone. Sucked into the black hole of the wood, beneath a low-hanging larch branch. Everything disappeared. No rabbits, no pheasant, no hawk. Just a black hole in the wood’s edge. It had gone very quiet. There was the distant coc-coc-coc of a scared pheasant.

  I ran into the wood and shivered. We’d been hawking in the soft, woolly haze of a sunny autumn evening. Soft grass, meadow brown butterflies; a comfortable, easy light. Walking into the wood, the temperature dropped by five degrees, and the light by several stops. It was dark. And cold. Outside, a late summer evening in England. In here, Norway. I half-expected to feel grains of snow pattering through the needles. I stood, slightly unnerved. Looked about. Nothing. No hawk. What should I do now?

  I stood very still and listened. Strained to hear through the dark. Listened so hard the air became particulate: sound no longer sound, but compression waves through trillions of molecules of air. But there was no sound at all. Dead, muffled silence between larch trunks. And then, some way off to my left – a long way off – I heard a scuffle and breaking sticks and the unmistakable sound of hawk bells. I broke through brush, blindly. I thought I’d heard a squeal in the sound; maybe she had caught a rabbit. Silence again, except for my breathing hard and smashing through the branches of a fallen tree, blind and brute, to get to the spot.

  I saw her before I heard her. She came running out from a tangle of thornbushes capping a huge warren. Came at a run, barrel-chested, and flung herself up to my fist. Everything apart from her yellow-tinted cere and feet was black and white. Blackthorn, black needles, the hawk’s white chest, black teardrop feathers, black talons. Black nose. White tailings of chalk from where the rabbits had dug. When she came back to my fist she had chalk mud on all her toes. It covered my glove as she ate, made small white marks like the letters of half-forgotten words that as she ate were smeared and erased and written all over again.

  It had been a long while since I’d hunted with a hawk, but I didn’t remember it being like this. I was sure it had never been like this. I was astounded by the radical change in subjectivity it had instilled: how the world dissolved to nothing, yet was so real and tangible it almost hurt. How every passing second slowed and stretched, catching us out of time: when I stepped back onto the road to walk home I was astounded how low the sun had fallen. We’d been out for less than an hour. It had felt like years.

  The falconer and scientist Professor Tom Cade once described falconry as a kind of ‘high-intensity birdwatching’. I thought it was a nice phrase, and an accurate one. But now I knew this was wrong. What I had just done was nothing like birdwatching. It was more like gambling, though the stakes were infinitely bloodier. At its heart was a willed loss of control. You pour your heart, your skill, your very soul, into a thing – into training a hawk, learning the form in racing or the numbers in cards – then relinquish control over it. That is the hook. Once the dice rolls, the horse runs, the hawk leaves the fist, you open yourself to luck, and you cannot control the outcome. Yet everything you have done until that moment persuades you that you might be lucky. The hawk might catch her quarry, the cards might fall perfectly, the horse make it first past the post. That little space of irresolution is a strange place to be. You feel safe because you are entirely at the world’s mercy. It is a rush. You lose yourself in it. And so you run towards those little shots of fate, where the world turns. That is the lure: that is why we lose ourselves, when powerless from hurt and grief, in drugs or gambling or drink; in addictions that collar the broken soul and shake it like a dog. I had found my addiction on that day out with Mabel. It was as ruinous, in a way, as if I’d taken a needle and shot myself with heroin.
I had taken flight to a place from which I didn’t want to ever return.

  19

  Extinction

  FALCONERS HAVE A word for hawks in the mood to slay: they call the bird in yarak. The books say it comes from the Persian yaraki, meaning power, strength and boldness. Much later I was amused to find that in Turkish it means an archaic weapon and is also slang for penis: never doubt that falconry is a boys’ game. I’m back in Cambridge now, and as I carry Mabel up the stony track to the hill each day I watch her come into yarak. It is disturbingly like watching her slow possession by a demon. Her crest feathers rise, she leans back, tummy feathers fluffed, shoulders dropped, toes very tight on the glove. Her demeanour switches from everything scares me to I see it all; I own all this and more.

  In this state she’s a high-tension wire-strung hawk of murderous anticipation, wound so tight she bates at anything that moves – things she’s not a hope of catching: flocks of larks, distant racing pigeons, even a farmyard tomcat – and I hold her jesses tight and don’t let her go. But when a hen pheasant rockets up from my feet I do. She chases it fiercely but it has too much of a head start; after fifty yards she slows, turns in mid-air and comes back to me, planing over the top of a hedgerow ash to land gently upon my fist. On another day she bursts downhill in pursuit of a rabbit and is about to grab it when the rabbit stops dead in its tracks. She overshoots and crashes into the ground; the rabbit jinks, doubles back on itself and runs uphill to the safety of a hole. She leaps back into the air to resume her pursuit but the rabbit is gone. She alights, confused and crestfallen, on the grass.