H is for Hawk

by Helen Macdonald

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

What I was doing wasn’t just educating myself in the nuts and bolts of hawk-training: I was unconsciously soaking up the assumptions of an imperial elite.

Marianne Moore: The cure for loneliness is solitude.

When you are broken, you run.

But you don’t always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards. My reasons weren’t White’s, but I was running just the same.

the string was a kind of wordless communication, a symbolic means of joining. It was a denial of separation. Holding tight. Perhaps those jesses might have been unspoken attempts to hold on to something that had already flown away.

leather. These were the cords that would hold me to the hawk, just as they would hold the hawk to me.

My father’s life wasn’t about disappearance. His was a life that worked against it.

The forgetting was delightful because it was a sign that the hawk was starting to accept me. But there was a deeper, darker thrill. It was that I had been forgotten.

But he didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t understand that a hawk in training must be kept a little hungry, for only through gifts of food will a wild bird begin to see you as a benevolent figure and not an affront to all existence.

Love me, he is saying. Please. I can make it up to you, make it better. Fix you. Please eat. But a fat, stuffed goshawk doesn’t want anything other than to be left alone, to disappear into that half-world of no-humans, replete and contented, eyes half-closed, one foot tucked up into soft feathers, to digest its food and sleep.

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.

In Blaine’s book White read that falconry was the art of control over the wildest and proudest of living creatures, and that to train them the falconer must battle their defiance and rebellious attitude.

He’d already empathised with the fledgling in the basket, had seen the hawk as himself. Now he was unconsciously re-enacting his childhood – with the hawk standing in for himself as a boy, and the

Masculinity and conquest: two imperial myths for the price of one.

His young German goshawk was a living expression of all the dark, discreditable desires within himself he’d tried to repress for years: it was a thing fey, fairy, feral, ferocious and cruel. He had tried for so long to be a gentleman.

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

My walks with the hawk were stressful, requiring endless vigilance, and they were wearing me away. As the hawk became tamer I was growing wilder. Fear was contagious: it rose unbidden in my heart as people approached us. I was no longer certain if the hawk bated because she was frightened of what she saw, or if the terror she felt was mine.

You’re a hormonal woman!’ It made such ghastly sense. It was why these falconers never wondered if their own behaviour had anything to do with why their goshawks took stand in trees, or flew into fits of nerves, or rage, or attacked their dogs, or decided to fly away. It wasn’t their fault. Like women, Goshawks were inexplicable. Sulky. Flighty and hysterical. Their moods were pathological. They were beyond all reason.

They were things to win, to court, to love. But they were not hysterical monsters.

female emancipation that had made goshawks so terribly frightening to later falconers – but even so I knew which kind of relationship I preferred.

But unlike other animals that have lived in such close proximity to man, they have never been domesticated. It’s made them a powerful symbol of wildness in myriad cultures, and a symbol, too, of things that need to be mastered and tamed.

While individual hawks of different species die, the species themselves remain unchanged. There are no breeds or varieties, because hawks were never domesticated.

The birds we fly today are identical to those of five thousand years ago.

Civilisations rise and fall, but the hawks stay the same. This gives falconry birds the ability to feel lik...