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Chapter 11: Leaving Home
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in H is for Hawk, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Living with the Wild
Fear, Grief, and Loss
Love, Trust, and Freedom
Time and History
Social Divisions
Summary
Analysis
Once Mabel will eat from her hand, Macdonald train the bird to fly to her fist. She stands a distance from the perch with a tempting morsel in her gloved fist, waiting patiently for the bird to become frustrated enough to take to the wing. When Mabel crashes into her fist with the force of a baseball bat, her power makes Macdonald feel alive. But training the bird outside is exhausting because it sends Macdonald into a state of hypervigilant anxiety. She’s always on the lookout for threats. But eventually she realizes that most people don’t see them, or at least pretend not to. And the few people who do approach are outsiders, like a globe-trotting bicyclist and an emigree from Kazakhstan who tells Macdonald about his people’s history of training golden eagles. Macdonald begins to feel like an outsider, too.
Macdonald hasn’t realized it for herself yet (at least in terms of the memoir’s timeline), but she’s acting like a hawk when she goes outside. She’s hypervigilant and distrustful of other people. But, like Mabel, with enough exposure, she can calm down to face the task at hand. When she does start to pay attention, it’s both helpful and painful to realize that most people aren’t paying attention. Helpful because it allows her to focus on her task. Painful, because it reemphasizes how lonely she feels at this point in her life. Yet, she isn’t fully invisible, even if she’s become more of an outsider in her isolation. Even the outsiders want—and need—community.
Themes
One day, Macdonald takes Mabel to a friend’s house. The friend’s husband answers the door. He’s somewhat impressed with the bird, but when Macdonald brags about Mabel’s calm temperament, he says it’s probably just a girl thing—falconer and hawk get along because they’re both females. Macdonald is offended. But she concedes that most of her falconry books describe the goshawk’s temperament in gendered terms. To 19th-century writers, goshawks were hormonal or hysterical women: “moody,” “sulky,” and “peculiar.” Earlier falconers, like the 17th-century falconer Edmund Bert, described in kinder terms but still as women to be wooed, won, and loved. To a great degree, human assumptions—and blind spots—have colored attitudes toward goshawks. For example, Macdonald realizes that Mabel likes to play, a behavior she’s never seen described before.
Macdonald finds herself frustrated that the men who traditionally dominated falconry tend to discuss their birds in gendered—and frankly sexist—terms. But lying beneath this uncomfortable truth is another one that Macdonald understands, to a point: the birds inspire fierce love and devotion in their handlers. In a way, then, in makes sense, that falconers past would have described them as women to be wooed, won, and (possibly) controlled as wives. Macdonald also loves Mabel with a fierce (and one-sided) devotion, even if her comparatively open mind allows her to uncover as-yet hidden aspects of Mabel’s—and goshawks’—personalities.
Themes
When White procured his own goshawk, they had a terrible reputation among English falconers. Perhaps, Macdonald speculates, this was part of why White, who often expressed his affinity for underdogs, loved Gos. Gos also allowed him to try on different roles, including “benevolent parent,” “innocent child,” and “patient pupil.” And falconry offered White a sense of kindship and belonging that his traumatic childhood and sexual orientation had previously denied him.
Macdonald can see White taking on—and foisting on Gos—many roles other than falconer and bird-in-training. She understands why his trauma might lead him to do this, how he might see training the bird as a way to redeem his past suffering and find the love and trust his human relationships have lacked. She’s less able to see the way she’s doing this herself—both in adopting the goshawk’s impervious, isolated persona and in focusing on taming Mabel as the key to taming her grief.
Themes
Falconry also connects White—and Macdonald—to a glorious sense of history. Hawks and falcons have an eternal quality that seems to defy the flow of time. It’s like the intimacy conjured up by unexpectedly encountering the vestiges of another life, an intimacy that seems to bridge across time. Given the sport’s aristocratic history, this sense of connection tends to make falconers think of themselves as a cut above the rest. Once, Macdonald felt this way. But now she just wants to become less and less noticeable.
Because humans have been training hawks in essentially the same way for thousands of years, it’s impossible to participate in the sport without this sense of connection to the past. But Macdonald knows that the past isn’t just glorious. It was also marred by limiting social and gender hierarchies. She can’t escape those connections, even though she tries to distance herself from them.
Themes
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Macdonald tastes the invisibility she wants one night when she takes Mabel to a park along the banks of the river. No one—not the walkers, cyclers, boaters, or droves of joggers about—seems to notice her or the bird. Mabel remains calm, relaxed. And at the end of the walk, she shows she’s ready for the next step of training when she hops from a fence post to Macdonald’s gloved hand.
For Macdonald invisibility seems linked with wildness; she wants to become a part of the scenery, because doing so means that she will no longer be tied by the kinds of human affections and relationships which—in their eventual loss—cause suffering. And because she links invisibility with Mabel’s success in her mind, she celebrates her success rather than realizing how it’s making it harder for her to face and eventually overcome her grief.
Themes
