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Chapter 20: Hiding
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
As time passes, Macdonald finds herself confronting death in complicated ways. She doesn’t like to think of herself as a killer, but she becomes one. Goshawks don’t always kill their prey before they begin to eat it. To be merciful, Macdonald learns to break the necks of the rabbits Mabel catches. She used to tell people that the way a bird hunts and kills its prey isn’t cruel, but now she’s not so sure. She kills the rabbits to be merciful, but she’s also aware that their suffering reminds her of her own mortality.
The problems Macdonald tries to escape—loss, grief, and death—follow her into the wild where she hunts with Mabel. Unwilling to think too much about her father’s death, ironically, she becomes a killer, and each time she takes a rabbit’s life, she becomes a little more used to the idea of death. The wild isn’t protecting her from her grief—it is merely reframing her grief in ways she can handle.
Themes
One afternoon, Macdonald encounters a sick rabbit languishing on the roadside and puts it out of its misery. Its tumor-laden head invokes a fearful childhood memory of wanting to build a fallout shelter in the family’s yard. Her parents told her it wasn’t necessary; they lived too close to important military targets to be likely to survive a nuclear attack anyway. In many ways, Macdonald knows she merely participated in the vague fears of the late 20th century. She remembers the nihilist attitude of J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, and she begins to worry that she’s developing a similar sense of hopelessness. Despite his shortcomings, White always clung to the beauty of life, something she admires.
Earlier in the book, Macdonald talked about how part of White’s decision to train a goshawk arose from his fear of war and his sense that humanity in the early 20th century had doomed itself. If anything, the picture is far grimmer from Macdonald’s vantage point. After all, she grew up at the height of the Cold War, when it seemed like the threat of nuclear annihilation was hanging over the whole world. It’s a sign that she’s slowly beginning to metabolize and process her grief that she can now not only differentiate between those who turn from their fear and those who embrace it, but that she’s starting to admire White for embracing life even when it was painful.
Themes
It isn’t always easy to do so, especially in the bloody-minded world of falconry. In the late 1930s, Macdonald explains, two prominent British falconers were invited to the International Hunting Exhibition in Germany. The Nazi party loved the iconography of birds of prey. Herman Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man and falconry enthusiast, presented the British contingent with their second-place prize in the falconry category. Even the man who sent White his hawk, Renz Waller, was involved with the Nazi party.
Macdonald continues to muse on the cultural connection between prey birds, death, and power. She sees how people can twist nature’s lessons—like kill or be killed—into unfathomable cruelty. She’s drawing a distinction between her own growing fascination with death and the violence enacted by some of history’s worst actors.
Themes
Waller eventually found another goshawk for White, Macdonald says. But before it could arrive, he was hospitalized with appendicitis. Eventually, he procured a new hawk named Cully. White did his best to nurse her back to health—she had been injured when she was trapped—and train her. And eventually, he managed to fly her free. Her first quarry, a rabbit, awoke a new and unexpected bloodlust in White’s soul.
Just as the winds contributed to Gos’s escape by blowing him off course from White, White’s appendicitis blows his plan to adopt another bird off course. Sometimes, people undermine themselves and ruin the things they love. Other times, circumstances intervene. In both cases, clinging too tightly to things causes pain. But those willing to undergo suffering and learn its lessons can grow, as White did.
Themes
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