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Chapter 26: The Flight of Time
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
Macdonald and her mother spend Christmas in North America, in Maine, with Macdonald’s friend Erin and his family. Macdonald loves Maine. In England, hunting has traditionally been a pastime for the wealthy and landed. In Maine, almost everybody hunts on vast tracts of public lands. And it’s here that she begins to reconsider the stark division she has in her mind between the wild and the civilized, because they seem closer together here. Her friend Scott McNeff flies a red-tailed hawk that he caught and tamed in the fall and which he will release in the spring. McNeff flies the hawk in town, where it captures a squirrel.
The class divisions which mark hunting and falconry in England are less apparent in America, with its comparatively shorter history and greater percentage of public land. Privilege and ownership make the wild seem more precious and less accessible in England. Macdonald must leave her country, her bird, and her preconceptions behind to fully grasp something that her experience has already hinted at—remember the moment when she stands on the hill and realizes she’s just as home there as in the city—that a good life mixes human connection with the raw, wild power of nature.
Themes
On their last morning in Maine, Macdonald, her mother, and Erin take a walk on the beach. Macdonald remembers an earlier trip in which she’d gone along on Erin’s father’s lobster boat, and how charmed she was watching the fishermen adroitly handle the traps. She was too out of her element to be of help. Suddenly, she realizes with shame that she’s been treating her own community like a she’s a tourist—there but not involved in the work of life—ever since her father’s death. Her guilt sits with her until she and Erin burn the family Christmas tree in a bonfire. Watching the barely controlled flames, she feels her spirits lift, as if she’s participating in an ancient purification ritual. When she gets home soon afterward, she is overwhelmed by a profound sense of love and gratitude for Stuart and Mandy, who’ve been watching Mabel for her.
In her reflection that she’s been a tourist in her own country, Macdonald finally starts to grapple with the ways she tried to appropriate Mabel’s wildness as a shield to protect herself from too much contact with a life that had become painful and confusing. In doing so, she missed one of Mabel’s most important lessons. The bird doesn’t—indeed, cannot—hide or deny her nature. Macdonald tried to deny her human nature, taking on the nature of a wild bird to avoid her human pain. But it didn’t work, and it made her life harder by isolating her from the supportive networks she always had available to her. Realizing this frees her to be a human again.
Themes
Macdonald imagines White sitting in a cottage he’s rented in Ireland. It’s 1939, and although he feels on some level that he should join the war effort, he can’t bring himself to, so he has run away from England. As he listens to the bells on the tails of his two peregrine falcons—Cully died after getting tangled in some strawberry wire in the barn—he starts to plan another hawk book, one which will describe the esoteric rituals of falconry through the lenses of magic and literature. It will start with the magic of knots, those physical spells by which the falconer kept his birds tied in their places. And it will end, of course, with the falcon escaping to fly free.
Macdonald imagines White finding his own redemptive story from the ashes of his failure with Gos. In the germ of this story idea, Gos’s escape isn’t a failure but the ultimate mark of success. A falconer can control a bird, for a little while, through the magic of strings and knots. But that turns it into a slave. The true measure of power is found when a falconer frees himself from cruelty by not just allowing but encouraging his bird to be free.
Themes
