H is for Hawk: Chapter 6: The Box of Stars Summary & Analysis

As she drives home, Macdonald feels simultaneously fearful about the difficulty of the task in front of her and resentful of those who’ve warned her against it. Goshawks’ lightning-fast reflexes and overdriven nervous systems give them their high-strung reputation. But one of Macdonald’s antiquated guidebooks promises that a gently handled goshawk will be “kind to her keeper.” She remembers the breeder’s kind strength and slowly begins to understand the flash of love she felt watching him handle the frightened bird. She misses her father. She’s been looking for father figures everywhere—even on TV shows—and overidentifying with the lucky people they nurture. In that moment, she identified with the hawk, safe in the breeder’s paternal grasp.

Later, at a highway service station, Macdonald frets over the silence emanating from the box. Irrationally, she worries her goshawk is dead, even though she knows it’s fine. Humans have been transporting captive hawks over much longer distances for centuries. She leans down to peer through an airhole in the box and the bird startles. Shining motes of dust and feathers fill her field of vision, like a universe full of stars.

T. H. White’s bird, Gos, traveled nearly 1,500 miles from a remote German forest to a small English village by foot, airplane, and train. In The Goshawk, he imagines this terrifying trip through the bird’s eyes. Macdonald thinks he likely imposed his own traumatized fears on the bird. After spending the earliest years of his life caught in the terror of his parents’ unhappy and violent marriage, he spent a brief idyll with his grandparents in England. But then he was sent to a boarding school where the cruel schoolmaster beat the students so brutally and so frequently that he must, White concluded, have derived sexual satisfaction from it.

Macdonald imagines White sitting at the kitchen table of his cottage, waiting for his bird. He painted the rooms bright colors, invested in luxurious carpeting, turned one bedroom into a romantic bower. Yet he sleeps on a cot in another room. Decades later, carrying her bird into her own home, Macdonald remembers a line from The Sword in the Stone in which a falconer describes his goshawk as a prosthetic extension of his body. She feels the same. That night, she dreams of her father as a boy, playing in the bombed-out ruins of Shepherd’s Bush. He points at the sky and Macdonald looks up to see a plane; when she looks down, he is gone.