H Is for Hawk

by Helen Macdonald

  She bites her lip, nods.

  ‘Make sure you turn the right way; you don’t want to get the creance caught round your legs.’

  She holds the hawk with cautious concentration, as if it were a pitcher full of some caustic agent. She stands straight-backed, still and composed, a small figure fifteen yards away in skinny black jeans, T-shirt and bright red sneakers.

  ‘OK!’

  She turns, and Mabel bursts towards me, dragging the creance behind her, flying so low her wing-tips almost brush the turf. With each deep wingbeat her body flexes and swings but her eyes and head are perfectly, gyroscopically, still, fixed and focused on my glove. The silvered undersides of her wings flash as she spreads them wide, her tail flares, she brings her feet up to strike and she hits the glove feet-first like a kickboxer.

  ‘Was that OK?’ shouts Christina.

  I give her a thumbs-up, and she responds the same way: for a moment we are two traffic controllers on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.

  We do it again. And again. The next day brings heavy rain so we fly her loose between us in the front room of my house, back and forth from fist to fist, over the rug, past the mirror, under the light, wings sending up draughts that leave the lampshade swinging wildly. By the fourth day the hawk is flying twenty-five yards to me, will come without hesitation from the ground, from Christina’s fist, from tree branches, from the roof of the pavilion. ‘Thank you so much for your help,’ I tell her as we walk from the field. ‘You know, I think we’re nearly there. Once she flies a full fifty yards I’ll let her loose.’ The thought brings a squirmy, high-pitched joy. I mustn’t rush. I cannot wait.

  I had called so many hawks before, but calling Mabel was different. I stood there, raised my arm, and whistled the whistle that meant, Please come. This is where you want to be. Fly to me. Ignore the towering clouds, the wind that pushes the trees behind you. Fix yourself on me and fly between where you are and where I am. And I’d hear my heart beating. And I’d see the hawk crouch and fly. I’d see her drop from the perch, speed towards me, and my heart would be in my mouth. Though she was still on the creance, I feared the faltering. I feared the veering off, the sudden fright, the hawk flying away. But the beating wings brought her straight to me, and the thump of her gripping talons on the glove was a miracle. It was always a miracle. I choose to be here, it meant. I eschew the air, the woods, the fields. There was nothing that was such a salve to my grieving heart as the hawk returning. But it was hard, now, to distinguish between my heart and the hawk at all. When she sat twenty yards across the pitch part of me sat there too, as if someone had taken my heart and moved it that little distance. It reminded me of Philip Pullman’s children’s fantasy series His Dark Materials, in which each person has a daemon, an animal that is a visible manifestation of their soul and accompanies them everywhere. When people are separated from their daemons they feel pain. This was a universe very close to mine. I felt incomplete unless the hawk was sitting on my hand: we were parts of each other. Grief and the hawk had conspired to this strangeness. I trusted she would fly to me as simply and completely as I trusted gravity would make things fall. And so entrenched was this sense that the hawk flying to me was part of the workings of the world that when things went wrong, the world went wrong with it.

  She’d left Christina’s fist with all the joy and certainty in the world. I watched her approach and waited with happy anticipation for the solid thwack of her landing on my glove. But it did not come. Instead, she snatched at the food in my fist with one down-dropped taloned foot, and kept flying, fast, out and away from me. I could feel the failure in her, the sense that she hadn’t got what she wanted, and I could feel, too, that what had just happened had spooked her, and that now she was flying away from it, and me, as fast as possible. I grabbed hold of the creance and ran with her, putting resistance on the line until she was brought to earth, crest raised, wings spread wide, feet planted in the turf, beak open, panting in fury. I held out my fist and she flew straight up onto it as if nothing had happened at all.

  ‘She must have been scared by something,’ I said. ‘Let’s try it again.’

  And again the hawk came, low and fast, and again she snatched at the glove and kept flying. Again I brought her to earth.

  ‘Why is she doing it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

  This had never happened before. Over the years I’d had hawks that ignored me. Hawks that turned their back on me. Hawks that flew reluctantly, flew badly, or didn’t fly at all. It never worried me. These hawks weren’t at their flying weight, that was all, and this was easily fixed. But this was different. This was a hawk desperately eager to fly to me, but with a last-second terror of landing on my glove. It was incomprehensible. I telephoned Stuart. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. Does she need more manning? Is she too high in weight?’

  I was as bewildered as a child.

  ‘What should I do?’

  There was a long pause, and then a longer sigh.

  ‘Are you feeding her chicks?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Stop feeding her chicks! They’re too rich for her at this stage. She’ll be fine, she’s nearly there. Just feed her rabbit. It won’t hurt her, but it’ll stop this problem.’

  All the trust I had left in the world rested in the fact that the hawk wanted to fly to me. Now she was scared to land on my fist – she didn’t trust me – and I could not explain to Stuart how awful this felt. I thanked him. I had asked for advice, and he had given it, simply and precisely. This is the problem. This is how you fix it. But I didn’t believe him. It can’t just be the food. I have done something bad, I thought miserably. Something terrible.

  The next day a plague of moorhens had come out of the messy copse behind the pavilion and were running all over the pitch like a flock of feathered black mice. Moorhens! Birds that can neither fly well nor run fast, they are such easy prey for goshawks that falconers avoid flying them out of a sense of sporting fair play. Mabel had never seen them before, but she looked upon them now as if they had been designed by a kindly deity for her personal delectation. I wasn’t surprised; I’d already discovered that all sorts of predatory taxonomies are buried in a baby goshawk’s brain. A few days earlier I’d seen her looking at a small drawing of partridges in a book I’d left open on the floor. Intrigued, I picked up the book and held it in front of her. She kept her eyes fixed on the picture, even when I moved the book about in the air. No way! I thought. The drawing was in ink; it was stylised and sparse: it caught the feel and form of partridges, but there was no colour or detail to it. I flipped through the book, showed her other drawings: finches, seabirds, thrushes. She ignored them all. Then I showed her a drawing of a pheasant. Her black pupils dilated; she leaned forward and stared down her beak at it, as fascinated as she had been with the partridges. I was amazed. Amazed that she could understand two-dimensional images, and even more amazed that something deep in her brain saw these sparse inked curves as fitting the category gamebirds and had pronounced them worthy of interest.

  Right on cue I hear a soft clucking noise, and a thin peeping, and Mabel’s head swings round, and mine too, and we see – just there, just ten feet away – a hen pheasant and a line of cheeping, half-feathered poults squeezing themselves under a railing on their way towards the grass. The pheasant sees Mabel and stops dead. She has never seen a goshawk before, but instantly perceives the danger she is in. She crouches to fly, realises this would leave her chicks behind, then considers sitting down and pretending to be a rock, and when she realises the futility of this manouevre – her lacy beige back does not match the sunlit grass, and the hawk has already seen her – all hell breaks loose. She stretches her neck high, puffs out her cheek feathers, beak open in panic, and runs pell-mell out across the pitch. Her chicks follow her desperately, six ungainly clockwork dinosaurs. I am bewildered – there is no safety out there, nowhere to hide, unless the pheasant thinks that putting her chicks amongst th
e distant moorhens would give them a faint, statistical chance of escape.

  Mabel. Oh God, Mabel. Mabel is bating at them, bating so hard, wings beating so furiously, that she hangs horizontally in the air. The breeze is cold in my face, my fist pulled towards the fleeing pheasants. She bounces back onto my hand, beak open with exertion, fixes me with a white-hot, angry eye, then bates towards them again. Not here, not now! Mabel! I can’t. I can’t let you catch one. It is against the laws of God and Man and . . . College.

  I try to keep her on my fist – which is like trying to balance a very tall and unstable pile of precious china plates – execute a smart volte-face to block the pheasants from view, and in the excessively polite voice that only ever falls on me at times of enormous stress I ask Christina if she ‘might possibly chase the pheasants back into the bushes? And perhaps the moorhens too?’ She grins, and shepherds the pheasants back into the garden behind the railings. Then she sprints off across the pitch towards the moorhens. Meanwhile Mabel is standing on tiptoe, jumping up and down, craning her neck over my shoulder to see where they have gone, and I’m trying to stop her from seeing, and largely failing, and I turn my head and see Christina running across the field, arms windmilling, and before her, scores of moorhens rushing back into the woods, wings open as they run, like small boys playing aeroplanes, and I start giggling uncontrollably. This is ludicrous. I’m holding tight onto Britain’s deadliest hawk while someone chases all the gamebirds away. My God, I’m thinking. If any of my falconer friends find out about this, they’ll never speak to me again.

  Once the pitch is clear of temptation I call Mabel as usual. She flies to my fist perfectly, a whole thirty yards. But on the second and third flights she clouts the glove hard with both feet, skies up, tries to turn in mid-air, wobbles, stalls, then ends up on the ground a few feet away, panting, wings dropped, looking as if she is going to explode. All my laughter is gone. Now I know why austringers have, for centuries, been famed for cursing. I curse. It is my fault this is happening. I know it is. I hate myself. I try to keep calm. I fail. Damn, damn, damn. I’m hot, incredibly bothered, pushing hair from my eyes with rabbit-flesh-specked fingers, cursing to high heaven, and to top it all I see a man in white shirtsleeves and a black waistcoat striding towards Christina, his shadow dark before him. It is one of the college porters, and he is not happy. The set of his shoulders is unmistakable. They start talking. From this distance I can’t hear what’s being said, but she is waving one hand towards me, and I suppose she is explaining to him that I’m not a random trespasser, but a bona fide College Fellow, and what I am doing is not against the rules.

  From his demeanour I don’t think he believes her.

  They stop talking as I approach. He recognises me. I recognise him. ‘Hello!’ I say brightly, and explain what I am doing with a hawk on this hallowed ground.

  ‘Hmm,’ he says, eyeing Mabel with suspicion. ‘Are you going to catch students with it?’

  ‘Only if they’re causing trouble.’ Then I whisper conspiratorially, ‘Let me have the names.’

  It is the right answer. A shout of laughter. He is fascinated by the hawk, and wants to know more about it, but he is working and duty calls. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, and he sets his shoulders once again, narrows his eyes into the sun, and stalks off towards some poor tourists who’ve decided to have a picnic on the corner of the college rugby pitch.

  I flew her later in the day. I flew her earlier. I fed her rabbit with fur and rabbit without. I fed her chicks that I’d gutted and skinned and rinsed in water. I reduced her weight. I raised it. I reduced it again. I wore different clothes. I tried everything to fix the problem, certain that the problem couldn’t be fixed because the problem was me. Sometimes she flew straight to my fist, sometimes straight over it, and there was no way of knowing which it would be. Every flight was a monstrous game of chance, a coin-toss, and what was at stake felt something very like my soul. I began to think that what made the hawk flinch from me was the same thing that had driven away the man I’d fallen for after my father’s death. Think that there was something deeply wrong about me, something vile that only he and the hawk could see. And every evening I wrote in the journal I’d kept since the hawk arrived. I made notes in terse, impersonal shorthand, detailing the weather, Mabel’s behaviour, measurements of weight and wind and food. They read like aviation reports, things to be broadcast in clipped tones from the Air Ministry roof:

  2lb 1½oz light winds, sunny, 4 p.m. 35 yards four flights quick response, overshot last two. Washed chicks.

  But they were changing.

  2lb 1½oz clear, slight breeze, 4.30 p.m. three flights 35 yards overshot every time. Awful. Rabbit.???!!

  They were no longer entirely about the hawk.

  Dull. Headache. Hard to get out today. Am I ill? 2lb 1¼oz rabbit three flights 25 yards overshot on last why? Have to fix this what am I doing wrong?

  Sun, stiff breeze. 4 p.m. Rabbit, but same as yesterday 20 yards OK – at 25 overshot twice: 2lb 1¼oz rest of day horrible because I had to see people, have to pretend everything fine. On and on. Wish they would FUCK OFF AND LEAVE ME ALONE.

  The anger was vast and it came out of nowhere. It was the rage of something not fitting; the frustration of trying to put something in a box that is slightly too small. You try moving the shape around in the hope that some angle will make it fit in the box. Slowly comes an apprehension that this might not, after all, be possible. And finally you know it won’t fit, know there is no way it can fit, but this doesn’t stop you using brute force to try to crush it in, punishing the bloody thing for not fitting properly. That was what it was like: but I was the box, I was the thing that didn’t fit, and I was the person smashing it, over and over again, with bruised and bleeding hands.

  Rage crouched inside me, and anything could provoke it. One weekday morning I laboured into town under a sky the colour of wet cement to meet an Uzbek student I’d worked with on a research trip to Central Asia the previous winter. A quiet, neat man, a nice man. I’d camped with him in frozen deserts, eaten lamb-stuffed quinces at roadside shacks on the Silk Road, stood with him on the banks of the Syr Darya river. He had lately arrived in Cambridge and he wanted to see me. I sat down with him at a café table. I liked him. I knew I should talk to him, but couldn’t remember how. I tried a few words. They sounded wrong. I stuck a watery smile on my face and turned my head towards the window, desperately trying to remember how to have a conversation. And there, behind the plate glass of the bank across the street, a woman in a grey uniform was standing on a chair in her stockinged feet, reaching up to peel a huge vinyl sticker of a singing skylark from the glass. It had been advertising some kind of financial offer. Now the offer was finished, and so was the lark. She picked at its open beak with her fingernails, then started pulling its head from the window. Inch by inch the bird disappeared; first it hung there, decapitated, printed wings spread wide, then each wing was stripped from the glass, hacked at with fingers and a plastic scraper, until the last feather of its tail was gone. She screwed the skylark into a ball, and threw it to the floor.

  Blind, cold, shaking fury. I felt it rise. I hated that woman. I wanted to burst into the bank, scream at her, pick up the tangled ball that was a skylark and take it home. Smooth it out, save it from harm. Across the table my student friend was looking at me with the same expression of baffled concern that the waiter had worn on the night my father died. That also made me angry. I was angry with the woman for tearing down the skylark and angry with this nice, innocent man who gave me no cause to be angry at all. I mumbled an unsatisfactory apology, told him that ‘things have been hard since my father died’, and ‘it isn’t your fault’ and ‘I’m sorry, and this is awful, but I really have to go’. I walked past the window as I crossed the street. The woman was back on her chair, smoothing a new sticker out against the glass: a giant arrow that pointed at nothing. I could not meet her eye.

  Then I started crashing my father’s car. I didn’t mean to: i
t just happened. I backed up against bollards, scraped wings against walls, heard the sound of metal squealing in agony over and over again, and I’d get out of the car and rub the new gouges dumbly with my fingers, as if somehow that might fix them, though they ran through the paint to the metal below. ‘Are you punishing your father’s car because he left you?’ asked a psychoanalytically-minded and fairly tactless friend. I thought about that. ‘No,’ I said, embarrassed because my answer was so much less interesting. ‘It’s that I don’t know what shape my car is any more.’ It was true. I couldn’t keep the dimensions of the car in my head. Or my own, for I kept having accidents. I cracked cups. I dropped plates. Fell over. Broke a toe on a door-jamb. I was as clumsy as I had been as a child. But when I was busy with Mabel I was never clumsy. The world with the hawk in it was insulated from harm, and in that world I was exactly aware of all the edges of my skin. Every night I slept and dreamed of creances, of lines and knots, of skeins of wool, skeins of geese flying south. And every afternoon I walked out onto the pitch with relief, because when the hawk was on my fist I knew who I was, and I was never angry with her, even if I wanted to sink to my knees and weep every time she tried to fly away.

  15

  For whom the bell

  ‘BLOODY HELL, SHE’S calm, Helen,’ Stuart says. ‘I can feel her heartbeat. She’s not bothered at all.’ His head is bowed low over the table, fingers spread wide over the closed wings of my hooded hawk. He holds her upon a kitchen cushion as firmly and as gently as if she were made of glass. ‘Good,’ I say, shifting her covert feathers carefully aside to reveal the base of her tail. Here, just before the long feathers join her body, the quills are hollow and translucent, and I’m about to glue and tie a bell the size and shape of an acorn onto the topmost pair. It doesn’t take long. I tug on it gently to check it is secured, then take the hawk back onto my fist. She rouses and the bell sounds loud in the bright room. It does not seem to concern her at all.