"H IS FOR HAWK" by HELEN MACDONALD

Helen and a gyrfalcon

“H Is for Hawk” and also for Helen.  That would be Helen Macdonald, an inspired writer, naturalist, historian, academic and falconer of enormous intelligence, experience, and passion.  She’s in England but travels, among other places to Mongolia where their idea of a hawk is a golden eagle.  As it happens, I have some experience with such a bird but nothing like her expertise.  Many people are writing reviews of Helen’s book, “H Is for Hawk,” as she travels around Great Britain giving readings.  Some of them are friends of hers or of her father, Alistair Macdonald, a noted journalist photographer.  

This book records her “working through” of the grief after her father’s sudden death from a heart attack, mostly by focusing on her relationship with a goshawk named “Mabel,” creating an exquisite tapestry of contradictions, paradoxes, deeper meanings, and epiphanies that finally became a portrait of love.  She is not a narcissist nor is she shallow.  This account joins an ancient and enduring stream of material about human fascination with raptors: rapacious and sometimes reptilian, but capable of soaring transcendence that their handlers can momentarily share. 

T.H. White supplies an integument of encounter with his own hawk decades earlier in his book “The Goshawk,” whom he calls simply “Gos.”  He has no experience, no experts, just an old book and his own brain, which is a perverse and undependable instrument.  He has retreated to a hermitage on the grounds of the school where he taught in that miserable English boarding school way that literally flays little boys.  Helen, in contrast, was raised with a brother in a sympathetic and free-spirited family, but she is no less part of the great stream of Anglo thought that gave rise to the King Arthur mythologies in Britain and she is not protected from the emotional roller-coaster of training a goshawk.  We are reading about Helen, T.H. White and “Wart” from White’s “Sword in the Stone” all at the same time in layers of meaning.

The first time I saw hawks flown free was about 1963 here in Browning at the high school where I was teaching.  The hawk trainer had worked with Disney on “Perri” (1957) another Felix Saalten book like “Bambi.”  Perri was about a squirrel threatened by an owl trained for the movie by this man.  Before television, school assemblies were very popular and this man came with hawks.  I’ve tried to find his name but failed.  I talked him into coming down to the Scriver Studio to take a lot at “Eegie,” our golden eagle.  He gave us a lot of information: that she was female, that she would lay eggs but they would not be fertile because eagles mate high in the sky, and that she must have roughage in her food even if it was only paper and cut-up string in hamburger.  

Helen had access to the culled male chicks from a nearby hatchery but we went onto the prairie to shoot a gopher every morning.  Nurturing a predator means meat.  No eagle chow in a sack.  It turns out that the art of flying a hawk is a crucial balancing act because the weight of the bird is key to its temperament and willingness to at least take an interest in flying to hunt.  White overfed Gos to the point of turning her spurts of excrement -- called “mutes” -- to green, a very bad sign.  Helen, feeling the same worry over starving Mabel, didn’t go that far but had to learn to get her into “yarack,” the technical term for the edge of hunger that prompts performance.

West Hills UU Fellowship

The second time I saw hawks flown was in the sanctuary of the West Hills UU Fellowship in Portland in the late Seventies.  This group of free spirits and artists recognizes the deep spirituality of nature.  Helen would fit right in with them, not least because they wouldn’t consider her particularly odd or gifted -- they’re all like that.  The Sunday, April 17, 2011 post on Fretmarks.blogspot.co.uk explores Helen’s love of eccentricity and her childhood among Theosophists -- this entry is an excellent introduction to her work.

Helen, who sometimes goes by Pluvialis, has been blogging since 2005, about the same time that I started, and was one of the early blogs that I was careful to follow.  So I was there when her father died, when she plunged into the abyss, and through the long silence that followed until she emerged with this triumphant manuscript.  She had no idea I was out here in Montana, but her friend Jake corresponded with me a bit, so we exchanged our worries and then joy.  The magic of the Internet is that a person may be part of a community more world-wide and alert than they ever suspect.  Lucky Jake lives close enough to Helen to share a circle of real people who love birds.

Mongolian girl training her eagle.

Falconry seems to have become developed on the high plateaus of Eurasia where the skies are wide.  But Helen and T.H. were driven through an ordeal, personal and essentially unsharable, in the tightly overgrown and governed lands of England, making a transect of a great swampy wasteland of emotional undergrowth that tore and sucked at them, and yet they struggled forward because they were following something beloved and high-flying, trailing its jesses as it calls them on forward with desire and frustration.  What emerges at the end is a clear, cool stream of thought and reconciliation.  Falconry is a way of bending nature to one’s own uses that has been practiced for millennia and yet must be individually perfected each time.

Martha Raddatz, F15E combat pilot

Far from being all-too-twee about birds, Helen says they’re like fighter jets.  This quote is from an interview in the Guardian.  She and the reporter were overflown by an F15 and she identified exactly what it was. “She sees parallels between fighter jets and birds of prey. 'That sense of fear and awe and being problematic in terms of being involved in death is very much the same feeling people get when they see hawks. It's mesmerizing.'"  Reading the  book reviews for this book is rewarding in itself.  The people who write about her really stretch to capture what she has done.  Of course, they’re English, they’re literate, and they’re in sympathy, so they write very well.  

Our own “Eegy” died when the Scriver Museum burned -- the smoke suffocated her.  But she was not a high-flier-- she only flew once and that was to the top of the house when the wire was being replaced on her cage.  Then she flew back in. 

We treated Eegy in the off-hand familiar way that we treated all the pets.  Too young to fly at first, she gripped the Dutch door of the shop while we stuffed her with gopher parts until she stopped shrieking for more.  She marched around under the worktables, shouldering aside the pet cats and dogs.  Later, in her cage, she was happy when feral cats managed to get in so she could kill them -- squeezing her talons through them while holding them at leg’s length to keep them away from her eyes. 

During the first fall she was with us there was a too-early blizzard.  We didn’t think of the bird with only a board for a shelter until it was after supper. When we finally realized and went to see how she was faring, she looked like a schmoo, plastered white with only her blinking eye showing.  We each took a wingtip as though she were a toddler and walked her into the shop.  When the weather warmed again, Bob cut a door so she could get under the building.  While he worked, he had to hire Dean Kipling, the kid next door, to fend her off with a stick, because she kept unplugging the extension cord to the saw.  Frustrated, she jumped up to rap Dean in the chest with her closed fists; he resigned.

Eegie bonded with Bob, nibbling behind his ears, but wouldn’t tolerate me once she was adult.  After Bob divorced me and I was gone, he had the idea of getting a fertile goose egg for his bird to raise and she did fine.  He put an old tub in the cage and the two big birds splashed around in it like kids.  If you ran a hose in the backyard, Eegie shrieked until you squirted her.  Once, out riding, we had seen a pair of eagles playing at the edge of a pond, splashing each other and throwing sticks back and forth.

  

Helen at a poetry conference in 1998 which she left early in order to inseminate a peregrine.

I assume not in mid-air.

Helen says Mabel would play catch with a ball of crumpled paper.  Eegie would do the same with a rubber ball by hitting it back to us with her fist.  Even so in play with animals do we work through our human issues.  Everything is connected and everything changes, but somehow the themes recur and recur, even across species and through the skies.

Helen recently -- I think this must be the coat that reminded her of "Withnail and I"