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Chapter 16: Rain
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
The thought of free flying Mabel plagues Macdonald with insomnia. She is terrified that when she unclips the creance, the other lines holding the bird to her—lines “of habit, of hunger, of partnership, of familiarity”—may snap. But all such lines of possession are fragile. One morning, while in a coffee shop, she watches the strange spectacle of a bank run. Suddenly, she sees that none of the things people cling to—their relationships, their money, their civilization—are stable.
At this stage in her grief—and her training of Mabel—Macdonald is starting to realize that it’s never possible to ensure that a person won’t lose the things that matter to them. The bank run—in which people rush to withdraw their money from a floundering institution before it declares bankruptcy (leaving some people empty handed)—reminds her of this, too.
Themes
Flying Mabel free also means facing not just potential abandonment, but death. When she was young, Macdonald didn’t think about this much. She admired the calm detachment of the tweedy falconers as they calmly placed their birds’ quarry into game bags. But as much as she loves Mabel for her fierce aliveness, she knows that allowing the bird to hunt means she will have to confront death, too.
Free flying also forces Macdonald to confront the life-and-death stakes of falconry— she’s not training any old animal but an apex predator whom evolution has designed and fine-tuned for killing. Given her father’s recent death, she finds herself thinking about life and death in new and more personal terms than ever before.
Themes
Macdonald thinks about the despair White felt over his failure to tame Gos. She feels compassion for White, a boy whose life was marked by a primal fear that everyone, even his mother and father, wanted to destroy him. She imagines him realizing that, to Gos, he had become a cruel, dictatorial “madman” like his father. She imagines him putting a bow perch outside the barn and tying six yards of creance (made of thin, fraying twine) to Gos’s swivel, before turning his back. And before he realizes it, Gos has snapped the twine and flown off.
In her grief, Macdonald can better understand and feel compassion for White’s suffering than for her own. She’s still in denial about her own need to escape her grief and can’t yet see all the ways in which she’s asking her bird to help her do that. Unable to forge the bond of trust that Macdonald has made with Mabel, White is left with nothing but his love for Gos, and eventually this tells him that he’s being cruel. And so because he loves Gos, he finds a way to let him fly to freedom.
Themes
