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Chapter 19: Extinction
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 imagines White rushing from his house after receiving news of agitated crows that might indicate Gos’s position. But he can’t find Gos anywhere. He makes traps. He writes to Germany for another bird but receives no answer. With her job at the college finished, Macdonald temporarily moves into the home of a friend who is abroad. Feeling out of place—if not directly unwelcome—in the large, empty house, she spends more and more time flying Mabel. She grows distant from the people in her life.
Without Gos, White has become unmoored in his life, and he grasps at everything he can think of to right the situation. White’s loss will force him to confront himself, but Macdonald hasn’t reached that point yet. In fact, she’s going in the opposite direction, adroitly avoiding her grief by focusing with laser-like intensity of the bird.
Themes
One day, as Macdonald watches Mabel tearing into a rabbit she’s just killed, a B-17 Bomber—a WWII plane—flies over their heads. It reminds Macdonald of some lines of poetry comparing the view of airmen to that of birds of prey. There was a craze for comparisons like this before and during WWII. Yet, Macdonald knows that the lives of airmen had much more misery and danger than freedom and excitement. Still, she understands feeling drawn to the romance of hawks. She very badly wants to live the “safe and solitary” life of a creature like Mabel.
The airplane appears over the trees as if it’s flying out of history—both global (because it’s a WWII plane) and personal (because her father was a plane-spotter). Seeing it reminds Macdonald of what she hopes to get from her time with Mabel—a sense of being above it all. But it also reminds her that human lives and history are much messier that that, and that it’s not possible to escape into the safe isolation of wild creatures.
Themes
The plane also jogs loose memories of Macdonald’s father, who was born during WWII and who developed an early obsession with plane spotting as a result. Unlike others, however, even after the war he never lost the habit of looking up when he heard an engine overhead, a habit that Macdonald suspects encouraged her own interest in the sky and, by extension, birds. The bomber also reminds her of the story she wants to tell at her father’s memorial.
Macdonald hints at a story that she’ll tell in full in Chapter 23. But mostly, the plane reminds her of exactly what she comes out hunting with Mabel to escape: the loss of her beloved father. And these inescapable memories suggest yet again that her quest to escape her grief by turning to the wilderness will ultimately fail.
Themes
Airplanes also meant something to White, who had learned to fly them in an attempt to conquer his fears of them. Macdonald suspects that he identified their looming danger with the persecution he experienced at the hands of authority figures. In his nightmares, airplanes often chased him until he could scramble into caves or other underground hiding spots. Macdonald wonders if he transferred his fear of planes and war and death onto Gos, and thus made training the hawk into a sort of personal WWII. At times, despite hating Hitler, his personal political views flirted with fascism. But Macdonald thinks it's to his credit that when he realized that in his relationship with Gos, he’d become the dictatorial figure that equally fascinated and repulsed him, he admitted defeat.
Airplanes link Macdonald not just to her father but to White, to whom they represent an early attempt to overcome personal challenges—or change himself to fit the socially-acceptable mold—by brute force of will. His ongoing fear of flying despite learning how, just like his failure to tame and civilize Gos (or to control his own sexual impulses), suggests that it isn’t possible to outrun or escape fear, grief, or loss. Instead, the only way to carve out a meaningful life lies in finding ways to live with these things.
Themes
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Macdonald imagines White taking a blind that he has made into the fields near his cottage. When he lies beneath it, waiting for the sparrowhawks, he enacts another (futile) rite of passage. The blind becomes instead a grave, and his symbolic death links him to the long-dead souls of people he thinks might have understood or loved him. Poachers pass by, unaware of his presence. And he feels safe knowing that he has finally become invisible.
Macdonald has just explained to readers White’s tendency to try to seek cover, to go to ground, when threatened. Yet, when she imagines him in his blind, it’s unclear to what degree she’s projecting her own desires onto him. After all, she’s the one who’s already told readers that she longs to be invisible and solitary like a hawk. When she imagines White’s rite of passage, then, she’s expressing her own desire to escape suffering by finding a way to disassociate herself from the world of human connections.
Themes
