H is for Hawk: Chapter 20: Hiding 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.

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 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.

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.

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.