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Chapter 2: Lost
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 recalls the first time she saw a trained goshawk. She was 12, and her parents had arranged for her to spend the day with a group of tweed-clad falconers. They seemed very posh to her, but she wanted desperately to belong to their ranks someday. When one of the hawks killed a pheasant, the sight filled Macdonald with complicated, mixed emotions. She collected some of the pheasant’s feathers as a memento. As the day wore on, three of the hawks decided they were tired of the hunt and retreated, sulkily, to the trees. Their humans were still waiting doggedly for the birds to descend hours later.
In this childhood memory, Macdonald again betrays some of her real reasons for wanting a goshawk: they are, like her grief, impervious and ungovernable. Thus, if she could tame one, she could prove to herself that she has the strength to face her own grief. This memory also encapsulates the feelings of trust and alignment between the birds and their handlers. Despite their birds’ stubbornness, the falconers trust that they will come down, eventually. And right now, Macdonald needs the assurance that something she loves won’t abandon her.
Themes
Macdonald never forgot those “silent, wayward goshawks.” But when she became a falconer, she preferred falcons. In part, that’s because she absorbed her books’ preference for falcons—a quirk of fate that says more about class status than about the birds themselves. Hawks can hunt in all terrains while high-diving falcons require the kinds of open space only aristocrats had access to in the heyday of falconry. But this had led to prejudices among falconers about their birds; goshawks have a reputation as sulky, difficult, cold-blooded murderers.
The contrasts between goshawks and falcons illustrate the class divisions (and privilege) inherent in the sport of falconry and illustrate how easy it is to reinforce these divisions. Although she’s not a Victorian gentleman, Macdonald’s self-education from the manuals they wrote instilled their biases in her. This also reemphasizes the idea of goshawks as wild creatures and reinforces Macdonald’s idea that taming a wild creature will help her tame her wild grief.
Themes
Nevertheless, the summer of her father’s death, an intense longing for a goshawk possesses Macdonald. She finds an available fledgling of mixed heritage—one-half Czech, one-quarter Finnish, one-quarter German, and small for its age—and arranges to pick it up from the breeder in Scotland. Not long before the arranged date, she attends a barbeque hosted by her friend and “goshawk guru” Stuart. He’s worried—in his experience, Czech goshawks are the most “bloody-minded.” He offers Macdonald a nice little peregrine falcon. But she insists on the gos.
Importantly, Macdonald doesn’t truly feel as if the goshawk idea is her own. Instead, she finds herself possessed by it. The bird is, in her imagination at least, in control of the situation. She doesn’t choose it—it chooses her. This yet again aligns the ideas Macdonald has about goshawks with her struggles to comprehend and process her grief, another powerful force that she didn’t ask to encounter.
Themes
Around this time, Macdonald finds herself inexorably drawn to re-read her copy of T. H. White’s The Goshawk, a book she first encountered at age eight. Already well into her bird obsession, she was amassing a library of books about the art of falconry. White’s book attracted her because of its title and the beautiful animal pictured on its cover. She hated the book because White describes it as a monster, trains it so badly that it borders on cruelty, and wastes pages on distracting asides about the Holy Roman Empire, Strindberg, and Mussolini. But she always loved the bird, which White called Gos.
Although at the time she couldn’t fully understand her motivations, in writing the memoir, Macdonald illustrates them very clearly for readers. She’s fascinated by White and in some way wants to prove that she’s a better falconer than him, something she seemed to feel even as a child. The Goshawk also provides a model for Macdonald’s own memoir, which has already laid out some of the tangential themes it will explore, like White himself, conservation, and the uses of history.
Themes
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Once, Macdonald says, she met a retired pilot who flew American U2 reconnaissance planes on long missions at the edge of space. To stave off boredom, he would bring books to read in the cockpit, and one of his favorites was T. H. White’s reworking of Arthurian mythology, The Once and Future King. Although White isn’t a very popular author in modern times, this book, which refracts medieval legends through the lens of 19th- and 20th-century history and society, is a masterpiece that has had a notable influence on Western culture. Macdonald remembers being moved by the lonely pilot reading a book written by White, another deeply lonely man.
The Once and Future King haunts H Is for Hawk just as much as The Goshawk does, albeit for different reasons. Here, Macdonald references the novel to suggest the importance of human community obliquely, by describing White’s loneliness and the pilot’s—and, by implication, her own partially unacknowledged loneliness during this period of her life. She also highlights White’s work for the way it uses history as a tool to illuminate the concerns and challenges humanity faces in the present.
Themes
Re-reading The Goshawk as an adult, Macdonald can see why people consider it a masterpiece. It describes White’s attempt to train a “person who was not human” (his goshawk), treating it as a metaphysical battle between man and nature. Macdonald still doesn’t like this part—or the cruel, incorrect training methods White, in his ignorance, used. But reading the book again, she recognizes that some of her reasons for wanting to train a hawk mirror White’s.
Now that she’s an adult, Macdonald can appreciate the way White approached training Gos as an encounter with the wild. She, too, wants to test herself against that wildness, albeit in a different way. For White, it was a pitched battle that he wanted to “win,” while Macdonald yearns to draw from the strength and power of the wild without trying to overpower it.
Themes
