H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Author:Helen Macdonald
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Birdwatching Guides, Animals, Nature, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Birds
ISBN: 9781448130726
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-07-30T23:00:00+00:00

16

Rain

WHITE IS MAKING a trap. It is not easy. There is a testing practicality to this that pleases him. He has stripped an ash-wand of bark and bent it into a U. He’s given it leather hinges, covered it with two yards of knotted strawberry netting, and made it into a bow-net like the ones the old falcon-trappers used. He’s going to bait it with a tethered blackbird and catch one of the hawks in Three Parks Wood. Or try to. He’d first seen them a month ago, and they’d never quite left his mind. They were nothing like Gos; they were small, fast, sharp-winged. Aerobatic. They’d raced round a tree wing-tip to wing-tip in a perfect vertical bank, exactly like aircraft round the pylons at the Hatfield air race. An aviator’s dream; a dream of the future. He reaches to pick up the reel of line that will pull the net over the hawk he will draw to earth. And he remembers an old nightmare. Fleeing in terror from a gang of thugs, he’d leapt into an aeroplane and piloted it up towards safety. There was danger in the dream, a net of telegraph wires strung above that blocked his ascent to freedom. He is not sure what the hawks are. He knows they are not kestrels. It would be too much to hope for peregrines. Perhaps they are sparrowhawks.

White’s hawks in the wood weren’t sparrowhawks. They were hobbies: tiny dark-hooded migratory falcons with rust-red trousers and thin white brows. Fantastically rare in the 1930s, they are much commoner today. They catch small birds and insects in mid-air: it would have been impossible to trap one with a blackbird tethered to the ground. But White thought they were sparrowhawks, and out in the wood he built a hide of poles and branches and pegged the trap fifteen feet away, strewing it with dust and leaves to hide it. He was neglecting Gos, and he knew it. The sparrowhawks were a new craze, his ‘insensate El Dorado’.1 He told himself he was catching one for Peter Low, a boy he’d taught who’d lost a pet sparrowhawk. He told himself he was catching them because training Gos was too easy, and he had to test himself against something harder.

I think now that White’s quest for the hawks was his final test of Gos: he was behaving like a fearful man who has finally won someone’s love and, unsure whether that love can be trusted, decides it is safer to obsess about someone else. But when I was small his actions were incomprehensible. ‘WHY?’ I’d howled. ‘Why did he abandon his goshawk? I would never have done that!’ My mother was wiping the bathroom mirror. I could see her face in it, and behind it my own, pale and outraged. It was my first reading of the book. I’d reached the bit about the sparrowhawks and I was too upset to read any more. I’d jumped from my bed and gone looking for reassurance.

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