Helen Macdonald’s ‘H Is for Hawk’

If birds are made of air, as the nature writer Sy Montgomery says, then writing a great bird book is a little like dusting for the fingerprints of a ghost. It calls for poetry and science, conjuring and evidence. In her breathtaking new book, “H Is for Hawk,” winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book Award, Helen Macdonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence — and her own — with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don’t notice their astonishing engineering.

The premise of her memoir is simple: Macdonald loses her bearings after her beloved father’s sudden death. She retreats from the human world. She’s a poet, historian and longtime falconer, and for complicated reasons, she seizes upon a strange yet sublime prescription for what ails her: She will raise and train a young goshawk, a cur of a bird to some, notoriously difficult to tame. Bigger, “bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier,” she says, than other hawks they are sometimes confused with.

Although “animal as emotional healer” is a familiar motif, Macdonald’s journey clears its own path — messy, muddy and raw. Early on, she drives to Scotland from her home in Cambridge to pick up a captive-bred, 10-week-old, Czech-Finnish-German goshawk she’s seen online. At the first glimpse of her bird, Macdonald’s “heart jumps sideways.” And so does the reader’s, for here is a creature worth writing about: “A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.”

Back home, the bird fills “the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.” Fatherless mourner and baby hawk become acquainted. Macdonald grew up obsessed with birds of prey and later trained them, so she knows what to do and has all the necessary equipment: the tiny leather hood, as beautifully made, an observer says, as a Prada shoe; the jesses, or tethering straps; bells; and transmitters. The freezer is a morgue for dead chicks used to train and feed the hawk. Except for using devices that require a power source, Macdonald handles her bird much as a 15th-century falconer would.

The bird becomes Mabel, derived “from amabilis, meaning lovable, or dear,” and she learns to fly to Macdonald’s fist at the sound of a whistle: “There is a scratch of talons on wood, a flowering of feathers, one deep downstroke, the brief, heavy swing of talons brought up and into play and the dull thud as she hits my glove.”

Helen Macdonald Credit Marzena Pogorzaly

There are tearful misunderstandings and glorious steps forward. But Macdonald’s progress is not as steady as her hawk’s. Training proceeds, but not without an existential hitch. “While the steps were familiar,” Macdonald writes, “the person taking them was not. I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief and numb to the hurts of human life.”

Looking back at her mad mourning, she realizes a painful transformation is taking place: “What the mind does after losing one’s father isn’t just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.”

Macdonald feels safe in the dark house, barricaded from the outside world, but knows she must go out for Mabel’s sake — to the woods, where the goshawk’s “long, barred tail feathers and short, broad wings” are perfectly suited for the speed and hairpin-turning ability necessary for aerial slalom in dense forest.

We get to know Mabel as her trainer does. Macdonald stays so close, and the house is so quiet when they are together that she can hear the bird blinking. The hawk’s breath is like “pepper and musk and burned stone.” Her preening sounds like a deck of cards being shuffled. Every mood can be read: Feathers held in tight is fear; when Mabel fluffs herself and shakes her feathers into place, she is content. We come to love the bird’s “shaggy trousers and waggy tail,” her “café au lait front streaked thickly with cocoa-colored teardrops,” and even her formidable weapons — the “curved black beak” and the black talons.

Soon enough, Macdonald doesn’t even consciously inventory the body language of her bird; instead she seems to just feel what Mabel feels. On a hunch, Macdonald even discovers a little bit of whimsy in this ultra-serious predator. She rolls up paper into a ball and hands it to Mabel. The hawk plays with it like a toy, eyes narrowed in “bird laughter.”

That’s not our image of hawks at all. And it’s an important point to Macdonald, who worries, rightly, that generations of preconceived notions rob us of truly seeing some creatures as they really are. “Wild things are made from human histories,” she writes.

This handler is determined to see her own hawk for who she really is, and, of course, she comes to see herself more clearly too. The two go further and further afield, and through scrapes, wounds and mishaps, Macdonald sheds something, changes, becomes something new — but not what she might have intended. She thinks she’s becoming a hawk herself. Her identity has shifted enough so that when she slips out of her hawking clothes and into street clothes for social events, she feels she’s in disguise.

Perhaps not so surprising for a woman who calls herself a “watcher,” who grew up as an “invisible girl,” who, like her father, a news photographer, felt more comfortable observing others than being seen. Her personal history, the history of falconry and historical and personal notions of identity and belonging surface as she aches for her lost father. She experiences vertigo and depression. She keeps denting her father’s car, breaking dishes. Falconry with Mabel feels like an addiction, as dangerous as “if I’d taken a needle and shot myself with heroin.”

And yet the hawk also helps her to remember what happiness feels like. “There was nothing that was such a salve to my grieving heart as the hawk returning,” she writes. She and the hawk are “parts of each other,” incomplete when separated. Macdonald notes: “I remember thinking of the passage in ‘The Sword in the Stone’ where a falconer took a goshawk back onto his own fist, ‘reassuming him like a lame man putting on his accustomed wooden leg, after it had been lost.’ ”

Caring for Mabel revives Macdonald’s interest in the author of the book, T. H. White. His memoir “The Goshawk” haunts her; she has a fascination, often reluctant and dark, with the writer and his inept, troubled and even cruel relationship with a goshawk he tried to tame.

There is a funny mingling of tame and wild in hawks. They can be bred and raised by humans, Macdonald points out, but they are not domesticated. I’ve brought a gloved fist underneath a trained hawk who was “mantling” a dead pigeon (covering it with his wings), and hissing at me with eyes blazing. It shocked me that he left the kill to hop on my novice’s hand. And I’ve seen injured wild hawks being treated in veterinary clinics where the caregiver plunges a gloved hand into the cage and then pulls it out with a hawk on board. Imagine trying this with an injured tiger.

But those wild hawks are every bit as predatory as any big cat. When Mabel is deliberately dropped to a lower weight, her desire to kill, something falconers call yarak, ratchets up. The hunting is brutal. And Macdonald and Mabel are co-­conspirators. They look for prey together, work in tandem on the release, and even share the killing and its spoils. Mabel brings down pheasants and rabbits, and she merrily begins eating them before they’re dead. Macdonald steps in then, breaking the necks of Mabel’s catches to hasten the end. As the hawk becomes tamer, she says, she herself grows wilder. Maybe she’s gone too far on her journey. “Hands are for other human hands to hold,” she writes. “They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks.”

Her own hands, by now, are records, written in “thin white lines,” of her months with Mabel, months of grief and healing. “One is from her talons when she’d been fractious with hunger; it feels like a warning made flesh. Another is a blackthorn rip from the time I’d pushed through a hedge to find the hawk I’d thought I’d lost. And there were other scars, too, but they were not visible. They were the ones she’d helped mend, not make.”

In some traditions, hawks are considered spirit messengers to a world beyond, and Macdonald comes to understand that part of her bond with Mabel was her desire “to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home.” But as Mabel matures into a confident hunter, she brings Macdonald a different kind of discovery: that grace resides in the most unlikely places — and that moving forward means leaving some things behind.