Anthology Part 1 - H is for Hawk

Grief, expectation and wildness

From H is for Hawk

By Helen Macdonald

When Macdonald’s father died suddenly of a heart attack, Macdonald was devastated. An experienced falconer, she adopted a goshawk to distract her from her grief. In this extract Macdonald meets her hawk for the first time.

[1] ‘We’ll check the ring numbers against the Article 10s,' he explained, pulling a sheaf of
[2] yellow paper from his rucksack and unfolding two of the official forms that accompany
[3] captive-bred rare birds throughout their lives. 'Don’t want you going home with the
[4] wrong bird.'

[5] We noted the numbers. We stared down at the boxes, at their parcel-tape handles, their
[6] doors of thin plywood and hinges of carefully tied string. Then he knelt on the concrete,
[7] untied a hinge on the smaller box and squinted into its dark interior. A sudden thump of
[8] feathered shoulders and the box shook as if someone had punched it, hard, from within.
[9] ‘She’s got her hood off,’ he said, and frowned. That light, leather hood was to keep the
[10] hawk from fearful sights. Like us.

[11] Another hinge untied. Concentration. Infinite caution. Daylight irrigating the box.
[12] Scratching talons, another thump. And another. Thump. The air turned syrupy, slow,
[13] flecked with dust. The last few seconds before a battle. And with the last bow pulled
[14] free, he reached inside, and amidst a whirring, chaotic clatter of wings and feet and
[15] talons and a high-pitched twittering and it’s all happening at once, the man pulls an
[16] enormous, enormous hawk out of the box and in a strange coincidence of world and
[17] deed a great flood of sunlight drenches us and everything is brilliance and fury. The
[18] hawk’s wings, barred and beating, the sharp fingers of her dark-tipped primaries cutting
[19] the air, her feathers raised like the scattered quills of a fretful porpentine1. Two
[20] enormous eyes. My heart jumps sideways. She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen
[21] angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary2. Something bright and
[22] distant, like gold falling through water. A broken marionette3 of wings, legs and light-
[23] splashed feathers. She is wearing jesses4, and the man holds them. For one awful, long
[24] moment she is hanging head-downward, wings open, like a turkey in a butcher’s shop,
[25] only her head is turned right-way-up and she is seeing more than she has ever seen
[26] before in her whole short life. Her world was an aviary no larger than a living room. Then
[27] it was a box. But now it is this; and she can see everything: the point-source glitter on
[28] the waves, a diving cormorant a hundred yards out; pigment flakes under wax on the
[29] lines of parked cars; far hills and the heather on them and miles and miles of sky where
[30] the sun spreads on dust and water and illegible things moving in it that are white scraps
[31] of gulls. Everything startling and new-stamped on her entirely astonished brain.

[32] Through all this the man was perfectly calm. He gathered up the hawk in one practised
[33] movement, folding her wings, anchoring her broad feathered back against his chest,
[34] gripping her scaled yellow legs in one hand. ‘Let’s get that hood back on,’ he said tautly.
[35] There was concern in his face. It was born of care. This hawk had been hatched in an
[36] incubator, had broken from a frail bluish eggshell into a humid perspex box, and for the
[37] first few days of her life this man had fed her with scraps of meat held in a pair of
[38] tweezers, waiting patiently for the lumpen, fluffy chick to notice the food and eat, her
[39] new neck wobbling with the effort of keeping her head in the air. All at once I loved this
[40] man, and fiercely. I grabbed the hood from the box and turned to the hawk. Her beak
[41] was open, her hackles raised; her wild eyes were the colour of sun on white paper, and
[42] they stared because the whole world had fallen into them at once. One, two, three. I
[43] tucked the hood over her head. There was a brief intimation of a thin, angular skull
[44] under her feathers, of an alien brain fizzing and fusing with terror, then I drew the
[45] braces closed. We checked the ring numbers against the form.

[46] It was the wrong bird. This was the younger one. The smaller one. This was not my
[47] hawk.

[48] Oh.

[49] So we put her back and opened the other box, which was meant to hold the larger, older
[50] bird. And dear God, it did. Everything about this second hawk was different. She came
[51] out like a Victorian melodrama: a sort of madwoman in the attack. She was smokier and
[52] darker and much, much bigger, and instead of twittering, she wailed; great, awful gouts
[53] of sound like a thing in pain, and the sound was unbearable. This is my hawk, I was
[54] telling myself and it was all I could do to breathe. She too was bareheaded, and I
[55] grabbed the hood from the box as before. But as I brought it up to her face I looked into
[56] her eyes and saw something blank and crazy in her stare. Some madness from a distant
[57] country. I didn’t recognise her. This isn’t my hawk. The hood was on, the ring numbers
[58] checked, the bird back in the box, the yellow form folded, the money exchanged, and all
[59] I could think was, But this isn’t my hawk. Slow panic. I knew what I had to say, and it
[60] was a monstrous breach of etiquette. ‘This is really awkward,’ I began. ‘But I really liked
[61] the first one. Do you think there’s any chance I could take that one instead . . .?’ I tailed
[62] off. His eyebrows were raised. I started again, saying stupider things: ‘I’m sure the other
[63] falconer would like the larger bird? She’s more beautiful than the first one, isn’t she? I
[64] know this is out of order, but I … Could I? Would it be all right, do you think?’ And on
[65] and on, a desperate, crazy barrage of incoherent appeals.

[66] I’m sure nothing I said persuaded him more than the look on my face as I said it. A tall,
[67] white-faced woman with wind-wrecked hair and exhausted eyes was pleading with him
[68] on a quayside, hands held out as if she were in a seaside production of Medea. Looking
[69] at me he must have sensed that my stuttered request wasn’t a simple one. That there
[70] was something behind it that was very important. There was a moment of total silence.

Notes

1 porpentine: a type of porcupine animal
2 bestiary: a (medieval) descriptive passage on various kinds of animals
3 marionette: a puppet worked by strings
4 jesses: a short leather strap fastened to the leg
Falconer: someone who trains and handles birds of prey.
Etiquette: accepted rules of polite behaviour.
Medea: a figure from Greek tragedy.

Reading the text

Its headnote gives three secure facts: Macdonald's father has died suddenly, she is devastated, and she is an experienced falconer meeting the goshawk she intends to take home. Those facts matter because this is not a neutral first sighting. She arrives with knowledge, grief and a powerful expectation that one of the boxed birds will become her hawk.

The first useful distinction is between topic and perspective.

A perspective is not a secret message to guess. It is a defensible account of what the writer seems to think, feel or come to understand. Here, several readings can coexist:

• the first hawk produces awe because its force exceeds Macdonald's expectations;
• Macdonald's expertise lets her notice temperament and physical detail rapidly;
• her grief-heightened need may encourage her to project meaning and ownership onto a bird she has just met;
• the hawk remains a living creature with fear and agency, not merely a mirror for a human emotion.

The boundary matters. Macdonald is grieving is a biographical fact supplied by the headnote. This particular image expresses grief is an inference and needs evidence from wording, position or pattern. Calibrate that move with suggests, may reveal or can be read as when the text permits more than one explanation.

Anticipation, revelation and reversal

The extract gains its force from arrangement. Instead of beginning with a portrait of a hawk, Macdonald makes the reader wait through paperwork, boxes, knots and cautious handling. That delay gives the first release the force of a revelation; the later paperwork check then turns revelation into reversal.

Use this map to navigate the complete text above.

Notice the precision of the order. The first bird is the smaller, younger one and creates the initial wonder, but the forms say she is wrong. The second bird is the larger, older one Macdonald expected to receive, but Macdonald cannot accept her as my hawk. The extract ends after Macdonald asks for the first bird and before the breeder answers.

This structure prevents a flat reading such as she sees a hawk and likes it. Her perspective moves through at least five states:

controlled expectation -> concentrated suspense -> astonished awe -> disappointment and mismatch -> exposed personal need

The most useful structural verbs describe that movement: delays, erupts, interrupts, reverses, doubles, withholds. Each verb should lead to a consequence. For example, withholds is unfinished until you explain that the final silence leaves the request unresolved and foregrounds how much seems to depend on it.

Syntax, pace and attention

Macdonald does not use one sentence style to mean one thing. The power comes from change.

Before the first hawk appears, the isolated fragments in line 11 remove ordinary connective grammar. Each perception occupies its own beat, so opening a hinge seems painstaking and risky. Soon afterwards, the syntax surges into the extended sentence across lines 13-17. Repeated coordination, accumulated body parts and sound, and a temporary switch into present-tense action make ordered recollection feel overwhelmed by simultaneous experience. The phrase it's all happening at once names the sensation that the sentence itself performs.

Choosing evidence for an exact focus

Suppose the focus is: How does Macdonald make the first hawk's emergence feel overwhelming? Three references are plausible:

1. enormous, enormous intensifies scale, but alone it says little about the movement into revelation.
2. brilliance and fury compresses radiance and violence into one balanced phrase, making wonder inseparable from danger.
3. The change from Concentration. Infinite caution. to the long coordinated release across lines 13-17 shows the strongest structural decision: controlled delay gives way to sensory and grammatical overflow.

For a language-and-structure response, the third route is the most productive starting point because it explains a relationship between moments. The second phrase can then sharpen the account of what the release contains. The first is still valid evidence, but repeating enormous without analysing scale, expectation or position would be thin.

Compare these two explanations:

• The writer uses short sentences for impact.
• The pre-release fragments isolate each mental instruction, stretching the final seconds of caution; when the syntax expands into coordinated present-tense action, the earlier control is displaced by a revelation too fast and crowded for orderly thought.

The revision succeeds because it answers four questions: what changes, where, how, and why here? It also connects the local syntax to the wider movement from anticipation to revelation.

A concise analytical paragraph could read:

Macdonald makes the first emergence feel too sudden for orderly thought. Before the release, Concentration. Infinite caution. isolates each state of attention and delays the final hinge. The sentence then expands through accumulated action and a present-tense rush, so the prose seems to lose the measured control established by the paperwork and knots. This contrast makes the hawk's wild energy feel not simply large but resistant to the human procedure meant to contain it.