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
The day on which Macdonald will first fly Mabel free is fraught. She’s already restless and nervous before a terrible accident leads to city-wide gridlock that nearly prevents her from making it up to the hill before dusk. The kite Stuart has been using to train his falcon scares Mabel. This isn’t at all how Macdonald expected the day to play out. But she defers to Stuart’s experience. He beats the bushes, flushing out something, and before Macdonald can see what it is, Mabel bates, and Macdonald releases her jesses. Mabel misses the quarry and wheels high into the air. Macdonald feels the growing distance like a “wound,” and she’s overwhelmed with dread that Mabel won’t come back. But, in the end, she answers Macdonald’s whistle and flies back to her hand.
Circumstances on the day of Mabel’s first free flight offer Macdonald pointed reminders about the contingency of life. Nothing is guaranteed, and at any moment, something can go terribly wrong and lead to chaos. Still, it’s a hopeful sign that she presses onward, eventually climbing the hill to meet Stuart rather than allowing the mess of the traffic to give her an excuse. And her instinctive release of Mabel—something she suggests that she was not consciously willing to do—shows that she knows she must let Mabel go eventually, even though she doesn’t want to. And although it hurts her, the invisible lines between woman and bird hold.
Themes
Macdonald imagines White running through the forest and putting out bait for Gos, hoping to lure the bird back. He sees Gos in a tree, runs up, and holds out his glove. Gos tries to fly down to White, but the strong winds—which he does not know how to handle—blow him away. Imagining White standing there, heartbroken, Macdonald considers her own history with death and loss. In childhood, it was something she mainly encountered in books about animals. The spider dies in Charlotte’s Web as do the rabbits of Watership Down and the dog in Old Yeller. White’s loss of Gos made her feel sad, too, although as a child she couldn’t grasp the totality of his grief.
While Macdonald has been very clear about the failures of White’s training methods, in this moment, she imagines an external force intervening to keep Gos from returning to White. It’s a kindness to White, implying as it does that his loss wasn’t entirely within his control. But it also reflects on Macdonald’s feelings as she faces her father’s death through training Mabel. Sometimes, bad things just happen. And death is inevitable—something Macdonald has always known but has only had to grapple with recently.
Themes
Macdonald describes White’s unsuccessful attempts to recapture Gos. He tried baiting the bird with a live, tamed pigeon tied to a string. But the cruelty of that act ultimately overwhelmed him, so he resolved to return to the tree where Gos was perched at night to catch him while he was asleep. After nightfall, he returned later with a ladder and a helper, but the helper made a noise that startled Gos off. For days White pursued Gos, anxious for another chance, fearful that the bird’s tattered creance would get tangled in a tree and lead to the bird’s untimely death.
In Macdonald’s retelling, it’s White’s attempts to lure Gos back that finally bring home for him what it costs to keep a semi-wild animal. It requires hardening one’s own heart to neediness and it requires keeping the animal needy enough so that it stays. And inherent in every act of taming is at least some cruelty, something that the danger the creances pose to Gos brings into sharp focus.
Themes
Macdonald visits her mother. She enjoys the time, but her father’s absence is palpable, and that brings her grief welling back to the surface. It falls away when she flies Mabel in the fields of a nearby farm. She allows herself to get lost in the drama as Mabel takes to the wing and streaks into the forest after some rabbits. Macdonald plunges into the wood after her. When Mabel sees her, she flies instantly to Macdonald’s fist, triumphantly gobbling a rabbit. This, Macdonald thinks, is as exciting as gambling—or more.
This episode clearly frames the unhealthy ways in which Macdonald tries to use Mabel to keep her grief at bay. Instead of sitting with and facing her uncomfortable feelings of loss with her mother, she runs away to the fields. Instead of considering what one individual death—her father’s—means to her, she gets caught up in the grand drama of life and death on a broader scale. She feels better in the moment, but she’s getting herself as stuck as the rabbit in Mabel’s claws.
Themes
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