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
As winter deepens, the antidepressants begin to take effect. They make Macdonald groggy, but she also starts to appreciate the world around her again. She reconnects with other humans. But she also takes risks, flying Mabel at higher weights. She lets the bird fly longer distances. Mabel begins to hunt more like a wild hawk. Macdonald senses the strain, but the invisible lines connecting them haven’t broken—yet.
Readers should remember that a tractable bird is a hungry bird; to keep Mabel truly in line requires Macdonald to knowingly keep her at least a little bit wanting. Mabel will always be wild, keeping her will always require Macdonald to assert her will over nature. But, responding to that inherent cruelty, Macdonald begins to take risks that show how much she loves and respects the bird by allowing her to become more and more wild.
Themes
One day, things get out of hand. Mabel flies off and refuses to come back to Macdonald’s fist. Macdonald chases her onto someone’s private property, and by accident, she flushes a flock of pheasants which the landowner has taken obvious pains to attract, likely for his or her own hunting. Mabel catches a pheasant after which she returns to Macdonald. They have become poachers. And although Macdonald tells herself that their act of poaching was accidental, it spooks her.
In choosing to honor Mabel’s wildness to ever greater degrees, Macdonald begins to run more risks than losing Mabel. The bird’s wildness makes Macdonald reckless, but it isn’t until the potential consequences become dire—poaching is a crime—that she starts to notice. Earlier she realized how much she needed human community; now she’s starting to see the costs of indulging her own wildness.
Themes
But despite these moments, Macdonald is feeling better. She’s almost equally at home in the city and high on the hill, now. The hill has become a home to her. After months of flying Mabel there, she—and the bird—have drawn their own internal maps of its magical places, just like she did in her neighborhood has a child.
However, despite the risks, Macdonald’s relationship with Mabel has brought her closer to the wild than she’s has been since she was a child. It’s clear that she needed to be connected to nature, and now she’s reaching a balancing point.
Themes
