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
Early the next morning, Macdonald wakes to the sound of a chaffinch purring its distinctive rain call outside her window. She sleepily remembers an experiment made in the 1950s in which a researcher raised chaffinches in soundproofed cages to see if their songs were innate or learned. If the chaffinches missed a crucial window of exposure early in their lives, they never could quite learn their own language.
The scientific experiment Macdonald recalls ostensibly tells readers something about birds, but it also says something important about humans—something that Macdonald misses in the moment. The birds need to be around their own kind, to hear their songs echoed back at them, to understand themselves. Macdonald needs other humans, too.
Themes
Then Macdonald begins the process of manning her goshawk—acclimating it to her presence. With a thick, leather falconers’ glove on her left hand, she lifts the bird from her perch. Instantly, the bird bates or tries to fly away in fear. She doesn’t get far; Macdonald holds the jesses tightly. Gently, she returns the bird back to her fist, sits down in the darkened living room, and removes the bird’s hood. The bird bates again and again, terrified of this strange human monster. To be less threatening, Macdonald sits absolutely still and tries to empty her mind, intent on making herself invisible—a skill she cultivated as a child when she loved to observe the world from hidden spots.
The first process in taming the wild bird is to help her become accustomed to Macdonald’s presence. This subtly suggests that the first step toward overcoming her grief is just getting used to it. And her attempts to make the bird feel more comfortable by becoming invisible suggest just how much effort it will require to establish the bonds necessary for taming. Readers should note the gendered nature of the term for acclimating birds to people—they are “manned” because men have traditionally practiced (and controlled) the sport.
Themes
Amid the ongoing grief and confusion of her father’s death, Macdonald feels relieved to have a purpose, to have her world shrunk to the size of her living room. Once, her father explained that he faced the occasional dangers of his photojournalism work by reducing the world to what he could see through his camera’s viewfinder. Sometimes, he worried that his “survival strategy” also prevented him from being fully involved in his life. Macdonald doesn’t want to consider her father’s loneliness, so she mentally flips through his photographs instead. She thinks about his legacy of fixing important, grave, terrifying, and joyous moments on film. He made the ephemeral—a frost-shrouded December sky, a street cleaner feeding a bird—permanent.
On some level, Macdonald’s ruminations about her father’s coping mechanism suggest an awareness that she’s not actually dealing with her grief so much as trying to shut it out, just as she shuts her door and closes her curtains against the outside world. Considering her father’s worries wouldn’t just mean having to entertain his loneliness—it would also require Macdonald to face her own, because she’s following his example as best she can. Notably, when she runs up against evidence that her plan might not be very good, Macdonald still shies away rather than consider it. She ignores her father’s worries, trying to comfort herself with his legacy of binding ephemeral moments in images.
Themes
Macdonald re-hoods her goshawk and returns the bird to her perch, where she can relax and sleep. Macdonald naps, too, close by on the couch. Later, when Macdonald next unhoods the bird, things have shifted incrementally. The hawk only bates once. And she relaxes enough to forget Macdonald’s presence for a second, curious about her surroundings.
Unlike Macdonald, the bird grows accustomed to her new and initially traumatizing circumstances quickly. In part, this is because she (unlike Macdonald) can’t escape them—she’s literally held in place until she calms down. This hints that, by trying to escape her pain, Macdonald might prolong it.
Themes
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