Shannon’s Reviews > H is for Hawk > Status Update

I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it. Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all.

To her right is a male martial eagle, an antelope-killing black and white monster with piercing white eyes. It is enormous, bigger than most of the dogs walking past the mesh fence in front of the marquee, and it watches them go by with its black chrysanthemum-petalled crest raised in idle speculation of murder.

After twenty minutes Mabel raises a foot. It looks ridiculous. She is not relaxed enough to fluff out her feathers; she still resembles a wet and particoloured seal. But she makes this small concession to calmness, and she stands there like a man driving with one hand resting on the gearstick.

Flying the hawk free, unencumbered by the creance, nothing stopping her headlong flight out and away but the lines that run between us; palpable lines, not physical ones: lines of habit, of hunger, of partnership, of familiarity....Flying a hawk free is always scary. It is where you test those lines. And it's not a thing that's easy to do when you've lost trust in the world, and your heart is turned to dust.

I looked at Mabel. Her head drooped forward. She looked indescribably mournful in her hood. I stroked her craggy, snake-scale toes. Snake-scale bird toes are always one of the things I miss from home. We tell Pico he has dinosaur feet.

'Need to excel in order to be loved,' White had written in his dream diary. But there is an unspoken coda to that sentence. What happens if you excel at something and discover you are still unloved?...Success is a pressure. He cannot quite bear it. It boils and bubbles. And without knowing it, quietly and cruelly, he begins to sabotage his success, because success cannot be borne. It is so very easily done.

I look at Mabel. She looks at me. So much of what she means is made of people. For thousands of years hawks like her have been caught and trapped and brought into people's houses. But unlike other animals that have lived in such close proximity to man, they have never been domesticated. It's made them a powerful symbol of wildness...and a symbol, too, of things that need to be mastered and tamed.

Oh god, of course all that talk about the moodiness and insanity of goshawks is rooted in sexist narratives about the need to tame and control women. It makes so much sense.

In those long hours of psychoanalysis ...White had learned that going back in time was a way of fixing things; uncovering past traumas, revisiting them and defusing their power....Now he was unconsciously re-enacting his childhood – with the hawk standing in for him as a boy, and the grown-up White playing the role of an enlightened teacher who could not, would not, must not beat or hurt the child in his care.

In the second photograph the boy [T. H. White as a toddler] runs towards the camera over parched earth. He is running as fast as he can...and the expression on his face, half-terror, half-delight, is something I've never seen on any other child. It is triumph that he has ridden the donkey, but relief that it is over. It is a face in desperate need of safety, with certain knowledge that there is none.