Autumn

Autumn is not merely a date on the calendar in these passages: it arrives through rain, dusk, and a changed quality of attention. Its first clear signal comes during an evening walk with Mabel the goshawk, when the weather and fading light make the landscape feel newly charged. The season also supplies a counterpoint to the book’s other temporal pressures: grief makes the world seem bare, while watching and flying a hawk can make it feel vivid and time itself strangely elastic.

The Season Arrives at Dusk

On Midsummer Common, Helen Macdonald sits with Mabel beside the river as a man cleans and polishes a racing boat on the opposite bank. The two workers attend to separate tasks: he tends the boat, while Macdonald continues the work of taming the hawk. Mabel, meanwhile, is more interested in mallards on the water. This scene places training among ordinary evening activities, observed from a quiet patch of the common rather than set apart from daily life.

As Macdonald and Mabel walk home, daylight thickens into dusk and rain begins. The smell of autumn makes Macdonald shiver with pleasure, a physical response that registers the season before it becomes a subject of reflection. The wet, darkening evening also changes the conditions of the training. Joggers gather on the paths in increasing numbers, but Macdonald and Mabel remain still in rough grass, watching them pass unnoticed. The scene makes concealment practical: the hawk and handler can observe the moving crowd without attracting its attention.

The training then tests whether Mabel will jump to the fist outside the familiar setting of the house. Macdonald places her on a post beside a barrier around a young lime tree. In rain, with wind blowing the wrong way and runners passing nearby, Mabel makes the short, food-rewarded jump three times. The season’s weather is therefore more than atmosphere: it is part of the changing environment in which trust and response are tested. The small success closes the walk on a note of exhilaration, with the rain still falling around them.

Seasonal Light and Grief

A separate passage returns to the problem of how the world looks after Macdonald’s father has died. On the train home from a memorial meeting, sunlight on the window obscures the fields with a mesh of silver. The light recalls spider silk that Macdonald had walked across without seeing. From that image comes a tentative possibility: the world’s apparent bareness and wrongness may not be the whole truth; beauty and rightness could remain present, even when they cannot be perceived.

The recollection does not erase bereavement. Macdonald feels a simple sadness and misses her father, but the encounter with light and remembered spider silk marks a change in the surrounding emotional sequence. The anger that had persisted for months has gone, and later that evening she tells Stuart that she is not coping well and thinks she is depressed. The passage gives no basis for treating the sunlight as a cure. Instead, a moment of perception makes speech possible: grief remains, but it is no longer entirely sealed behind silence.

Autumn, the Hunt, and the Feeling of Time

Later, Macdonald takes Mabel to a nearby farm, entering the fields quietly after checking that no workers or dog-walkers are present. At the edge of the wood she sees three rabbits feeding and a cock pheasant passing nearby. Grief had first driven her toward hawking, but in this scene she describes grief as gone and her attention as concentrated on the immediate landscape. The seasonal setting is not named directly here; its relevance lies in how the passage continues the movement from an evening world of rain and watching toward a more demanding encounter with wildness.

When Mabel leaves the fist, the action unfolds in a sequence Macdonald experiences as sharply divided moments. The quarry runs toward the wood, and the hawk disappears beneath a low branch. After a silence, bells and movement lead Macdonald through the brush. Mabel eventually runs out from thorn bushes by a large warren and returns to the fist, her toes marked with chalk mud. The account emphasizes the intensity of attention and the close, physical circumstances of the return without claiming more about the hunt’s outcome than the passage establishes.

Looking back on the flight, Macdonald describes a radical change in her sense of time and reality. The world had seemed to dissolve, even as every detail became tangible; seconds stretched, and an outing of less than an hour felt like years. She rejects the idea that hawking is simply an especially intense form of birdwatching. Its distinctive force, as she understands it, comes from preparing carefully and then relinquishing control over what happens next. Autumn’s fading light and rain first sharpen the act of watching; the later flight carries that heightened attention into uncertainty. Together, the passages make season and time felt conditions of experience: weather alters what can be seen, while the hawk’s departure can make a brief interval seem almost immeasurable.