Winter

Winter in the book is at once a season of practical limits and a frame through which grief and memory return. Cold, short days, and winter fields alter how the narrator hawks with Mabel the goshawk; December also sharpens the conflict between a possible career elsewhere and a life organized around the hawk. Across present-day scenes and remembered childhood, winter repeatedly brings loss close without making it orderly or easily understood.

A season that narrows the future

An offered university position in Berlin gives winter a particular force. The narrator sends a letter declining the job, outwardly explaining the decision by saying that her father has died and that she needs to remain where she is. Yet those reasons do not fully account for the refusal: the thought of going to Berlin in December is appalling because there is a hawk to fly. The decision sets competing futures against each other. A conventional career and long-term plans recede; the immediate work of training Mabel the goshawk takes precedence. Winter is not simply the setting for that choice. Its approaching date makes the imagined departure feel incompatible with the close, daily demands of hawking.

That narrowed horizon also resonates with the narrator’s inability, at this point, to imagine a future in ordinary terms. The account links that uncertainty to the hawk, which cannot imagine the future either. This comparison does not present the choice as a settled philosophy or a simple rejection of ambition. Instead, it shows how bereavement and the present task of flying Mabel the goshawk have changed what seems possible. Winter becomes a point on the calendar against which the narrator measures a life that has contracted to immediate responsibilities.

Winter, childhood, and anticipated loss

A return to her mother’s house brings the narrator into contact with childhood books about animals. Their stories had joined adventure and wildness to repeated deaths: animals were killed, poisoned, or lost, and the shrinking number of pages made those endings feel increasingly inevitable. Remembering them now, the narrator recalls that as a child she had already expected Gos to be lost after he snapped his leash in wind and rain. That expectation did not make the loss less dreadful; it gave it the shape of an ending she had learned to anticipate from books.

The winter setting also frames a change in understanding. As a child, the narrator could respond to the loss of Gos with resignation, but she had not yet trained a hawk or experienced loss in the same way. After her father’s death, she recognizes something of the scale of grief that she had previously encountered only through T. H. White’s account of Gos. The remembered animal stories and the earlier hawk loss therefore do not remain sealed in childhood: they acquire a different weight when bereavement gives the narrator a new basis for understanding them.

Winter also enters the narrative through a book about a man watching peregrines in the Essex countryside in the late 1960s. Revisiting it, the narrator sees its birds not as uncomplicated emblems of nature but as figures bound up with disappearance and death. That response recalls the childhood world in which wildlife seemed threatened on every side. In this strand, winter belongs to the book’s remembered landscape of endangered birds, while the act of rereading brings that landscape into the narrator’s present grief. The season thus links distinct times without making their losses identical.

Memorial and weather

At her father’s memorial, winter is registered through the journey and the scene of arrival: the narrator travels by train carrying her speech, then enters a church crowded with family members and other speakers. Her worry about whether she is dressed properly gives way to recognition of the family gathered around her. The passage makes the memorial both public and intimate. Winter’s presence does not explain the grief; it accompanies a moment in which the narrator must speak before others while holding on to her mother and brother.

Ten days later, the weather supplies a different kind of pressure. A storm surge threatens the East Anglian coast, and the narrator spends the night worrying about the caravans there. The surge does not arrive: by morning the danger has held back. After lunch she takes Mabel the goshawk up the hill. The contrast between the threatened inundation and the clear morning that follows is a concrete change in conditions, not a resolution of bereavement. On the walk, Mabel the goshawk pursues a rabbit, moves among trees, and returns to the narrator’s offered fist. The episode places ordinary hawking after a night of apprehension, allowing the day’s activity to resume without claiming that worry or grief has disappeared.

Cold, daylight, and the late-winter landscape

In a later cold spell, winter directly shapes the terms of flight and observation. The days have only six hours of daylight, and ice underfoot affects Mabel the goshawk: the sound of the narrator’s steps prompts her to clench her toes. The narrator has been away from the hill for a week and returns after four days interviewing students for her old college. During that interval, Mabel the goshawk has eaten quail rather than chicks and is restless to hunt. These circumstances matter to the outing: the season, the hawk’s recent food, and the enforced pause all help explain the intensity with which she approaches the day.

Late winter brings the narrator back to her mother’s house, a place made difficult by her father’s absence even as repeated visits become easier. The surrounding fields are open and closely cropped, and the narrator can hawk across them to a broad hedge that marks the limit of familiar ground. She removes the leash, releases Mabel the goshawk into the wind, and follows as she settles in an ash before they begin hunting for rabbits in broken woodland. The sequence gives winter a distinct practical geography: field, boundary, trees, and the less familiar land beyond. It also sets the work of hawking alongside an altered idea of home. The narrator can move across the landscape with Mabel the goshawk, but the familiar place remains changed by bereavement.

Across these episodes, winter does not act as a single symbol with a fixed meaning. It marks a decision about work and place, recalls the child’s expectation of animal deaths, and determines the conditions under which the narrator and Mabel the goshawk can hunt. Its short days and exposed landscapes provide concrete measures of time, while its repeated returns let the narrative move between childhood memory, mourning, and present activity. The season’s significance lies in that recurrence: the world continues to offer weather, fields, and flights, even as familiar homes and futures have become less secure.