Helen

Helen, the memoir’s narrator and a falconer, turns to goshawk training after her father’s death, but Mabel becomes far more than a focus for attention or a practical training project. The work exposes how grief, self-doubt, and the wish to inhabit another creature can shape a human relationship with a wild animal. As Helen struggles to understand Mabel without reducing her to a symbol, she also revises her earlier preferences and confronts the class and gender hierarchies built into the history of falconry.

Formation as a Falconer

As a child, Helen was struck by the silent, wayward goshawks she saw, yet she did not initially want to fly one. They seemed unnerving and difficult, while falcons appealed to her for their speed, aerial confidence, and apparent ease in flight. The contrast was not simply a matter of personal taste. Helen later recognizes that falconry’s praise of falcons was shaped by access to land: flying them well required large open spaces, such as grouse moors and extensive farmland, that were easier for wealthy or well-connected people to obtain. Goshawks could hunt in more confined settings, while the solitary handlers of goshawks and sparrowhawks had often been treated with contempt in falconry writing.

That history had also made the birds themselves seem disreputable. Helen recalls accounts that characterize goshawks as disagreeable, violent, or difficult, and a falconer’s casual confidence that one knew what to expect from a goshawk. Such judgments initially reinforced her reluctance. Later, however, she sees that descriptions of the birds and their handlers belong to a hierarchy: the supposedly noble falcon and its privileged human counterpart were elevated over the supposedly unruly goshawk and the solitary austringer. Her training of Mabel makes those inherited categories newly consequential rather than merely historical.

Grief and the Work of Training

Helen’s father had lent her a spotting scope for birdwatching, and she had not returned it. On the train with her mother and brother, travelling to look for his car after his death, she realizes at Queenstown Road station that she will never see him again. She calls out for him, and her family hold one another as they grieve. The remembered scene gives her falconry a painful context: the birdwatching equipment and the shared journey are bound to a relationship that cannot be resumed or repaired.

With Mabel, Helen seeks knowledge that can be measured and acted upon. She studies the hawk’s condition and identifies a flying weight of two pounds and one and a half ounces, at which Mabel’s earlier agitation gives way to calm attention. This judgment is not merely a number: Helen compares it with older falconers’ reliance on experienced observation of a bird’s muscles, breastbone, and behaviour. She understands that scales offer a rougher measure than intimate familiarity, yet uses them because they make a difficult, consequential assessment more manageable.

The training does not become predictable simply because Helen gathers data. She varies Mabel’s food, weight, timing, and the conditions of her flights, while keeping a journal of weather, measurements, and responses. The entries begin to register Helen’s own distress as well as the hawk’s performance. A missed or successful return can feel like a judgment on Helen herself; she even connects Mabel’s apparent avoidance with the departure of a man she had fallen for after her father died. The training problem becomes a painful loop of adjustment and self-accusation, in which uncertainty about the bird expands into a belief that something is wrong with her.

Gender, History, and the Hawk’s Independence

A man suggests that Helen and Mabel get along because they are both female. Helen rejects the idea that their different species share an automatic bond of sisterhood. Her irritation prompts her to revisit falconry books and examine how male writers described female goshawks. Several present the birds as moody, contrary, and troublesome, making the handler’s frustration sound like a defect in the hawk. Helen recognizes the gendered pattern in which a female animal’s resistance is treated as inexplicable rather than considered in relation to the handler’s conduct.

Earlier writing complicates that tradition. Helen finds seventeenth-century descriptions of goshawks as shy and fearful but also sociable and affectionate when treated with kindness. Edmund Bert presents himself as his hawk’s friend and playfellow, and the bird’s well-being as part of the handler’s responsibility. Helen does not treat these accounts as proof that historical relations were uncomplicated; she finds in them a model of attention that accepts the hawk as self-willed and different, rather than explaining every difficult response as bad temper. The contrast changes how she reads both Mabel and the literature she had once accepted.

Her thinking about class develops alongside this reconsideration. While staying in Maine, Helen encounters a hunting culture in which common-law access to land allows hunting across the state, unlike the exclusive estates and elite shooting grounds associated with Britain. She contrasts that setting with the social barriers that helped make falconry’s ideal falconer a privileged figure. These comparisons show that the language used to rank birds and handlers is connected to material conditions: who can reach land, what kind of hunting is available, and whose practices are treated as respectable.

Identification, Illness, and Return

Helen’s identification with Mabel becomes more than an imaginative exercise. Reading an account by the anthropologist Rane Willerslev of Yukaghir hunters who temporarily take on an animal’s perspective, she recognizes an unsettling parallel with her own experience. She has adopted traits associated with goshawks in books—nervousness, withdrawal, and sudden fear or anger—and has imagined the world from Mabel’s alien point of view. What once seemed like the instructive transformation of a child in The Sword in the Stone now appears dangerous to her; the identification has blurred her sense of herself rather than simply deepened her understanding of the bird.

As her distress worsens, Helen seeks medical help. She tells a doctor that her father has died and explains that she has also lost her job, income, and home. After listening and discussing her situation, he offers help, and she agrees to try antidepressants. She worries that medication might alter her thinking or make Mabel less likely to fly to her, but takes it and continues flying the hawk. The episode marks a shift from treating distress as another private problem to be solved through greater effort to accepting medical support, while showing that her fear for the working relationship with Mabel remains part of her recovery.

Later, Helen moves back to the city and unpacks in a small rented house with a garden. The The Goshawk (book) appears among the boxes; she finds that, as she has grown happier, T. H. White’s world has receded from her own. Through the window she watches Mabel bathe and preen, and reads her half-closed eye and feather movements as signs of contentment, while acknowledging that she cannot know the hawk’s thoughts. That limit matters: Helen’s eventual stance is not an assertion that she has become Mabel or can fully interpret her. It is a more attentive relationship that leaves the bird alive and distinct beyond the meanings Helen once placed upon her.