Helen and Mabel

Helen and Mabel’s relationship is formed through the daily practice of training, but it becomes far more than a trainer’s command and a hawk’s response. By learning Mabel’s moods, accepting her independence, and relying on her return, Helen finds a way to attend to grief; Mabel, meanwhile, repeatedly exceeds the narrow image of the difficult, unfeeling goshawk that Helen had inherited from falconry books. Their connection is mutual in its effects, though never equal or fully under Helen’s control.

An inherited image of the goshawk

Before training Mabel, Helen had loved falcons and avoided goshawks. The hawks she remembered from childhood seemed unsettling and difficult, while falcons appeared graceful, sociable, and easier to admire. She later understood that this contrast was shaped partly by class. A falcon flown properly required large open spaces, such as grouse moors and extensive farmland, access more readily available to wealthy or well-connected falconers. Goshawks, which pursue prey in a quick dash from the fist at close range, could be flown in more kinds of places. The different reputations of the birds therefore reflected not only their behaviour but also the unequal social worlds in which they were flown.

The trainer of goshawks, traditionally called an austringer, had also been caricatured as solitary and uncouth. In later falconry writing, the goshawk herself was commonly represented as difficult, ill-tempered, or irrational. Helen had absorbed these descriptions and expected a demanding bird. They made her initial choice of Mabel a confrontation with a received account: as training proceeded, the hawk’s actual behaviour would prove wider than the inherited stereotype.

Helen found a different tradition in seventeenth-century writing. Those accounts described goshawks as shy and fearful, but also sociable and affectionate when treated with patience and consideration. Their behaviour was not proof of an inexplicable bad temper; rough treatment could provoke fear or resistance. This older emphasis on the falconer’s responsibility helped Helen imagine a relationship based on care and friendship rather than mastery alone. It did not make Mabel tame in the sense of domesticated: the goshawk remained a wild animal, capable of choosing how to respond.

Learning to read and play

Training required Helen to watch Mabel’s posture and feathers closely. Tightly held feathers could signal fear, while a looser posture suggested ease; smaller changes around the face conveyed subtler states. As Helen became increasingly attentive, she learned to adjust when she moved, sat, came close, or retreated. The practice changed her own attention: instead of treating the hawk as an object to be managed, she tried to anticipate what Mabel noticed and how the bird might react. That imaginative identification was powerful, but Helen also recognized its danger. Her ability to enter the perspective of what she watched could make her sense of herself recede.

A visit from Christina offered a small but telling test. With Mabel bareheaded indoors, Helen asked Christina to ignore the hawk and read the newspaper. Mabel watched the unfamiliar human activity, then later flew from Helen’s fist. Helen first assumed the sudden movement meant fear and that Mabel should be hooded to rest. She reconsidered: the bird was frustrated and hungry, and eating the offered food brought a visible change in her posture. Mabel subsequently took small scraps of meat from the floor and returned to her perch. These exchanges showed Helen that care depended on interpreting the particular response in front of her, not applying a fixed rule to every movement.

Play further challenged Helen’s expectations. Mabel investigated a strip of paper, repeatedly taking it in her beak and crunching it, and responded to a rolled magazine as Helen looked through it toward her. Helen had not encountered goshawk play in her reading and had not expected it from the bird she thought she knew. Mabel’s curiosity and enjoyment belonged to her own behaviour; they were not simply evidence that she had become a human companion. The episode also exposed the limits of the available descriptions: what falconers had failed to notice could be absent from their books without being absent from the bird.

Trust made through return

The training relationship depended on food, the creance, and repetition. In one early exercise, Helen held out a day-old cockerel chick while Mabel tried to reach it from her perch. Mabel stretched, leaned, and made a forceful move toward the glove before settling there to feed. For Helen, crossing the small gap was a major change: Mabel had moved from avoiding the offered hand to using it as the place where food could be taken. The episode registered both the bird’s strength and the distance still separating contact from control.

As Mabel learned to fly to Helen, each recall carried emotional weight. Helen raised her arm and whistled, hoping the hawk would leave a perch and cross the space between them. Even on the creance, she feared that Mabel might falter or veer away. When the bird landed on the glove, the return felt like a reassurance, and Helen’s grieving heart found comfort in it. She also described the bond as a troubling blurring of boundaries: when Mabel waited across a field, Helen felt that part of herself waited there too. The bird’s return could seem as dependable as a natural law, so that a failed return threatened not only a training exercise but Helen’s sense that the world remained ordered.

That fear became concrete when Mabel repeatedly took food from the glove and kept flying away. Helen held the line and brought her down, then tried again, believing that something had frightened the hawk. The recurrence unsettled the certainty she had built around calling Mabel. Later, when Mabel’s weight was correctly judged to be suitable for flying, she flew the full length of the creance to Helen three times without hesitation. Stuart identified the change as a matter of reaching the right flying weight. Helen had miscalculated it for weeks; in her bereavement, she had instead imagined that her own emotional confession had made her more acceptable to Mabel. The difference matters: their renewed success was not proof that the hawk could read or heal Helen’s grief, even though Helen experienced the return as deeply consoling.

Shared hunting, unequal stakes

The relationship changes when Helen takes Mabel hunting. She and the hawk move covertly through a farm field where Helen sees rabbits and a cock pheasant. As she approaches the hunting ground, attention narrows to the positions of the bird and potential quarry. The hunt involves Mabel’s flight and choices, but Helen is not simply watching from a distance: she has trained the hawk, carried her into the field, and participates in the outcome. For Helen, the experience differs from birdwatching. It brings uncertainty and a relinquishing of control, since training can make a return or a catch seem possible without guaranteeing either.

After an outing, Helen recognizes the lure of that uncertainty as addictive. The hawk’s release gives her a chance to invest hope in an outcome she cannot command, and the possibility of losing herself in that moment attracts her precisely when grief has left her feeling powerless. The relationship is therefore not just a remedy. Hunting gives Helen intensity and purpose, but it also opens a route away from ordinary life that she fears she may not want to leave.

On a later hunt, Mabel chases a pheasant into cover, and Helen searches for it while trying to understand what the hawk can see from above. For a time, Helen’s attention shifts between their positions and the hidden bird. When the pheasant is flushed and Mabel catches it, Helen’s understanding of the hawk changes. She had expected to encounter violence or bloodlust; instead, she sees Mabel as a young bird discovering what she can do. Helen helps her feed, an action described through an image of maternal care, and weeps for the pheasant, Mabel, her father, and the child she had once been, waiting for hawks to appear. The scene joins hunting and mourning without making the prey’s death a simple symbol: Helen is moved by the living hawk, the animal killed, and the losses gathered into the moment.

A bond without domestication

Helen’s relationship with Mabel is sustained by close attention and practical care, but it cannot erase the difference between them. The hawk may return repeatedly, learn to take food from a glove, and play with objects Helen offers; she may also frustrate expectations and act in ways Helen cannot control. That tension gives the bond its force. Mabel is neither the monster described in older stereotypes nor a human-like companion whose actions exist to comfort Helen.

The history of falconry complicates their intimacy further. Its judgments about noble falcons and troublesome goshawks were entangled with access to land and with assumptions about who could hunt. Its descriptions of female goshawks also often treated their resistance as irrational, rather than asking how the falconer’s own conduct shaped the encounter. Helen’s experience with Mabel exposes the narrowness of such accounts: patient observation reveals behaviours, including play, that those accounts had not made room for. Their relationship thus becomes a practical counterexample to mastery as the only model of training. Its closeness is made through attention and repeated contact, while the hawk’s wildness remains present in every return that Helen hopes for but cannot guarantee.