Mabel

Mabel is the female goshawk whom Helen trains during a period of grief, and her significance lies in how she changes the terms of that relationship. At first, Helen’s attention to Mabel becomes so intense that she feels herself merging with the bird. Over time, Mabel’s responses—her caution, appetite, play, and independent flight—make clear that she is not an extension of Helen’s feelings. Their developing partnership depends on learning to attend to Mabel as a distinct animal.

Identity and inherited reputation

Before training Mabel, Helen had been drawn to falcons and unsettled by goshawks. The birds seemed difficult, solitary, and associated with death; the books Helen read often praised falcons as noble while describing goshawks as disagreeable or troublesome. That contrast was not simply about the birds’ temperaments. Flying falcons properly required extensive open land, access more readily available to wealthy or well-connected falconers, whereas goshawks could hunt at close range in more varied settings. Historical writing thus connected the supposedly superior falcon with privilege and treated the solitary goshawk trainer, or austringer, with contempt.

The disparagement also took a gendered form. Later falconry accounts cast female goshawks as sulky, irrational, and difficult, while earlier writers described them as shy but sociable and responsive to kindness. Helen finds that these accounts place responsibility not only on the bird but on the falconer’s conduct: rough handling could provoke fear or resistance. Mabel’s behaviour gradually complicates the inherited portrait. Her difference is not evidence that she is a defective or spiteful creature; it is evidence of a living animal whose reactions have to be understood on their own terms.

Learning one another

Training begins as an exercise in close observation. Helen watches Mabel’s posture and feathers for signs of fear or ease, then becomes attentive to smaller changes in her expression. This vigilance helps Helen anticipate what Mabel might do, but it also unsettles the boundary between observation and identification: Helen describes herself as beginning to feel what the hawk feels and notice what she notices. Grief and concentration contribute to that sense of transformation. It is powerful, but also risky, since understanding another animal can slide into imagining that the animal’s inner life is the same as one’s own.

Mabel’s first calm, bareheaded time in the room with Christina becomes an important step. At first she watches the visitor cautiously. Later, during a quiet period together, she abruptly takes food and eats while Christina remains in the room. Mabel’s relaxed feathers and first rouse—the shaking of her plumage—mark a new stage in her comfort. She can sit without her hood, although being picked up still makes her bate. In another early interaction, she studies a small scrap of meat on the floor, hops down to take it, and returns to her perch. These small acts show progress through choice and repeated exposure rather than a sudden conversion to tameness.

A later training exercise asks Mabel to jump from her perch to Helen’s glove for a day-old cockerel chick. Mabel first stretches toward the food and tries to reach it without jumping. When that fails, she makes a forceful leap onto the glove and holds her position to feed. For Helen, the important change is not merely the short distance crossed. Mabel has taken a new step in accepting the glove and the person holding it. The scene also emphasizes the unequal physical confidence between them: Mabel can grip and hold with a strength Helen cannot match, while releasing her hold is not effortless for her.

Flight and the hunt

As Mabel’s training advances, Christina helps Helen practise calling the bird between them. In poor weather they fly Mabel loose inside the house, back and forth across the room. By the fourth day she will fly about twenty-five yards to Helen from the ground, Christina’s fist, tree branches, or the pavilion roof. Helen hopes to wait until Mabel will cover fifty yards before letting her fly free, and the calls remain charged with uncertainty: Mabel must choose to cross the space between them rather than be carried there.

The first free flight comes sooner and under more stressful circumstances. Following Stuart’s advice, Helen goes with him into rough ground where he beats the vegetation to flush possible quarry. As Mabel notices movement, Helen releases her. Mabel flies in widening circles, investigating the unfamiliar freedom and darkness, and initially seems unsure about returning. She perches in a young beech, then later comes toward Helen’s raised fist but does not settle securely, continuing to circle before perching again. Helen calls and offers food; Mabel eventually comes back. The encounter makes the distance between them feel frighteningly real, but it also shows that return is an action Mabel must make, not an automatic extension of Helen’s desire.

The following day, Mabel chases a pheasant that disappears into a hedge. While Helen searches through the brambles, she cannot see the hawk and tries to reconstruct Mabel’s position and intentions. The divided attention produces a brief sense of disconnection: Helen imagines the positions of hawk, prey, and human as a pattern she cannot control. When the pheasant is flushed, Mabel strikes and holds it. Helen’s understanding of her changes in that moment. Rather than seeing only a creature defined by violent death, she sees a young hawk discovering what she can do. She helps prepare the prey and watches Mabel feed, while grief for the pheasant, the hawk, her father, and her younger self comes together. The hunt is both Mabel’s independent act and a scene through which Helen confronts her own mourning.

Appetite, play, and independence

Mabel’s behaviour also corrects Helen’s interpretation of their difficulties. After weeks of flying, she has gained muscle but become too light; despite flying at a higher weight than before, she is hungry, and hunger has contributed to her aggression. Helen recognizes that she had failed to see Mabel’s condition because she was absorbed in her own distress. The next evening she gives Mabel a whole pigeon, which the hawk eats completely. This adjustment is a practical act of care, but it also marks a wider recognition: attending to Mabel requires noticing what is happening to Mabel, rather than turning her into a reflection of Helen’s grief.

At home, Mabel plays with toys Helen makes from paper, tissue, and card. She turns her head, handles the objects with her beak, and tosses scrunched paper back when Helen throws it. Stuart doubts that goshawks play, but Mabel’s repeated participation makes play part of their own relationship. The activity does not make her less wild; it shows that her behaviour exceeds the narrow roles assigned to her in falconry books. Her curiosity and enjoyment are features of Mabel’s life, not merely rewards for Helen.

As Helen’s world begins to widen again, the closeness between them changes. She recognizes that Mabel’s world and her own are not the same, and allows the bird to range farther on a higher weight. In one flight across the Cambridgeshire countryside, Mabel launches low over the ground, uses the contours of the hill for cover, and continues along a hedge until she disappears from Helen’s view. The freedom carries risk, but it gives Mabel room to act according to her own hunting sense. Their growing distance is not a failure of attachment; it is part of a more balanced relationship.

Change and significance

Helen eventually makes a promise not to reduce Mabel to a symbol, a historical figure, or a villain recalled from someone else’s story. That resolve follows her reading about T. H. White and his goshawk Gos, but its meaning concerns Mabel directly: the bird is not a human character in feathers. She has a world of her own, and her actions do not take place to explain human feelings. Helen can learn imaginatively from Mabel without claiming that the hawk’s experience is identical to hers.

Mabel therefore alters the meaning of training in the narrative. The work involves calling, feeding, carrying, and observing, but it also requires accepting that a goshawk remains undomesticated and cannot be reduced to obedience or metaphor. Helen first treats the bond as a refuge from grief and at times mistakes closeness for sameness. Mabel’s hunger, play, hunting, and independent flight expose that mistake. By the time Helen can share her life with the hawk while recognizing their separation, the relationship has become less possessive and more attentive. Mabel helps Helen feel more human, not by becoming human herself, but by compelling Helen to recognize the limits of a human point of view.