Maine

Maine is the setting for a Christmas visit that changes Helen’s sense of where the wild can exist and what it means to feel at home. Welcomed by friends on the southern coast, she finds a community where hunting is described as an egalitarian tradition, then witnesses a goshawk hunting among suburban backyards. The visit also confronts her with a less comfortable recognition: after months spent outside with Mabel, she has largely avoided the people whose work shapes the countryside around her.

Coastal setting and Christmas visit

On Christmas Eve, Helen looks out at an icy tidal river, its winter scene marked by snow, dark-edged light, and waterfowl moving across the river. Her mother is asleep in the next room, while her brother is away with his in-laws. Mabel is not with them: she is staying with Stuart and Mandy, three thousand miles away. The quiet offers Helen a marked contrast with the period since her father’s death; she describes herself as quieter inside than at any time since he died.

Helen and her mother are spending Christmas in America through the kindness of Erin and his parents, Harriet and Jim, who run a bed-and-breakfast inn on the coast of southern Maine. Erin and Helen became friends years earlier, when she was working with breeding falcons in Wales and he arrived at Carmarthen station hoping to fly falcons. Although he was instead put to work cleaning aviaries in driving rain, the two became, in Helen’s account, enduring friends. Through Erin she has also come to know people whose livelihoods and skills differ from those of her Cambridge circle.

Hunting and local community

Helen describes Erin’s Maine community as including fishermen, hunters, artisans, teachers, innkeepers, and guides. Its members make furniture, decoys, and ceramic pots; cook, teach, fish for lobster, and take visitors out for striped bass. Hunting is part of this working life, rather than an activity presented through the established British world of elite shoots and exclusive estates.

The account emphasizes the local claim that land can be hunted over under common law, a tradition residents regard with pride. Helen contrasts this with Britain’s history of class and privilege around access to hunting grounds. A wartime article she recalls had appealed to the ideal of being able to fish without trespassing on a nobleman’s property, while comparing that ideal with restrictions in fascist Italy and Germany; it also had to acknowledge that Britain shared the problem it criticized. Maine thus appears not simply as a scenic destination but as a place where access to land and the social meaning of hunting are understood differently.

Wildness among the backyards

During the visit, Helen follows Scott as a red-tailed hawk pursues a Squirrel through trees behind a backyard fence. The chase unfolds above a residential setting, with a family waving from an upstairs window. Snow-covered garages, a barbecue, an inflatable Santa, and the sounds of a television and a birthday song frame the hunt within ordinary neighborhood life. The hawk’s presence makes the scene startling to Helen precisely because she had associated wildness with places she had flown from, not with a town’s back lots and homes.

The encounter revises that expectation. Helen regards it as the wildest hunt she has seen and begins to consider whether home might be anywhere, just as the wild can be fierce in a suburban setting. A hawk’s useful lookout, she observes, need not be a remote pine; it can be a children’s play-frame. Maine has given her a family setting for Christmas and shown her that a hawk can belong within it. The scene’s significance lies in that conjunction: the wild is neither banished from human community nor confined to distant, supposedly untouched country.

Parsons Beach and the limits of watching

On the final morning, Helen, her mother, and Erin walk along Parsons Beach in bitter cold over frozen sand. Offshore, seaducks move in lines above water associated with Maine’s lobster fishery. Helen recalls an earlier boat trip with Erin’s family, during which she watched them haul traps, measure and sort lobsters, rebait the traps, and set them again. They were pleased she had joined them, but she felt guilty and out of her depth, like an English tourist unable to help.

That memory sharpens her thoughts about her own months with Mabel. She had watched the harvest, tractors working slopes, and stockmen turning sheep out for winter, yet had spoken to no one. She wonders whether her life with the hawk had made her a kind of tourist despite not feeling like tourism. The contrast with visitors photographing lobster boats and stacks of traps on Cape Porpoise quay gives her unease a specific form: looking closely is not the same as taking part in the working world. Maine’s place in the book therefore carries both an opening and a rebuke. It shows Helen a way to reconcile wildness with home, while exposing the distance she has maintained from human lives around her.