T. H. White's training of Gos

T. H. White’s training of Gos is a record of a falconer’s good intentions repeatedly turning against their purpose. Gos initially steps onto White’s fist and eats, but White’s worry about the hawk’s condition leads him to feed it too much, then to interpret its retreat as a problem to solve through still more attention. The training becomes a cycle of hunger, unwanted food, and renewed distance. In Helen Macdonald’s account, this failure is not only about technique: it exposes the strain between human longing for attachment and a wild bird’s independent needs, while also illuminating the class-bound history of falconry and the way White’s own self-doubt enters his treatment of Gos.

Background and the promise of an easy beginning

White’s first night with the young male goshawk appears, at first, to offer a quick route into partnership. He releases Gos in the barn, and at five minutes past three in the morning the hawk steps onto his fist and feeds. Gos is already familiar with people and willing to approach the falconer for food. Macdonald contrasts this promising start with her own experience: her hawk had not reached the same point and would take days to do so. Had White understood the basic requirements of training, she observes, Gos might have flown free within a week.

The difficulty is that White does not yet know how to read what the apparent success requires. A hawk must remain a little hungry if food is to become a reason to approach the falconer. White instead sees signs of weakness in the pale transverse marks on Gos’s tail feathers, which indicate that the feathers had grown under conditions of insufficient food. He fears the hawk has been damaged and feels responsible. Because the feathers have already grown, feeding Gos more cannot repair those marks, but White responds to his guilt by giving the hawk as much food as it can take.

Care becomes a repeating conflict

White’s attempts to make amends become increasingly misdirected. When Gos is already full, White tries different foods and encourages it to eat, treating refusal as a difficulty that further care might overcome. The bird, by contrast, has no need for more food or attention; it wants to be left alone. Once it becomes hungry enough to eat again, White feeds it heavily, convinced that the renewed meal means the relationship is improving. Gos then withdraws, and the cycle begins again.

Macdonald presents this pattern as a clash between two kinds of logic. White’s care is anxious and corrective: he wants to undo a perceived injury and make the hawk respond with trust. Gos’s needs are immediate and do not conform to that plan. The more White tries to secure closeness by feeding and attending to the bird, the more his efforts can become intrusive. White describes the resulting struggle as days of attack and counter-attack, an image that makes training sound like a campaign over contested ground rather than a gradual act of mutual accommodation.

White’s written record of the training shows the same gap between resolution and practice. One entry describes him walking repeatedly around Gos with a rabbit leg held out, while the hawk bates whenever he comes too close; he leaves without feeding it and repeats the exercise at intervals through the day. He despises the rabbit leg because Gos does not want it, and the hawk’s refusal becomes inseparable from White’s growing frustration. He worries about the bird’s health, wonders whether its droppings indicate sickness, and decides that it should eat only when it jumps to his fist. But by dawn he has given Gos most of a rabbit without achieving the jump. His plans to keep the hawk awake for three days and nights also fail: feeling sorry for it, he repeatedly returns it to its perch to sleep. Each act of pity weakens the discipline he has resolved to maintain, and the next encounter begins with Gos wild again.

White’s self-reproach and the limits of retreat

Macdonald reads White’s inconsistency not as a simple absence of care but as care tangled with fear, shame, and self-sabotage. White knows that he has behaved badly when he prevents Gos from regaining his fist after a bate, and he feels ashamed. Yet remorse does not give him a steadier way to approach the bird. Instead, concern for Gos’s hunger and health alternates with frustration at its refusal, while his repeated promises to himself break down under pressure. Macdonald connects this pattern to White’s drinking, which intensifies during the struggle. In her interpretation, drinking and broken resolutions belong to a wider evasiveness: the difficulty of sustaining a plan when it is also a demand that a damaged self be repaired.

The setting complicates White’s apparent escape from society. His cottage is on the Stowe estate, along one of the old carriage routes known as The Ridings; the open grassy track runs past the house and over a hill towards the school. The cottage has an earth closet and a well, and its barn retains a gamekeeper’s pencil notes about game. It is rustic, but not remote in the way White’s account might lead a reader to imagine. Its position on the old route keeps the school close, despite White’s wish to withdraw from human life. Macdonald’s image of a dog at the end of its chain captures the contradiction: White has moved away from the school, but has not escaped its bounds or his identity as a schoolmaster.

Falconry, class, and the interpretation of hawks

The account also sits within a social history in which different birds and their falconers were assigned different kinds of status. Falcons require open country for their characteristic pursuit of prey, and the land needed to fly them properly—grouse moors, partridge estates, and large expanses of farmland—has often been easier for the wealthy or well-connected to access. Falconry writing consequently presents the Peregrine falcon as noble and supreme, while the solitary trainer of goshawks, the austringer, has received a poorer reputation. Older descriptions of goshawks cast them as difficult, ill-tempered, or even monstrous, so the bird’s alleged defects seem to confirm the disparagement of the person who flies it.

Macdonald’s broader comparison challenges the idea that these characteristics belong simply to the goshawk. She notes that seventeenth-century writers could describe goshawks as shy and fearful but also sociable and affectionate when treated with patience and consideration. This earlier emphasis on the falconer’s conduct stands against later accounts that make the hawk’s supposed bad temper the whole explanation. Gos’s training therefore exemplifies a larger interpretive problem: when a bird resists, observers may blame its nature rather than ask how human handling has shaped the encounter.

Narrative significance

Macdonald reads about Gos while training Mabel, and the contrast makes White’s account change with each rereading. Gos becomes vivid to her even when White remains difficult to imagine. She sees the hawk’s distress at a distance, but also recognizes how easily a falconer can make the bird stand for his own anxieties. The account can seem comic in its record of thwarted plans, yet its repeated failures also reveal a painful mismatch between White’s need to put matters right and Gos’s need to be left undisturbed.

That mismatch gives the training its lasting significance. White’s attachment does not guarantee that he understands what Gos requires, and gentleness alone cannot replace an accurate reading of the hawk’s condition. The episode becomes a counterpoint to Macdonald’s own close watching of Mabel: training depends on attention to the animal’s signals, but that attention must not collapse into the assumption that the bird shares the trainer’s aims. Gos’s early willingness to feed is real, yet it is not a promise of easy companionship. The unfolding failure makes that distinction unavoidable.