I was all, uh, no, I’ve not come out to hunt you. I think they actually backed up against a wall as I walked past. About three days later they saw me out with the goshawk and looked quite nervous. Also I remember when a couple of young kids threw stones and broke some of the windows of my house. That was a bit nerve-wracking: She wasn’t very impressed with motorways, to say the least. Did you have any other funny times with Mabel? There was the first-and only-time she managed to get her falconry hood off in the car, as I was accelerating to join busy motorway traffic at 70 mph in the midst of a rainstorm. At heart it was a battle about who I was and what the world was for.Įven though it describes a dark time, the book has moments of humor throughout. I brought the wild-in the form of the hawk-inside the home, and inside myself. I didn’t test myself against the rugged exterior landscape. At the time I saw it as a way of escaping myself. You can’t tame grief, but you can tame a hawk. After my father’s death a kind of psychological autopilot took over. Was getting Mabel a conscious decision to find comfort in a challenge? What about the nature part of it? Wild was so much in the news recently, and with it, the idea that a personal journey is often done away from other people. It was a form of escapism, as she makes clear in her dazzling new memoir, H is for Hawk, which won the Costa Book Award this week and is excerpted in the February issue of Vogue. After her father died, she found the voice (more a squawk, really) in a young goshawk named Mabel, whose training required compassion and immense patience.

“When you’re lost you find yourself unconsciously moving towards light, or towards a familiar voice,” says Helen Macdonald, a lifelong bird lover who, as a child, slept with her arms bent like wings.

H is for hawk book