When they are gone she shakes her head nervously, cheeps once through her nose and starts eating again.Ī minute later a woman swinging supermarket bags is upon us. As their backs enter Mabel’s line of sight she sucks her feathers in so tightly she seems vacuum-packed in plastic. I dodge behind a tree trunk and let them pass. I am here to show the hawk people, but from a safe distance merely, and those three men in pastel shirts are heading right towards us. They come towards us like tumbling rocks in a video game, threatening destruction with the merest glancing blow. They are things to shun, to fear, to turn from, shielding my hawk. And straight away the emptied world is full of people.īut they are not people. She pulls and picks scraps from it with the rapt concentration of a diner disassembling a lobster. It is a tiring-a piece of sinewy, bony meat to keep her occupied as we walk, drawing her attention from the things around her. She is hunched busily over the rabbit leg in my glove. She couldn’t care less about her surroundings. I walk deeper into this lamplit world, wondering at my heightened perception and reassured by how unconcerned the hawk is. ‘Who spiked my tea with acid?’ Night has never looked like this before. It lies upon the grass as if held just above it, gleaming softly in the darkness. I look down and see each pale blade of grass casts two separate shadows from the two nearest lamps, and so do I, and in the distance comes the collapsing echo of a moving train and somewhere closer a dog barks twice and there’s broken glass by the path and next to it a feather from the breast of a woodpigeon judging by its size and curl. Moths make dusty circles about the lamps. Night air moves in the spaces between the trees.

Everything seems hot and clean and dangerous and my senses are screwed to their utmost, as if someone had told me the park was full of hungry lions. Stepping over the low railings into the park I head for the thick black avenue of limes and the lamplit leaves beneath. It feels like an unmooring, as if I were an airship ascending on its maiden flight into darkness. Somewhere in my mind ropes uncoil and fall. Leaving the house that evening is frightening. Keys in pocket, hawk on fist, and off we go. She is the author of Falcon, a cultural history of falcons, and three collections of poetry. She also worked as a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator, historian, and naturalist, and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. The following is from Helen Macdonald’s memoir, H is for Hawk.

H is for hawk by helen macdonald