![]() This was to become a holding operation – grief a hawk on a wrist. And the hawk “fretful” and “broken” seems already to share its about-to-be owner’s atmosphere. There could be no more dramatic love at first sight: momentous and unstoppable. A broken marionette of wings, legs and light-splashed feathers.” Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water. ![]() A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. The hawk’s wings, barred and beating, the sharp fingers of her dark-tipped primaries cutting the air, her fine feathers raised like the scattered quills of a fretful porcupine. In her memoir H Is for Hawk, which is this year’s nonfiction flyaway hit, winning the Samuel Johnson award, shortlisted for the Costa prize and one of the most all-consumingly wonderful books I’ve read in ages, she describes the first sighting of the bird: “… the man pulls an enormous, enormous hawk out of the box and in a strange coincidence of world and deed a great flood of sunshine drenches us and everything is brilliance and fury. ![]() It was the weirdest of blind dates, an assignation 400 miles from her home in Cambridge, on a Scottish quayside, in the months after her father’s death and in the grip of grief. I n 2007, Helen Macdonald met her hawk for the first time. ![]()
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