Page 127 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

she begins her life with Mabel, she locks herself away, leaves her poor friends

behind and becomes a hermit, living off frozen pizza. She loses herself in the

hawk. “I didn’t know who I was but the hawk was vital and present – more real

than I was. . . . .I had identified with the hawk, taken on her imagined character. I

was close to breaking.” MacDonald becomes increasingly more feral; Mabel

inches toward less fear. MacDonald sits motionless, her mind as empty as an

ancient mountain yogi, her heart full of hope. They spend days in her darkened

apartment like this.

Over time, MacDonald and Mabel co-evolve; there is an understanding of the

inequality in their relationship, there is a great deal of training and practice, there

is anxious attachment, but there is also that most important virtue, respect.

MacDonald, like Thwaites and Foster, has existential angst, especially over

absence, abandonment, death, and disappearance. She is not training Mabel

because she wishes to feel special. She is not puffing her feathers with the long-

standing glamour of falconry’s history. She has no use for history, no use for

time at all. She is training the hawk to make it all disappear. “I felt incomplete

unless the hawk was sitting on my hand: we were parts of each other. Grief and

the hawk had conspired to this strangeness.”

Mabel does not eat worms. If she can’t hunt, she will eat a dead, day-old

cockerel chick, or a rabbit pulled from Helen MacDonald’s fridge. Like Foster,

MacDonald and Mabel live with the fact of predation. It is not for the squeamish,

or the gentle bird-watcher with binoculars. "It's unusual to see animal death up

close. I was responsible for these [deaths] because I had the hawk, but people

who eat meat are responsible for the deaths they cause. They just don't see it."

And MacDonald has this to say about hunting with Mabel: "It didn't feel like sport.

It was nothing like sport. It was an entirely natural phenomenon, only I was there.

I'm probably a bit unfashionable in this regard, but I have this utopian notion that