In Helen McDonald’s thoughtful memoir, H is for Hawk, she takes us into the tradition and sleepless hours of training a Goshawk. This is the locale of instinct, identification and forming habits. The hawk and the hawk trainer are trained in a most complex relationship.
What McDonald really does, though, is to take us inside the mew of her own grief, an emotional inner world that parallels the place where hawk and human sort things out. Later in the book we discover the sad truth of her father’s passing.
And she writes:
Gos was still out there in the forest, the dark forest to which all things lost must go. I’d wanted to slip across the borders to 
this world into that wood and bring back the hawk. Some part of me that was very small and old had known this, some part of me that didn’t work according to the everyday rules of the world but with the logic of myths and dreams. And that part of me had hoped, too, that somewhere in that other world was my father. His death had been so sudden. There had been no tie to prepare for it, no sense in it happening at all. He could only be lost. He was out there, still, somewhere out there in that tangled wood with all the rest of the lost and dead. I know now what those dreams in the spring had meant, the ones of a hawk slipping through a rent in the air into another world. I’d wanted to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home.
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