As Helen Macdonald notes, animal books rarely end happily: Henry Williamson's Tarka is killed by hounds, and the otter in Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water is beaten to death by a man with a mallet; the deer in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's The Yearling is shot. Richard Adams's Watership Down is, in its sappy, mystical way, a little more hopeful. Hazel survives. All the same, the reader must come to terms with the loss of Woundwort, who is savaged by dogs, his body never found.
Macdonald's H Is for Hawk turns all this on its head, beginning as it does with a death and a human one at that and ending with a flare of optimism as her goshawk, Mabel, is safely installed in the aviary where she will spend the moulting season. For Macdonald, this is a painful parting. Their peculiar intimacy is temporarily at an end; the next time they meet, they will be strangers again. But the reader knows by this point that Macdonald will be able to bear the weeks ahead, that she is restored to herself and to those who care about her.
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