trail’s end
MAGICAL PLACES I
don’t own this land. But in walking it over and over again with my hawk, I’ve made it mine. I know where its animals live, and how they move about it. Know that the larks sleep on the top of the hill, but on sunny mornings they move to warm themselves on eastward slopes. This sense of where the animals are is the coincidence of long experience with unconsciously noted clues. The incidence of sunlight on a stubblefield, and the pressure of wind on the same. The precise color of the ground. I move towards the larks as if I could see them.
But the biggest field—one planted with oilseed rape—is not like the others. It is a mystery. Anything could be living in those thick-packed bluish leaves. Pheasants, partridges, hares—even a jack snape, whirring up with snappy wingbeats from a muddy patch near the hedge. It seems ludicrous that anything could be invisible in a bare two inches of herbage. But everything is. There is a sense of creation about it: when the hare leapt up from our feet today it was as if it had been made by the field ex nihilo. The hare had an ally: a strong north-easterly. Mabel tried twice to grab it, and both times it jinked across the wind and she missed. It is very strange watching a hawk chase a land animal in a high wind. The hare has purchase: its claws and furry pads dig into leaves and mud, and it uses the ground to propel itself against. But the hawk moves in air alone. It is like watching one element against another. One world versus another, like a gannet diving into the sea for fish. There is the tree Mabel dived from to cosh me on the head. There’s the hedge where she clung, tail fanned wide, wings pressed against twigs, looking for a pigeon already gone. There is the bramble bush that tripped me and pitched me into a flooded ditch. The hawk and I have a shared history of these fields. There are ghosts here—the ghosts of things that happened.
It’s a child’s world, full of separate places. Give me a paper and pencil now and ask me to draw a map of the fields I
64 · LAND&PEOPLE · FALL/WINTER 2015
roamed about when I was small, and I cannot do it. But change the question, and ask me to list what was there and I can fill pages. The wood ants’ nest. The newt pond. The birch- es by the motorway fence with fly agarics at their feet. These things were the waypoints of my world. And other places became magic through happenstance. When I found a huge red underwing moth behind the electricity junction box at the end of my road, that box became a magic place. I needed to check behind it every time I walked past, though nothing was ever there. I’d run to check the place where once I’d caught a grass snake, look up at the tree that one afternoon had held a roosting owl. These places had a magical importance, a pull on me that other places did not, however devoid of life they were in all the visits since. And now, through Mabel, I’ve discovered something rather wonderful. She is building a landscape of magical places too. She makes detours to check particular spots in case the rab- bit or the pheasant that was there last week might be there again. It is wild superstition, it is an instinctive heuristic of the hunting mind, and it works. She is learning a particular way of navigating the world, and her map is coincident with mine. Memory and love and magic. What happened over the years of my expeditions as a child was a slow transformation of my landscape over time into what naturalists call a local patch, glowing with memory and meaning. Mabel is doing the same. She is making the hill her own. Mine. Ours.
excerpted from h is for hawk by helen macdonald; reprinted by permission of the publisher, grove press. macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator, historian, and affiliate at the department of history and philosophy of science at the university of cambridge. her previous books include falcon and shaler’s fish.
courtesy helen macdonald
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