Helen drives through the Brecklands north of Cambridge, hoping to spot goshawks hunting in the forest clearings.

Helen receives a phone call from her mother and learns that her father has died of a heart attack.

Helen finds a young goshawk advertised online by an Irish breeder and decides she must acquire and train it.

Helen travels to Scotland to meet a breeder and chooses the smaller of two offered goshawks.

Helen brings the hawk home and clears her schedule, instructing friends she will be unavailable during training.

After days of patient effort, the hawk eats prey from Helen's gloved hand for the first time.

Helen names her hawk Mabel, from the Latin word for loveable, following the falconer's superstition of gentle names.

Helen walks Mabel through the streets of Cambridge for the first carriage session, drawing stares from passersby.

Helen turns down an academic teaching position in Berlin, allowing her professional life to quietly slip away.

Helen releases Mabel to fly completely free for the first time and watches anxiously as she circles and finally returns.

Mabel successfully kills her first pheasant and Helen tearfully strips it and watches the young hawk eat.

Helen delivers a speech at her father's memorial service and finds unexpected joy in the crowd of lives he touched.

Helen visits a doctor about her depression and leaves with a prescription for antidepressant medication.

Helen spends Christmas in Maine with falconer friends Scott and Erin and returns to England with renewed purpose.

Helen brings Mabel to a friend's well-appointed aviary to molt, accepting their months-long separation with hard-won equanimity.

Helen MacDonald's father dies suddenly, leaving her devastated and withdrawing from human company. Desperate to channel her grief, she acquires a young goshawk from a Scottish breeder and throws herself into the demanding work of training. As Mabel slowly learns to trust her, Helen's professional and personal life quietly falls apart around her. The breakthrough of Mabel's first free flight and first kill marks a tentative turning point, but it is her father's memorial service that cracks Helen open to other people again. She seeks medical help for depression and, during a Christmas trip to Maine, begins to rediscover joy and community. The memoir closes with Helen releasing Mabel to molt — an act of letting go that mirrors her gradual acceptance of her father's death.

Helen's grief, her hawk, and the long road back to life.

Helen, at age twelve, attends her first goshawk training demonstration and watches a hawk make its first kill.

Helen visits her expert friend Stuart, who strongly advises her to train a falcon rather than a goshawk.

T.H. White works as a schoolmaster at Stowe and keeps a private journal recording his desires and repeated failures.

Helen drives home from Scotland with the hawk in a cardboard box and dreams that her father is a little boy.

Helen removes the hawk's travel hood for the first time and the frightened bird bates repeatedly in a panic.

Helen's friend Christina visits and the two women sit in near-silence near Mabel to accustom the hawk to company.

Helen tries and fails to fit Mabel's handmade travel hood properly, breaking down in frustrated tears.

Helen trains Mabel to jump to her outstretched arm, enduring the painful force of repeated hard landings.

A fellow falconer shocks Helen by claiming her success with Mabel is due entirely to them sharing a gender.

Helen fits Mabel with a small tracking bell and a micro transmitter to prevent losing her during free flights.

T.H. White abandons Gos's training to build crude sparrowhawk traps in the surrounding fields.

Helen develops a fever during training and isolates herself at home for several days, wary of her own solitude.

Mabel vanishes during a hunt and is discovered pressed to the ground, gripping a rabbit that has gone to ground.

Helen reads through her late father's plane-spotting notebooks and finds her grief has transformed into strengthening love.

Helen visits the Stowe cottage where White once trained Gos and briefly feels the desire to bring the dead back.

From childhood fascinations with hawks to the quiet, unglamorous work of training Mabel day by day, this pool traces the smaller moments that give Helen's journey its texture. T.H. White's background as a lonely, self-sabotaging schoolmaster appears early, foreshadowing the parallel between his struggles and Helen's. Practical challenges — a hood that won't fit, a hawk that lands too hard, a falconer who doubts her — keep Helen grounded in the real difficulties of her work. The pool also captures Helen's gradual isolation, from her feverish days alone to the moments of community that flicker through, like a friend sitting quietly beside Mabel. It ends at Stowe, where Helen briefly touches the ghost of White's lost hawk and the losses that connect all falconers across time.

The supporting people, memories, and smaller failures that shaped Helen's journey.

Helen recalls once looking directly into a goshawk's eye at a bird rehabilitation center and feeling its raw power.

Helen reads T.H. White's The Goshawk for the first time at age eight and finds its anecdotal inexpertise unsatisfying.

Helen weighs her new hawk on a scale and discovers it is slightly overweight, complicating the start of training.

T.H. White repeatedly overfeeds his hawk Gos, undermining each small training gain in a pattern of self-sabotage.

Helen notices she is beginning to think and feel like a hawk, growing numb to grief and human life.

Helen recognizes a powerful and uncontrollable rage running beneath her daily life during Mabel's training period.

Stuart takes Helen to an open field for a coaching session and draws her attention to the beauty around them.

White ties Gos to a perch near the open barn door; Gos breaks his line and flies away forever.

Helen attends an art gallery opening where a projected condor habitat prompts thoughts about extinction and her father's death.

The president of the British Falconers Club privately shows Helen a taxidermized hawk that was a gift from Hermann Göring.

Helen and Mabel attend an Apple Day festival on a landowner's estate, where Mabel is displayed publicly but not flown.

Helen's perception of Mabel shifts after starting antidepressants and she begins to see the hawk as playful rather than coldly deadly.

Mabel pursues prey into a private estate where hunting is forbidden, kills a pheasant, and strands Helen for hours.

In Maine, Helen follows friend Scott as his red-tailed hawk chases a squirrel through suburban neighborhoods and backlots.

A rare earthquake shakes Helen's house in the night and she runs to check Mabel, finding the hawk perfectly calm.

This pool follows the key moments of insight and failure that altered the course of Helen's emotional and falconry journey. White's self-sabotage with Gos — his overfeeding, his neglect, his eventual loss of the hawk — runs as a cautionary thread throughout, mirroring Helen's own growing hawkishness and suppressed rage. Pivotal scenes — the Göring taxidermized hawk, the Apple Day festival, the condor art installation — reveal how history, community, and wildness intersect in unexpected ways. Antidepressants shift Helen's perception of Mabel from cold killer to playful companion, and the illegal pheasant hunt in a private estate becomes an emblem of the risks that come with genuine freedom. The pool closes with Mabel's eerie calm during a night earthquake: a final reminder that the hawk's world and the human world will never fully meet, and that this difference is precisely what makes each precious.

The revelations and turning points that transformed Helen's understanding of grief and hawks.