by Farley Mowat
Jitters liked people, but he hated cats and he waged a bitter vendetta against them. Our own cat, whose name was Miss Stella (after our landlady of the moment), became incurably neurotic as a result of the torment inflicted on her by the squirrel, and eventually she left home forever. The cats of our neighbors suffered severely too.
It was Jitters’s delight to seek out an unwary cat sunning itself beneath a tree, or under the lee of a house wall. Jitters would then quietly climb high above his victim and launch himself into space like a diving sparrow hawk. Since these leaps were often made from twenty or thirty feet up, the impact when he struck was sufficient to leave the poor cat breathless. By the time it recovered, Jitters would have scampered to a safe vantage point from which he could taunt his enemy.
We had Jitters for over a year, and in the end it was his cat baiting that killed him. He died rather horribly. One afternoon he launched himself from halfway up the wall of our three-story apartment building and landed, not on what he had supposed was a sleeping cat, but upon a foxskin neckpiece laid to air on a concrete balustrade.
By the time we moved to Saskatoon my parents tended to take my interest in natural history for granted. Yet even they were startled one night shortly after we arrived in Saskatoon.
Mother was having a dinner party that evening for a number of local people whom we had only recently met. When dinner was ready she called to me up the back stairs, and I came down to join the party, a little dreamily, for my mind was filled with the thrill of a great discovery.
I had just begun to practice dissections, and that day I had found a dead gopher that proved to be an ideal subject for experiment. When Mother called me I had just completed my preliminary work. I had removed most of the internal organs and placed them in a saucer of formaldehyde solution. The problem of identifying all these parts was a nice one, and I was so preoccupied with it that I brought the saucer with me to the dinner table.
It was a candle-lit dinner, and no one noticed my saucer until after soup had been served. I finished my soup before anyone else and decided to employ the waiting moments by continuing with my investigations. I was so lost in them that I was not aware of the peculiar dying away of conversation on either side, until my father’s voice aroused me.
“What in heaven’s name have you got there, Farley?” he demanded sharply.
I answered eagerly – for I had just that instant made a momentous discovery and one that I was anxious to share.
“Dad,” I cried, “you’ll never guess. I’ve got the uterus of a gopher and she was pregnant!”
Hector MacCrimmon was among the guests that night, but he survived the experience to become one of our best friends. The thirty bachelor years that he had spent in Canada since leaving Caithness in northern Scotland had not altered either his accent nor his Presbyterian sense of rectitude. For twenty years his home had been a room in one of Saskatoon’s hotels, and if ever a man was immovably settled into a habitual pattern of life, it was surely Hector.
Nevertheless, when we moved our caravan out to the Saskatoon Country Club for the summer months, we pressed Hector to join us for a bucolic week end.
He would have refused the invitation outright if he could have done so gracefully, for he had no love of the out-of-doors. His hotel life may have been dull and confining, but it was comfortable, and Hector was eminently a comfortable sort of man. He evaded the issue of the country week end with skill and perseverance, but in the end we were too much for him, and in mid-August he found himself committed to a three-day visit. It was in a mood of Christian resignation that he eventually arrived, for he put little faith in my father’s glowing assurances that we lived in the very lap of luxury.
Our camp was on the riverbank, in a dense stand of poplar. The caravan stood in a little clearing, with the open-air fireplace before it and farther back toward the trees an umbrella tent, which was the private place where I lived and slept. My parents had decided that Hector should have my unoccupied bunk in the caravan, but when Hector heard of this arrangement he was horrified.
“I’ll nae do it!” he cried vehemently. “Wud ye have me sleep between a mon and his lawful spouse? Foosh and for shame! Come, Angus, sin ye have no place for me to lay my haid, I’ll be away back to Saskatoon for the night.”
I don’t know how much of that outburst was really due to his Presbyterian scruples, and how much of it was due to a last-minute, but canny, attempt to escape from country living. But if it was escape he had in mind, he was doomed to failure.
“Nonsense,” Father replied heartily. “You can sleep on the spare cot in Farley’s tent. That should be decent enough even for an old Puritan like you, but” – and here my father’s voice betrayed a trace of hesitation – “it may not be quite as peaceful there as in the caravan.”
Hector knew that he was beaten, but he would have the last word. “Peaceful!” he said bleakly. “Ther’ll be little peace for me until I’m hame.”
It was a prophetic statement.
After supper my elders remained around the fire, drinking hot toddy and swatting at mosquitoes. I retired directly to my tent, for I had chores to do.
During that summer I had made a strenuous effort to obey the injunctions of Great-uncle Frank, and as a result the tent had become far more than a bedroom. It had become a place where I could live in really close contact with nature, for I shared the tenancy with a dozen chipmunks, a partially tamed long-eared owl, three bushy-tailed wood gophers, a least weasel, and a baker’s dozen of garter snakes. Each species had its own quarters. The snakes lived in a cardboard carton under my bed; the weasel in a gallon-size tin can; the chipmunks in an orange crate faced with fly screening; the wood gophers in a wooden tub; while the owl was free to range at the end of a long piece of twine tied to the tent pole. The makeshift cages were not all they might have been, and whenever I went into the tent I could usually count on finding some of my comrades on the loose. However, on this particular evening Father had drawn me aside after dinner to warn me sternly that there must be no escapes that night.
Having made everything secure, I went to bed. I awakened briefly at Hector’s belated arrival in the tent some hours later. He undressed in darkness, fearing perhaps that it would be indecent to do so by the light of the electric torch with which he was provided.
A number of mosquitoes had followed him into the tent, and although they did not bother me (for I buried my head under my sheet), they seemed to annoy Hector. He muttered and thrashed about for a long time.
Sometime well after midnight I was awakened again by the detonation of thunder overhead. Coincidental with the earth-shaking crash there was a disturbance at the tent door, and Mutt pushed his way inside. He was inordinately frightened of thunderstorms, and when this one burst, he abandoned his usual sleeping quarters under the caravan and fled to me for solace and protection.
I could see Hector, outlined against the flailing canvas by the flicker of the lightning, sitting up in his bed and thrusting one long leg, like a Masai spear, at something between the two cots.
“Whoosh!” he cried sharply. “What was that?”
“It’s nothing, Mr. MacCrimmon,” I replied. “Only Mutt coming in to get out of the rain.”
“Mutt be dommed!” Hector yelled. “It’s the deil himself!”
At that moment Mutt, who had crawled under my cot, gave a convulsive leap that almost overturned the bed. Immediately there was a scampering across my blankets that told me my chipmunks were no longer in their little home. Hector was now lashing about with arms and legs and making such violent contact with the walls of the tent that I was afraid the whole thing would collapse. “It’s all right; it’s only chipmunks!” I called in an attempt to soothe him.
He did not waste his breath in a reply. He had found his flashlight, and suddenly its yellow beam flooded the tent. I saw at once that I had been wrong. It had been neither Mutt nor the chipmunks that had been bothering him. It was my owl, which was now crouching in a belligerent
attitude on Hector’s pillow, gripping the still-wriggling body of a wood gopher in its talons. There was a look in the owl’s eye that boded no good for anyone who tried to interfere with it.
Hector had no intention of interfering. With one amazingly agile motion he reached the other end of his bed. He huddled there for a moment as if uncertain what to do next, and then he made up his mind and swung both feet down to the tent floor.
The floor was of canvas, but it was old and no longer waterproof. Sufficient rain water had already seeped through to dissolve the bottom of the cardboard snake box. The snakes were probably as upset as any of us, and when Hector stepped on one of them, the poor beast coiled convulsively around his ankle.
Hector’s vocal response to this new stimulus was so impressive that it wakened my parents in the caravan. Through the drumming of the rain, and the rumble of the thunder, I could hear my father’s voice crying with some asperity:
“Wake up! Wake u-u-u-u-up, Hecto-r-r-r-r! You’re having a nightmare!”
And that, as Hector admitted to a mutual friend in the Albert Hotel some weeks later, “was no so verra far from the truth, if ye ken what I mean!”
That long-eared owl was the first of my owls. It was followed by many more – but of them all, by far the most memorable were the two great horned owls which joined our family in the following year. The natural-science teacher at my school was a keen wild-life photographer and it was his ambition to take a series of pictures of a great horned owl. He enlisted my aid to discover a nest. This was a mission after my own heart, and as soon as the snows passed in the following spring, I began my search, in company with Bruce Billings, a youngster of my own age and inclinations.
Every week end Bruce and I would pack our haversacks and tramp the poplar bluffs looking for owls. At night we would build a lean-to shelter, or “wickiup,” out of branches. Then we would make our supper fire and cook a meal of bacon and eggs and tea. As darkness came down we would lie on the new-greening grass and listen to the prairie sing. From far off would come the yelping of a coyote, answered and echoed by others, and dying away at last into a distance beyond hearing. From the sloughs the frogs would babble, and the shrill piping of night-migrating sandpipers would come on the dark wind. Sometimes we were stirred by the reverberating cry of sandhill cranes so high above us that when they crossed the moon’s face, they were no more than midges.
But our ears were not really tuned to these voices. We were listening for the gruff “hoo-hoo-hoo” of horned owls, and when at last one of them would call, we would lay sticks upon the ground, pointing toward the sound.
With the first pallid dawn we would be awake, damp with the dew, and eager for the warmth of the breakfast fire. Later we would take our bearings from the direction the sticks pointed and, with Mutt romping ahead as an advance guard, would begin searching every poplar bluff along the indicated line of march.
It was always a long search, but never tedious. Every bluff had its occupants and if they were not the ones we sought, they were fascinating in themselves. Along the edges of the copses, wood gophers would chuckle fearlessly at us, for they seem to have a liking for man, and do not flee him as do their saffron-colored brothers of the open plains. Within each bluff itself there would usually be at least one large nest high in the poplars. Often it was a crow’s home, and the raucous scolding of the owners would follow us for miles. Sometimes it was the immense, roofed nest of a pair of magpies. Sometimes it was an old crow’s nest now occupied by long-eared owls whose sly, cat faces would peer at us nervously as we walked by. Sometimes the nest would belong to a pigeon hawk, the trimmest of the little falcons; or to a pair of the great-winged hawks, Swainson’s or redtails.
And between the bluffs, in the short new grass, meadowlarks and vesper sparrows would burst from underfoot, their nests hidden from us until Mutt’s snuffling nose found them out. Mutt never disturbed birds’ nests. He only found them for us and then stood by while we poked and peered, and occasionally took one of the eggs.
The moment when at last we halted beneath the untidy bulk of a large nest in a high poplar and, staring upward, could identify the home of the greatest of the owls was an intensely thrilling one. It was an emotion to be matched only by the excitement of climbing the tree, with eyes cautiously averted, and yet with many a furtive glance at the huge bird above. Only once was I ever actually struck by a defending owl, and then it was a glancing blow that probably resulted from a miscalculation on the owl’s part. But the wind-rushing dive of a bird with a five-foot wingspread, as it swerved to miss my head by a hand’s breadth, was as thrilling to a boy as ever the charge of an attacking lion was to a grown man.
Once we had found a nest and had assured ourselves that it was occupied, we would report the news to our teacher friend, and in the days that followed we would help him build his blind. These blinds were rickety affairs of branches and canvas, tied and nailed in the treetops adjacent to the nest. The owls seldom took kindly to the arrival of neighbors and on one occasion an owl attacked the face of a newly built blind, ripping the tough canvas to shreds with its inch-long talons. But eventually the blind would become no more than another part of the landscape and the birds would ignore it, and its occupants. For long, hot hours, I used to sit hidden from the owls, and watch their lives. I seldom used the camera that I carried, for I was too fascinated by the birds themselves. At first they seemed no more than brute beasts, bloodied with the game they brought back, yellow-eyed and savage to behold. But in time I began to see them differently – as living things whose appetites, and fears, and perhaps pleasures too were not so very different from my own.
I grew more and more enamored of them.
When we were preparing to leave the last of the three nests we had photographed that spring, I decided that I was not yet ready to sever my acquaintance with these interesting birds and so I carried one of the young ones home with me in my haversack.
The owlet was still flightless, and still possessed of much of his fledgling down. Nevertheless, he had presence, and we decided that he should be named Wol, after Christopher Robin’s sage but bumbling old friend.
Later that summer I came by yet another young horned owl. I found him held prisoner in an oil barrel where he had been placed by a bevy of youths who were intent on destroying him by inches. Bedraggled, filthy, and exhausted, he was a pitiful sight when I first beheld him. I parted with a hunting knife that was a prized possession, and found myself the owner of a second owl.
We named this one Weeps, for he never got over his oil-barrel experiences, and he never stopped keening as long as we knew him.
He and Wol were as different in character as two individuals could be. Wol was self-assured, domineering, and certain of his place in the sun. Weeps was timorous and retiring, and convinced that fate was his enemy. They differed in appearance, too, for Wol was of the arctic subspecies and his adult plumage was almost pure white, touched only lightly with black markings. Weeps, on the other hand, was a drab and sooty brown and his feathers always appeared shabby and frayed at the ends.
These two were among the most fascinating animals that I have ever known. They gave me a great deal of pleasure – but they made Mutt’s life a hell on earth.
13
OWLS UNDERFOOT
hen the owls first joined our family they were less than six weeks old, but already giving promise that their ultimate size would be impressive. My parents, who had never seen a full-grown horned owl, had no real idea as to just how impressive they could be, and I preserved a discreet silence on the subject. Nevertheless, Mother vetoed my plan for keeping the two newest, and youngest, members of the family in my bedroom, even though I pointed out to her that the birds might get lost, and in any case they would be in considerable danger from cats and dogs if they were kept outside.
Mother looked speculatively at the talons which the unhappy fledglings were flexing – talons already three quarters of an inch in length – and gave it as her considered opinion
that the cats and dogs would have a thin time of it in a mix-up with the owls. As to their getting lost – my mother was always an optimist.
Eventually my father solved the housing problem by helping me build a large chicken-wire enclosure in the back yard. This enclosure was used only a few months, for it soon became superfluous.
In the first place, the owls showed no disposition to stray from their new home. Each day I would take them out for a romp on the lawn and, far from attempting to return to their wild haunts, they displayed an overwhelming anxiety to avoid the uncertainties of freedom. Once or twice I accidentally left them alone in the yard and they, concluding that they had been abandoned, staged a determined retreat into the house itself. Screen doors were no barrier to them, for the copper mesh melted under the raking impact of their talons as if it had been tissue paper. Both owls would then come bursting through the shattered screen into the kitchen, breathing hard, and looking apprehensively over their shoulders at the wide outer world where their unwanted freedom lay.
Consequently the back-yard cage became not so much a means of keeping the owls with us, as a means of keeping them from being too closely with us.
The two fledglings were utterly unlike in character. Wol, the dominant member of the pair, was a calmly arrogant extrovert who knew that he was the world’s equal. Weeps, on the other hand, was a nervous, inconsequential bird of an unsettled disposition; and plagued by nebulous fears. Weeps was a true neurotic, and though his brother learned to be housebroken in a matter of a few weeks, Weeps never could be trusted on the furniture and rugs.
When they were three months old, and nearly full grown (although tufts of baby down still adhered to their feathers), Wol confirmed Mother’s first impression as to his ability to defend himself. At three months of age he stood almost two feet high. His wingspread was in the neighborhood of four feet. His talons were an inch in length and needle sharp, and, combined with his hooked beak, they gave him a formidable armament.