by Farley Mowat
One summer night he was in a huff as the result of a disagreement he had had with Mutt. When darkness fell he refused to come down from a high perch in a poplar tree in order to go to bed in the safe refuge of the cage. Since there was nothing we could do to persuade him, we finally left him in his tree and went to bed ourselves.
Knowing something of the ferocity of the night-stalking cats of Saskatoon, I was uneasy for him and I slept lightly, with one ear cocked. It was just breaking dawn when I heard the sound of a muffled flurry in the back yard. I leaped from my bed, grabbed my rifle, and rushed out of the front door.
To my horror there was no sign of Wol. The poplar trees were empty. Suspecting the worst, I raced around the corner of the house, my bare feet slipping in the dew-wet grass.
Wol was sitting quietly on the back steps, his body hunched up in an attitude of somnolent comfort. The scene could hardly have been more peaceful.
It was not until I came close, and had begun to remonstrate with him for the chances he had taken, that I saw the cat.
Wol was sitting on it. His feathers were fluffed out in the manner of sleeping birds so that only the cat’s head and tail were visible. Nevertheless, I saw enough to realize that the cat was beyond mortal aid.
Wol protested when I lifted him clear of his victim. I think he had been enjoying the warmth of his footrest, for the cat had been dead only a few moments. I took it quickly to the foot of the garden and buried it circumspectly, for I recognized it as the big ginger tom from two doors down the street. It had long been the terror of birds and dogs and fellow cats throughout our neighborhood. Its owner was a big man with a loud and raucous voice who did not like small boys.
The ginger tom was the first, but not the last, feline to fall into error about Wol. In time the secret cemetery at the bottom of the garden became crowded with the remains of cats who had assumed that Wol was just another kind of chicken and therefore easy meat.
Nor were dogs much more of a problem to the owls. Rather grudgingly, for he was jealous of them, Mutt undertook to protect them from others of his own race. Several times he saved Weeps from a mauling, but Wol did not really need his protection. One evening a German shepherd – a cocksure bully if ever there was one – who lived not far from our house caught Wol on the ground and went for him with murder in his eye. It was a surprisingly one-sided battle. Wol lost a handful of feathers, but the dog went under the care of a veterinary, and for weeks afterwards he would cross the street to avoid passing too close to our house – and to Wol.
Despite his formidable fighting abilities, Wol was seldom the aggressor. Those other beasts which, like man, have developed the unnatural blood lusts that go with civilization would have found Wol’s restraint rather baffling, for he used his powerful weapons only to protect himself, or to fill his belly, and never simply for the joy of killing. There was no moral or ethical philosophy behind his restraint – there was only the indisputable fact that killing, for its own sake, gave him no pleasure. Although perhaps, if he and his descendants had lived long enough in human company, he might have become as sanguinary and as cruel as we conceive all other carnivores – except ourselves – to be.
Feeding the owls was not much of a problem. Weeps ate anything that was set before him, on the theory – apparently – that each meal was his last. The future always looked black to him – such was his sad nature. Wol, on the other hand, was more demanding. Hard-boiled eggs, hamburger, cold roast beef, and fig cookies were his chosen articles of diet. Occasionally he would deign to tear apart a gopher that one of the neighborhood boys had snared on the prairie beyond the city; but on the whole he did not relish wild game – with one notable exception.
It has been said by scientists, who should know better, that the skunk has no natural enemies. It is this sort of smug generalization that gives scientists a bad name. Skunks have one enemy in nature – a voracious and implacable enemy – the great horned owl.
There can be few animal feuds as relentless as the one which has raged between horned owls and skunks for uncounted aeons. I have no idea how it originally started, but I know quite a lot about the tenacity with which it is still pursued.
The faintest whiff of skunk on a belated evening breeze would transform the usually calm and benign Wol into a winged fury. Unfortunately our house stood on the banks of the Saskatchewan River, and there was a belt of underbrush along the shore which provided an ideal highway for wandering skunks. Occasionally one of them would forgo the riverbank and do his arrogant promenading on the sidewalk in front of our house.
The first time this happened was in the late summer of Wol’s first year. The skunk, cocksure and smug as are all the members of his species, came down the sidewalk just as dusk was falling. Some children who were playing under the poplar trees fled the approaching outcast, as did an elderly woman who was airing her Pekinese. Swollen with his own foolish pride, the skunk strutted on until he came beneath the overhanging branches in front of the Mowat home.
Our windows were open and we were just finishing a late dinner. There was not much breeze, and by the time the first acrid warning came wafting into the dining room, Wol himself was ready to make his entrance. He came through the open window in a shallow dive and fetched up on the floor, depositing the still-quivering skunk beside my chair.
“Hoo-hoohoohoo-HOO,” he said proudly. Which, translated, probably meant “Mind if I join you? I’ve brought my own lunch.”
Owls are not widely renowned for their sense of humor, and Wol may have been an exception, but he, at least, possessed an almost satanic fondness for practical jokes, of which poor Mutt was usually the victim. He would steal Mutt’s bones and cache them in the crotch of a tree trunk just far enough above the ground to be beyond Mutt’s reach. He would join Mutt at dinner sometimes, and by dint of sheer bluff, force the hungry and unhappy dog away from the dish, and keep him away until finally the game palled. Wol never actually ate Mutt’s food. That would have been beneath him.
His favorite joke, though, was the tail squeeze.
During the searing heat of the summer afternoons Mutt would try to snooze the blistering hours away in a little hollow which he had excavated beneath the hedge on our front lawn. However, before withdrawing to this sanctuary he would make a careful cast about the grounds until he had located Wol, and had assured himself that the owl was either asleep or at least deep in meditation. Only then would Mutt retire to his repose, and dare to close his eyes.
Despite a hundred bitter demonstrations of the truth, Mutt never understood that Wol seldom slept. Sometimes the owl’s great yellow orbs would indeed be hooded, but even then – though he might appear to be as insensible as a graven bird – he retained a delicate awareness of all that was happening around him. His eyesight was so phenomenally acute as to completely discredit the old canard that owls are blind in daylight. Often I have seen him start from what appeared to be a profound trance, if not slumber, and, half turning his head, stare full into the blaze of the noonday sky while crouching down upon his roost in an attitude of taut belligerence. Following the direction of his gaze with my unaided eyes, I could seldom find anything threatening in the white sky; but when I brought my binoculars into play they would invariably reveal a soaring hawk or eagle so high above us that even through the glasses it seemed to be no bigger than a mote of dust.
In any event, Mutt’s suspicious reconnoitering before he gave himself up to sleep was usually ineffective and, worse than that, it served to alert Wol to the fact that his quarry would soon be vulnerable.
Wol was a bird of immense patience. He would sometimes wait half an hour after Mutt had slunk away to rest before he began his stalk. He always stalked Mutt on foot, as if disdaining the advantage given him by his powers of flight.
Infinitely slowly, and with the grave solemnity of a mourner at a funeral, he would inch his way across the lawn. If Mutt stirred in his sleep, Wol would freeze and remain motionless for long minutes – his gaze fixed and unblinking on
his ultimate objective – Mutt’s long and silken tail.
Sometimes it took him an hour to reach his goal. But at last he would arrive within range and then, with ponderous deliberation, he would raise one foot and poise it – as if to fully savor the delicious moment – directly over Mutt’s proud plume. Then, suddenly, the outspread talons would drop, and clutch….
Invariably Mutt woke screaming. Leaping to his feet, he would spin around, intent on punishing his tormentor – and would find him not. From the branch of a poplar tree well above his head would come a sonorous and insulting “Hoo-HOO-hoo-hoo,” which, I suspect, is about as close to laughter as an owl can come.
It seemed to be inevitable that any animal which we took into our family would soon cease to consider itself anything less than human; and it was so with Wol. Very early in life he took note of the fact that we others could not, or would not, fly, and he thereupon accepted a terrestrial way of life for which he was but poorly adapted.
When I visited the little corner store, some three blocks from home, Wol would usually accompany me, and he would walk. Strangers who did not know him (and there were few such in Saskatoon) were apt to be severely startled when they encountered him during one of these promenades, for he walked with a lumbering, rolling gait that smacked of a lifetime of alcoholism. Furthermore, he gave ground to no man. If a pedestrian bound upstream happened upon Wol going downstream, the pedestrian either moved aside or there was a collision. These collisions were not to be taken lightly. I recall all too vividly an occasion when a new postman, rapt in the perusal of the unfamiliar addresses on a bundle of letters, walked full into Wol one summer morning. The man was so completely preoccupied with his own problems that he did not even bother to glance down to ascertain the nature of the obstruction in his path, but blindly tried to kick it to one side. This, to Wol, was tantamount to deliberate assault. He rose on his dignity – which was immense – uttered a piercing hiss, and banged the offending human on the shins with his mighty wings. (Nor was this a gentle form of retaliation.) There was a sharp crack. The postman yelped in sudden pain, peered down at his feet, yelled even louder (this time on a high, keening note), and fled the neighborhood. It was left for me to collect the scattered letters and pursue him with what I hoped were appropriate apologies.
When school began again that fall I experienced some difficulty with the owls, but in particular with Wol. My school was on the opposite side of the river, a good three miles from home, and I reached it by bicycling over the Twenty-fifth Street bridge. When I began going to classes in September the owls were indignant, for they, who had been my constant companions all that summer, were now left alone. They did not readily accept this new state of affairs and, during the first week of the term, I was late on three successive days as a result of having to conduct my tenacious pair of followers back home.
On the fourth morning I grew desperate and tried locking them in the big outdoor pen – which they had long since ceased to use. Wol was infuriated by this treatment and he tore into the chicken-wire barrier with angry talons. I sneaked hurriedly away, but before I was halfway across the bridge a startled shout from a pedestrian, and the scream of brakes from a passing car, alerted me to some unusual happenstance. I had barely time to apply my own brakes when there was a wild rush of air, a deep-throated and victorious “Hoo-HOO!” and two sets of talons settled themselves securely on my shoulder. Wol was breathless from the unaccustomed business of flying, but he was triumphant.
It was by then too late to take him home again, so I went resignedly on my way to school. I left him in the yard, perched on the handlebars of my bicycle, and insecurely tied with binder twine.
My third class that morning happened to be French. The teacher was a desiccated female whose spiritual home may have been Paris, but who had never actually been farther east than Winnipeg. She was affected, humorless, and a tyrant. None of us liked her. Yet I actually felt sorry for her when, in the midst of the declination of an irregular verb, Wol whumped moodily in through the second-story window and slid to an unsatisfactory halt upon the top of her hardwood desk. The exclamation with which she greeted him was given in very old Anglo-Saxon, without even a hint of a French accent.
I had an interview with the principal after this incident, but he was a reasonable man and the upshot was that I escaped corporal punishment on the understanding that my owl would stay at home in future.
I achieved this end, but only at the cost of giving the owls the free run of our house. Some ten minutes before I was due to leave for school I would invite Weeps and Wol into the kitchen, where they were allowed to finish off the bacon scraps left from our breakfast. Apparently Wol accepted this as a sufficient bribe, for he made no further attempt to follow me to school; and Weeps, who always accepted Wol’s lead, gave me no more trouble either. Mother, on the other hand, was not best pleased by these arrangements.
Although the majority of the human residents of Saskatoon knew about, and were inured to, our owls, there were at least two occasions when Wol and Weeps were the unwitting cause of some alarm and despondency to members of the human species. One of these took place in a prairie hamlet to the north of Saskatoon. It was in August, and my parents had decided that we should spend a week end at Emma Lake, a resort area far to the north. We loaded our camping gear aboard Eardlie and the six of us – Mother, Father, myself, Mutt, and the two owls – set out.
Having ridden in the car on several previous occasions, the owls had developed a preference in the matter of seating arrangements. Their chosen roost was the back of the rumble seat, where they were exposed to the full force of the slip stream. They loved it, for it offered them the same exhilarating thrill that all small boys experience when they thrust a hand out of a car window and let the wind act on it as it does upon the wing of an aircraft. My owls exploited this adventure to the limit. As soon as the car was in motion they would extend their great pinions as if in flight. If they then slanted the leading edges downward, the rush of air would force them into a squatting position. But when they tipped the leading edges upward, they would be lifted clean off the seat, and only the grip of their talons would keep them from soaring aloft like kites.
There was not sufficient room to allow both of them to bob up and down together, so they learned to alternate. While one was going down, the other would be coming up, in rhythmic frequency. Intoxicated by the rush of air, they would often break into song, and my father, caught up in the spirit of the thing, would punctuate their excited hootings with blasts on Eardlie’s horn.
Mutt also rode in the rumble seat, his eyes protected from the inevitable prairie dust by his motorcycle goggles. Thus the complete picture of Eardlie on the highways included a vignette of Mutt sitting stolidly between two active owls, and staring straight ahead through his outsize goggles with a kind of dour resignation.
At the time I never considered the effect that this apparition must have had upon the drivers of farm wagons whom we passed; and upon the drivers of other cars who passed us. But I have since had some penitential thoughts about the matter.
On the day we started north the sky was threatening, and we had only gone fifty or sixty miles when a thin drizzle began to beat upon the windscreen. The drizzle quickly thickened, and we halted to erect the canvas hood over the front seat. By the time we had finished, the rain had become a downpour, and when we drove off again, the rumble seat and its occupants were receiving a mighty scourging from the storm. Mutt wisely hunched himself down into the seat well where he was less exposed to the fury of wind and water, but the owls refused to abandon their exposed perch. They even seemed to be enjoying the pelting rain, although their feathers were soon plastered to their bodies, and their great wings hung sodden and drooping.
Eardlie was the one who really suffered from the deluge, and he began to cough and sputter alarmingly just as we entered one of those two-elevator, one-store, one-garage villages which sprout like toadstools on the western plains. The garage in this particu
lar village was a scrofulous frame shanty with a single antiquated gasoline pump in front of it. A black doorway gaped in the façade and, presuming that this led to the workshop, my father wheeled Eardlie through the thickening gumbo of the street and into the interior of the building.
The garage was dark and gloomy. A single meager light bulb glowed dismally, high up among the rafters, and by its wan and pallid rays we could barely distinguish the clutter of old tractor parts and rusted scrap that almost filled the place. The proprietor was not immediately in evidence and we were about to dismount and go searching for him when my eye was caught by movement near Eardlie’s right rear fender.
A man was crouching in the shadows there, apparently brooding over an old inner tube. He had a tire iron in his hand and he seemed quite oblivious to our presence.
We waited with what patience we could muster until he finished communing with the tube and then, very slowly, he began to straighten his back and stand up to our level.
His face came into view about three feet away from the rumble seat. I can see that face as clearly now as I saw it then. It was pallid, deeply lined, and petulant, and smeared with grease that had stiffened a week-old beard. It was wearing a look of querulous animosity, but this began to change as the eyes focused themselves on the car and its passengers. The pallidity of the face was accentuated in a startling manner. The jaws began to move as they might in a ruminant – though they were chewing on nothing more substantial than empty air.
It was then that Wol chose to shake himself. He spread his wings to their full extent, gave a little leap, and sprayed water far and wide. The shake transformed him, increasing his apparent size about threefold as his wet feathers came unstuck. The transition was startling enough; but when he concluded the performance by loudly clacking his great beak, by flipping the membranes sickeningly over his yellow eyes, and by giving throaty voice to his relief – the effect was devastating.