by Farley Mowat
“He sure must think owls are dumb,” Bruce muttered to me when Mr. Miller wasn’t near. “She may not see him, but she could see that tent if her eyes were tight shut; and I don’t think she’s going to like it.”
When the blind was finished, Mr. Miller said he was ready to try it.
“You boys go off for a walk,” he told us. “Make a lot of noise when you’re leaving. The books say birds can’t count—so the owl will think all three of us have gone and she’ll never guess I’ve stayed up here in the blind.”
“Okay, Mr. Miller,” I said. “C’mon, Brucie, let’s get going.”
We walked about a mile away to a little slough and started looking for red-winged blackbirds’-nests. It was another nice day and we forgot about Mr. Miller until we began to get hungry. Then we went back to the bluff.
Mr. Miller was on the ground. He had just finished the rest of his cold tea, but he didn’t look the least bit well. His face was awfully white, and his hands were shaking as he tried to put his camera away. The camera looked as if it had fallen out of a tree. It was all scratched, and covered with dirt.
“Get some good pictures, sir?” I asked him cheerfully.
“No, I didn’t,” Mr. Miller said—and it was a sort of snarl. “But I’ll tell you one thing. Any blame fool who says owls can’t count is a liar!”
On the way home Mr. Miller finally told us what had happened.
About an hour after we went walking, the owl came back. She lit on her nest and then she turned around and took a good long look at the little tent, which was on a level with her, and only about six feet away.
Mr. Miller was busy inside the tent focusing his camera and getting ready to take the owl’s picture, when she asked: “Who-WHO-OO-who-WHO-OO?”—and took one leap.
The next thing Mr. Miller knew the front was ripped right out of the tent and the owl was looking him in the eye from about a foot away.
Mr. Miller accidentally dropped his camera; and then of course he had to hurry down to see if it was all right. And that was when we got back to the bluff.
I guess it wasn’t a very good day for Mr. Miller, but it wasn’t too bad for us. Mr. Miller said he had seen three young owls in the nest and he thought they were about halfway grown, which meant they were about the right age to take home for pets.
All we had to do now was to figure some way to get hold of them.
Chapter 3
The next week seemed awfully long. The only time I really hated school was during the springtime—particularly in May when the birds were busy nesting on the prairies. This May week, what with thinking about the owls, and sitting by the open window sniffing the smells of springtime, I wished school had never been invented.
Every recess, and after school, Murray and Bruce and I talked about the young owls and tried to think of ways to get them out of their nest. Murray suggested we should cut down the tree; but that was too dangerous because the young owls might be hurt. Bruce said he might get his father to come and shoot the old owl so it would be safe for us to climb the tree; but that wasn’t fair.
The only thing I could think of was firecrackers. My idea was to get some small skyrockets and let them off under the nest to scare the mother owl away. The trouble was that we had no money and, anyway, the storekeepers wouldn’t sell skyrockets to kids our age.
Then, on Friday night, we had a storm of the kind called a “chinook.” Chinooks come down out of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta and sometimes they blow right across Saskatchewan—and they blow like fury. Lying in my bed on Friday night I could hear branches snapping off the poplar trees along the riverbank. The rain was pelting on the roof so hard that it scared Mutt (who always slept on my bed) and made him howl. I had to pull a quilt over his head to make him keep quiet. He hated storms. I worried about the young owls for a long time before I finally fell asleep.
Early on Saturday morning Murray called for me and we met Bruce at the Railroad Bridge. It was a fine morning and the sun kept popping in and out between the white clouds that were racing across the sky trying to catch up to the chinook. Everything was steaming from all the rain, and the prairie was soggy wet.
We hurried across the fields and didn’t care if our feet did get soaked, because we were worried about the owls. When we were still quite a way from Owl Bluff, Bruce gave a shout:
“Lookee!” he yelled. “Old Miller’s blind is gone!”
Sure enough, six or seven of the biggest cottonwoods were snapped right off at the tops and, as for Mr. Miller’s blind, it had been blown clean out of its tree and nobody ever did find it again. But the worst thing was the owl’s-nest. The rain and wind had smashed it to pieces, and all that was left was a stick or two stuck in the crotch where the nest had been.
There was no sign of the old owls at all; but on the ground near the foot of the tree were two young owls—and they were cold and dead. They were so young they had grown only about half their feathers, and baby-down was still sticking to them all over. I don’t know whether they were killed by the fall, or not; but they were as wet as sponges and I think they probably died from being so wet and cold all night long.
We felt as miserable as could be, and all we could think of to do was to have a funeral for the little owls. Bruce had his jackknife with him and he started to dig a grave while Murray and I went looking for the right kind of sticks to use for crosses. There was a big pile of brush nearby, and I happened to give it a kick in passing. Something went snap-snap-snap from under it. I shoved my hand under the brush and touched a bundle of wet feathers.
Bruce and Murray came over and we pulled the brush away. There was the missing owlet, the third one that had been in the nest, and he was still alive.
He was bigger than the other two, and that was probably because he was the first one hatched. Horned owls are funny that way. They begin to lay their eggs in March when it’s still winter on the prairie. The eggs are laid a few days apart, but from the time the first one is laid, the mother has to start “setting.” If she waited until she had a full clutch of eggs, the early ones would be chilled and would never hatch. The first egg that’s laid hatches first, and that young owl gets a four-or five-day head start on the next one who, in turn, gets a head start on the next one.
The one we found must have been the first to hatch because he not only was bigger than the others but must have been a lot stronger too. When the nest blew apart, and he fell to the ground, he was able to wiggle under the brush pile for shelter, and that probably saved his life.
He was about as big as a chicken, and you could see his grown-up feathers pushing through the baby-down. He even had the beginnings of the two “horn” feathers growing on his head. A surprising thing about him was that he was almost pure white, with only small black markings on the ends of his feathers. When we found him he looked completely miserable, because all his down and feathers were stuck together in clumps, and he was shivering like a leaf.
I thought he would be too miserable to feel like fighting, but when I tried to pick him up he hunched forward, spread his wings, and hissed at me. It was a good try, but he was too weak to keep it up, and he fell right over on his face.
I was still a little bit afraid of him, because his claws were long and sharp, and his beak—which he kept snapping—seemed big enough to bite off my finger. But he did look so wet and sad that after a while I stopped being afraid. I got down on my knees in front of him and, very slowly, put my hand on his back. He hunched down as if he thought I was going to hurt him, but when I didn’t hurt, he stopped hissing and lay still. He felt as cold as ice. I took off my shirt and put it over him, and then I picked him up as carefully as I could and carried him out of the bluff so he could sit in the sunshine and get dry and warm again.
It was surprising how fast he started to get better. In half an hour his feathers were dry and he was standing up and looking around him. Murray had brought along some roast-beef sandwiches for lunch. He took some meat out of the sandwiches and held it out
to the owl. The owl looked at him a minute, with its head on one side, then it gave a funny little hop and came close enough to snatch the meat out of Murray’s fingers. It gave a couple of gulps, blinked its eyes once, and the meat was gone.
He was certainly a hungry owl! He ate all the meat we had, and most of the bread as well. When I found some dead mice that his mother must have left on the edge of the nest, and which had also been blown to the ground, the owl ate them too. They must have been hard to swallow, because he ate them whole. But he got them down somehow.
After that we were friends. When Bruce and I started to walk away from him, just to see what he would do, the owl followed right along behind us like a dog. He couldn’t fly,of course; and he couldn’t walk any too well either. He kind of jumped along, but he stayed right with us all the same. I think he knew he was an orphan, and that if he stayed with us we’d look after him.
When I sat down again, he came up beside me and, after taking a sideways look into my face, he hopped up on my leg. I was afraid his claws would go right through my skin, but they didn’t hurt at all. He was being very careful.
“Guess he’s your owl, all right,” Bruce said, and I could see he was a little jealous.
“No, sir, Bruce,” I replied. “He can live at my place, but he’s going to be our owl—all three of us.”
We left him sitting in the sun by the haversacks and then we buried the other two little owls and had a funeral over them. After that we were ready to go home.
We decided the best way to carry our new pet was to put him in my haversack. He didn’t like it much, but after a struggle we managed to stuff him into it. We left his head sticking out so he could see where he was going.
Mutt and Bruce’s dog, Rex, hadn’t been with us that morning. I think the two of them had gone off cat-hunting before we got up. But as we were walking along the sidewalk in front of my house, we met old Mutt coming back from wherever he had been.
Mutt was cross-eyed and shortsighted, and so he never could see any too well. He came up to me to say hello, wagging his long tail and sniffing me—and then suddenly he smelled owl. I don’t think he knew exactly what it was he smelled, because he had never been close to an owl before. But he knew he smelled something strange. I stood there trying not to laugh while he sniffed all around me. He snuffed my trousers and then he began to sniff the haversack. When his nose was nearly in the owl’s face, the bird opened its beak and snapped it shut again right on the end of poor old Mutt’s black nose. Mutt gave a yelp you could have heard a mile away, and went loping off to hide his hurt feelings under the garage.
We put the owl in the summerhouse and when Dad got home from work the owl was sitting on an orange crate watching the gophers running around on the floor below him. It kept him busy. His head kept turning one way and then the other until it looked as if he were going to unscrew it right off his shoulders. He didn’t know what to make of the gophers, because he had never seen a live one before. But he was certainly interested in them.
“Better count your gophers, Billy,” said my father. “I have an idea they may start disappearing. By the way, what do you call your owl?”
I hadn’t thought of any name for him up until that moment, but now one just popped into my head. I remembered Christopher Robin’s owl in Winnie-the-Pooh.
“His name is Wol,” I said.
And Wol he was, forever after.
chapter 4
I woke up early on Sunday morning, while everyone else in the house was still asleep. I sneaked downstairs in my pajamas and went out into the back yard to see how Wol was getting along. The grass was still wet with dew, and it was cold and slippery under my bare feet.
I peeked through the screen of the summerhouse but for a while I couldn’t see Wol. He had got down off his orange crate and was standing in the shadows, on the floor. There wasn’t a single gopher in sight, and I had an awful moment as I wondered if he had eaten the lot of them. Then I realized this was silly, for there had been thirty gophers—and he was only one small owl.
Wol didn’t see me. He seemed fascinated by a pile of old sacks lying in a corner and, as I watched, he made a hop and a skip and jumped up on top of the sacks.
Then we both found out where the gophers were. I never saw so many gophers move so fast. They came shooting out from under the sacks like bullets, and they went crazily bouncing from side to side of the summerhouse looking for some new place to hide.
I guessed what had happened. Wol must have been feeling lonely, and so he decided to make friends with the gophers. But if Wol didn’t know anything about gophers, the gophers knew all about owls. When he plopped down among them they must have run for shelter under those sacks as if the devil himself was after them.
Now that Wol had accidentally (or was it on purpose?) chased them out into the open again, they went mad. One big fellow came zooming against the wall, bounced off it, and ran headlong into Wol. Wol jumped, fluffed his feathers, and gave a surprised little hoot. The gopher probably thought his last moment had come, but anyway he wasn’t going to die like a coward; so he bit Wol on the leg.
Wol exploded. One minute he was on the floor, and the next he was clinging upside-down to the screening at the top of the summerhouse. He was scared to death. I don’t think anything in the world could have persuaded him to go back down there among those bouncing, biting gophers.
I went into the summerhouse and untangled Wol from the screening and took him outside. He was so glad to see me that he started to hoot and couldn’t stop. It was like hiccups. I couldn’t put him back with the gophers, so I tucked him under my arm, tiptoed back into the house and upstairs to my room.
My bedroom was on the third floor, right up under the roof. Nobody ever came up there except me and the maid, whose name was Ophelia (we always called her Offy), who made my bed and tried to dust the room. I knew perfectly well Mother would never allow me to keep Wol in the house, but I was pretty sure that if I could just keep him locked in my room, and could hide him under the bed when Offy was due, nobody would know.
When I went downstairs for breakfast about an hour later I left Wol sitting on the back of a chair acting quite at home. I thought I closed the bedroom door tight, but the latch must have slipped.
Dad and I had breakfast together, but Mother wasn’t feeling well that day so she decided to have hers in bed. After Offy had brought me my porridge, she went into the kitchen and got a breakfast tray ready for Mother.
Offy was an odd sort of girl. She used to have queer dreams. She claimed she used to see angels and things in her dreams. Sometimes she saw them when she was supposed to be wide awake. But she was a good cook, and so Dad and Mother never bothered much about the things she claimed she saw.
Offy took the breakfast tray and started up the back stairs. These stairs were dark and spooky because there was no window opening on them. About halfway up the stairs she met Wol on his way down.
Offy gave a terrible yell and dropped the tray. Wol, who was still nervous after the trouble with the gophers, let out a hoot, and tried to fly. He and Offy arrived at the bottom of the stairs together, all in one flapping lump.
After my father got her quieted down, Offy went straight to her room and packed her bags. She marched out of the house without even saying good-by to Wol and me—and none of us ever saw her again.
Dad was unhappy.
After breakfast he called me into his study for a talk.
“Billy,” he said, “if that owl ever comes into this house again, he goes into the roasting pan; and as for you, you’ll get a licking you’ll remember for a week!”
But my father never stayed mad long. The very same afternoon he got out his carpenter’s tools and he and I worked until suppertime making a special cage for Wol. It was a big cage, about ten feet square, and covered all over with chicken wire. It was built around the stump of a dead tree which stood in the back yard; and on the side of the tree Dad nailed a wooden box, as a place where Wol could go to keep dry
if it rained.
Wol liked the new cage all right; the only trouble was that he got lonely when he was left in it. As long as Murray or Bruce or I was with him he was perfectly happy; but when there was nobody around he would sit on the tree stump all hunched-up, looking miserable. I tried putting some pigeons in to keep him company, but they were scared of him, and he was nervous of them, so that didn’t work.
About two weeks later, the problem solved itself.
It was a Tuesday and I was biking home from school along the alley behind our block. As I came along I saw a couple of kids standing beside a big oil-drum and dropping stones into it. One of the kids was Georgie Barnes, but the other was a big kid I didn’t know.
Georgie saw me coming and gave a yell: “Hi, Billy! Come over here and have some fun!”
What those two kids were doing wasn’t fun at all. In the bottom of the barrel was a baby owl and, for a minute, I thought it was Wol, until I saw it was smaller, and a lot darker in color. It was the dirtiest bird I ever saw. Its feathers were all ruffled and broken, and it was smeared with oil. The kids were dropping stones on it, and every time a stone hit it, it would scrunch down and make a weepy noise, like a tin whistle with a tremble in it.
I wanted to tell them to stop dropping stones, but I knew that would mean a fight, and I knew I couldn’t lick the two of them.
“Where’d you get it?” I asked the big kid.
“What’s it to you, shorty?”
“Well,” I said, “I have a kind of a zoo at my place and I could sure use an owl.”
“Whatcha gimme for him?”
“Give you my Scout knife.”
“Let’s have a look.”
I showed it to him and he opened all the blades and then he said: “It ain’t much good. But this here owl ain’t much good either. Pretty near dead. O.K. kid, it’s yours.”