by Farley Mowat
I carried him ashore, but he didn’t thank me for it. His feelings were hurt worse than he was, and after he had shaken most of the water out of his feathers he went gallumphing off through the woods, toward home on foot (he was too wet to fly), without a backward glance.
Toward the middle of July Bruce and I got permission from our parents to spend a night in the cave. Murray couldn’t come because his mother wouldn’t let him. We took Wol and Weeps with us, and of course we had both dogs.
In the afternoon we went for a hike over the prairie looking for birds. Mutt, who was running ahead of us, flushed a prairie chicken off her nest. There were ten eggs in the nest and they were just hatching out.
We sat down beside the nest and watched. In an hour’s time seven of the little chickens had hatched before our eyes. It was pretty exciting to see, and Wol seemed just as curious about it as we were. Then all of a sudden three of the newly hatched little birds slipped out of the nest and scuttled straight for Wol. Before he could move they were underneath him, crowding against his big feet, and peep-peeping happily. I guess they thought he was their mother, because they hadn’t seen their real mother yet.
Wol was so surprised he didn’t know what to do. He kept lifting up one foot and then the other to shake off the little ones. When the other four babies joined the first three, Wol began to get nervous. But finally he seemed to resign himself to being a mother, and he fluffed his feathers out and lowered himself very gently to the ground.
Bruce and I nearly died laughing. The sight of the baby prairie chickens popping their heads out through Wol’s feathers, and that great big beak of his snapping anxiously in the air right over their heads, was the silliest thing I’ve ever seen. I guess Wol knew it was silly, too, but he couldn’t figure how to get out of the mess he was in. He kept looking at me as if he were saying, “For Heaven’s sake, DO something!”
I don’t know how long he would have stayed there, but we began to worry that the real mother might not find her chicks, so I finally lifted him up and put him on my shoulder, and we went back to the cave for supper.
We’d had a good laugh at Wol, but he had the laugh on us before the day was done.
After we had eaten we decided to go down to the riverbank and wait for the sun to set. A pair of coyotes lived on the opposite bank of the river, and every evening just at sunset one of them would climb a little hill and sit there howling. It was a scary sound, but we liked it because it made us feel that this was the olden times, and the prairie belonged to us, to the buffaloes and the Indians, and to the prairie wolves.
Wol was sitting in the Hanging Tree, and Rex and Mutt had gone off somewhere on a hunting trip of their own. It was growing dusk when we heard a lot of crashing in the trees behind us. We turned around just as two big kids came into sight. They were two of the toughest kids in Saskatoon. If they hadn’t come on us so suddenly, we would have been running before they ever saw us. But now it was too late to run—they would have caught us before we could go ten feet. The only thing we could do was sit where we were and hope they would leave us alone.
What a hope that was! They came right over and one of them reached down and grabbed Bruce and started to twist his arm behind his back.
“Listen, you little rats,” he said, “we heard you got a cave someplace down here. You’re too young to own a cave, so we’re taking over. Show us where it is, or I’ll twist your arm right off!”
The other big kid made a grab for me, but I slipped past him and was just starting to run when he stuck his foot out and tripped me. Then he sat on me.
“Say, Joe,” he said to his pal, “I got an idea. Either these kids tell us where the cave is, or we tie ’em to Ole Hanging Tree and leave ’em there all night with the Injun’s ghost.”
Just then the coyote across the river gave a howl. All four of us jumped a little, what with the talk of ghosts—but Joe said: “That ain’t nothing. Just a coyote howling. You going to tell us, kid? Or do we tie you to the tree?”
Bruce and I knew they were only trying to scare us, but we were scared all right. I was just opening my mouth to tell them where the cave was when Wol took a hand in things.
He had been sitting on the big limb of the Hanging Tree and, since it was almost dark by then, he looked like a big white blob up there. I don’t think he’d been paying much attention to what was happening on the ground below him, but when that coyote howled he must have thought it was some kind of a challenge. He opened his beak and gave the Owl Hunting Scream.
Did you ever hear a horned owl scream? Usually they do it at night to scare any mice or rabbits that happen to be hiding near into jumping or running. Then the owl swoops down and grabs them. If you’ve ever heard an owl scream you’ll know it’s just about the most scary sound in all the world.
When Wol cut loose it made even my skin creep, and I knew what it was; but the two big kids didn’t know.
Their heads jerked up, and they saw the ghostly white shape that was Wol up there in the Hanging Tree. And then they were off and running. They went right through the poplar woods like a couple of charging buffaloes, and we could still hear them breaking bush when they were half a mile away. My guess is they ran all the way to Saskatoon.
When they were out of hearing Bruce stood up and began rubbing his arm. Then he looked at Wol.
“Boy!” he said. “You sure scared those two roughnecks silly! But did you have to scare me right out of my skin too?”
“Hoo-HOO-hoo-hoo-hoo-HOO!” Wol chuckled as he floated down out of the tree and lit upon my shoulder.
chapter 9
Wol and Weeps were with us long enough to be well known in Saskatoon. Particularly Wol. As my father said, Wol never quite realized he was an owl. Most of the time he seemed to think he was people. At any rate, he liked being with people and he wanted to be with us so much that we finally had to stop trying to keep him out of the house. If we locked him out he would come and bang his big beak against the window panes so hard we were afraid the glass would break. Screens were no good either, because he would tear them open with one sweep of his big claws. So eventually he became a house owl. He was always very well mannered in the house, and he caused no trouble—except on one particular occasion.
One midsummer day we had a visit from the new minister of our church. He had just arrived in Saskatoon, so he didn’t know about our owls. Mother took him into the living room, and he sat down on our sofa with a cup of tea balanced on his knee, and began to talk to Mother about me skipping Sunday School.
Wol had been off on an expedition down on the riverbank. When he got home he ambled across the lawn, jumped up to the ledge of one of the living room windows and peered in. Spotting the stranger he gave another leap and landed heavily on the minister’s shoulder.
Mother had seen him coming and had tried to warn the minister, but she was too late. By the time she had her mouth open, Wol was already hunched down on the man’s shoulder, peering around into his face, making friendly owl noises.
“Who-who?” he asked politely.
Instead of answering, the minister let out a startled yelp and sprang to his feet. The tea spilled all over the rug, and the teacup shot into the fireplace and smashed into a million pieces.
It was all so sudden that Wol lost his balance; and when he lost his balance his talons just naturally tightened up to help him steady himself. When Wol tightened his grip the minister gave a wild Indian yell, and made a dash for the door.
Wol had never been treated this way before. He didn’t like it. Just as the minister reached the front porch, Wol spread his wings and took off. His wings were big, and they were strong too. One of them clipped the man a bang on the side of his head, making him yell even louder. But by then Wol was airborne. He flew up into his favorite poplar tree, and he was in such a huff at the way he had been treated that he wouldn’t come down again till after supper.
Riding on people’s shoulders was a favorite pastime with Wol. Usually he was so careful with his
big claws that you couldn’t even feel them. Sometimes when he was on your shoulder and feeling specially friendly, he would nibble your ear. His beak was sharp enough to have taken the ear right off your head at a single bite, but he would just catch the bottom of your ear in his beak and very gently nibble it a little. It didn’t hurt at all, though it used to make some people nervous. One of my father’s friends was a man who worked for the railroad, and he had very big, red ears. Every time he came for a visit to our house he wore a cap—a cap with ear-flaps. He wore it even in summertime because, he said, with ears as big as his and an ear-nibbling owl around he just couldn’t afford to take chances.
Wol was usually good-natured, but he could get mad. One morning Mother sent me to the store for some groceries. My bike had a flat tire so I had to walk, and Wol walked with me. We were only a little way from our house when we met the postman coming toward us. He had a big bundle of letters in his hand, and he was sorting them and not watching where he was going. Instead of stepping around Wol, he walked right into him.
Worse still, he didn’t even look down to see what it was he had stumbled over. He just gave a kind of kick to get whatever it was out of his way.
Well, you could do a lot of things to Wol and get away with it—but kicking him was something different. Hissing like a giant teakettle, he spread his wings wide out and clomped the postman on the shins with them. A whack from one of his wings was like the kick of a mule. The postman dropped his handful of letters and went pelting down the street, yelling blue murder—with Wol right on his heels.
After I got hold of Wol and calmed him down, I apologized to the postman. But for a month after that he wouldn’t come into our yard at all. He used to stand at the gate and whistle until one of us came out to get the mail.
Our owls were so used to going nearly everywhere with me now that when school started that fall I had a hard time keeping them at home. I used to bicycle to school, which was about two miles away across the river. During the first week after school opened, I was late four times because of having to take the owls back home after they had followed me partway.
Finally Dad suggested that I lock them up in the big pen each morning just before I left. Wol and Weeps hadn’t used that pen for a long time, and when I put them in they acted as if it was a jail. Wol was particularly furious, and he began to tear at the chicken wire with his beak and claws. I sneaked off fast. I was almost late anyway, and I knew if I was late once more I’d be kept in after school.
I was about halfway over the river bridge when a man on the footpath gave a shout and pointed to something behind my back. At the same time a car, coming toward me, jammed on its brakes and nearly skidded into the cement railings. Not knowing what was going on, I put on my brakes too, and I just had time to stop when there was a wild rush of air on the back of my neck, a deep “HOOO-HOOO-HOO!” in my ear, and Wol landed on my shoulder.
He was out of breath—but he was so pleased with himself that I didn’t have the heart to take him home. Anyway, there wasn’t time. So he rode the handle bars the rest of the way to school.
I skidded into the yard just as the two-minute bell was ringing and all the other kids were going through the doors. I couldn’t decide what on earth to do with Wol. Then I remembered that I had some twine in my pocket. I fished it out and used it to tie him by one leg to the handle bars.
The first class I had that morning was French. Well, between worrying about Wol and not having done my homework, I was soon in trouble with the teacher (whom we called Fifi behind her back). Fifi made me come up in front of the class so she could tell me how dumb I was. I was standing beside her desk, wishing the floor would open and swallow me up, when there was a whump-whump-whump at the window. I turned my head to look, and there sat Wol.
It hadn’t taken him long to untie the twine.
I heard later that he had banged on the windows of two or three other classrooms before he found the right one. Having found the right room at last, he didn’t waste any time. Unluckily Fifi had left one of our windows open. Wol ducked down, saw me, and flew right in.
He was probably aiming to land on my shoulder, but he missed and at the last second tried to land on Fifi’s desk. It was a polished hardwood desk; he couldn’t get a grip on it. His brakes just wouldn’t hold; he skated straight across the desk scattering papers and books all over the floor. Fifi saw him coming and tried to get up out of her chair, but she wasn’t fast enough. Wol skidded off the end of the desk and plumped right into her lap.
There were some ructions after that. I was sent to the principal’s office and Fifi went home for the rest of the day.
The principal was a good fellow, though. He just read me a lecture, and warned me that if I didn’t keep my owl away from the school in future, he would have to get the police to do something about it.
We finally figured out a way to keep the owls from following me to school. Each morning, just before I left, we would let Wol and Weeps into the kitchen. Mother would feed them the bacon rinds left over from breakfast, while I sneaked out the front door and rode away. It worked fine, but it was a little hard on Mother because the owls got so fond of the kitchen she usually couldn’t get them out of it again. Once I heard her telling a friend that, until a woman had tried to bake a cake, with two horned owls looking over her shoulders, she hadn’t really lived at all!
chapter 10
Thirty miles south of Saskatoon was a little village called Dundurn. It consisted of a garage, a couple of houses, and two red wooden grain elevators. Between Dundurn and the Saskatchewan River was a huge expanse of virgin prairie, and right in the middle of it was a slough so big it was almost a real lake, even though the water wasn’t very deep.
This lake was about the best place for ducks and geese and other water birds in the whole of Saskatchewan. The reed beds along its shores were full of yellow-headed black-birds, bitterns, coots and grebes. Out on the open water you could sometimes see two or three hundred families of ducks—mallards, pintails, shovelers and lots of other kinds. Sometimes there were flocks of whistling swans; and in the autumn so many geese stopped to rest that they almost hid the water.
Every summer we used to camp for a couple of weeks near Dundurn in a four-wheeled caravan my father had built, which we used to tow behind our Model A Ford. The caravan was fixed up like a little ship. It had ship’s bunks, a ship’s galley (which is what sailors call a kitchen), ship’s lamps, and a ship’s clock. On deck (the roof), there was even a little mast with a flag flying from it. People in Saskatoon used to call it Mowat’s Prairie Schooner. On a stormy night when the wind made the caravan rock back and forth you could lie snug in your bunk and find it hard to believe you weren’t on a real schooner, after all.
Of course, whenever we took the caravan on a trip, Mutt and the owls had to come along. Our Ford was a convertible with a rumble-seat. (A rumble-seat, something cars don’t have any more, was a sort of folding seat placed where the trunk is on a modern car.) This was where Mutt, the owls, my friends and I used to ride. Mutt always rode with his head and front feet stuck away out over the side of the car, while Bruce or I held onto his tail so he wouldn’t fall out on his nose. The owls used to perch on the back of the rumble-seat, and they had to hang on for dear life.
Because his eyes used to get sore from the dust of the prairie roads, Mutt had to wear goggles—the same kind that motorcycle riders wear. The sight of a goggled dog, two horned owls, and our prairie schooner used to make people in other cars take a long look at us as they went by. Sometimes they didn’t believe their eyes, and then they would turn their cars around and follow us to make sure they hadn’t been seeing things.
During the second summer that the owls lived with us, we went to Dundurn for a camping trip. There was lots of water in the lake that year and my father brought along his canoe, tied to the deck of the caravan. He paddled Bruce and me all around the lake looking at birds. We must have found a hundred ducks’-nests; and we even found the huge nest
of a sandhill crane.
The first few times we went out in the canoe, Wol came down to the shore to see us off, but he wouldn’t come canoeing with us. I think he still remembered the trouble he’d had with the Saskatchewan River, at the cave, and he didn’t trust water any more. All the same, he hated to be left out of things. But when Weeps made up his mind to join us in the canoe one day, Wol got up his nerve and decided he’d come too.
It wasn’t a very big canoe, and by the time two boys, one man, two owls and a dog had climbed in it was pretty crowded and pretty low in the water. We had to sit as still as mummies.
For a while Dad paddled in the open lake, and then we began to explore the reed beds. Soon we came to a muskrat’s house with the nest of a mallard duck built on top of it. We had a look into the nest and were wondering how long it would be until the eggs hatched out, when a crow came swooping over the marsh.
He caught sight of our two owls, and just about went crazy. He cawed and cawed until, in about five minutes, the sky was black with crows. The more that came, the braver they all got, and soon they were diving down within a couple of feet of our heads. Dad tried to scare them away by waving his paddle and shouting; but by this time they were so excited they paid no attention to us. I guess no crows had ever caught a pair of owls at such a disadvantage before, and they were going to make the most of it.
Weeps scuttled under my seat and hid between my legs—but Wol, who was perched on the bow of the canoe, wasn’t going to run away. He kept getting madder and madder until he was hissing and clacking his beak in a perfect fury. This made the crows even more excited, and some of them dived so close that the wind ruffled Wol’s feathers.