by Farley Mowat
Finally one crow came a bit too close. Suddenly Wol spread his wings and jumped into the air; and at the same time he gave a sort of half-turn on his side and grabbed at the crow with both sets of talons. There was an explosion of black feathers and the crow went squawking off across the marsh, half-naked.
We didn’t have time to watch him go. When Wol jumped, Bruce tried to catch him for fear he would fall in the water and be drowned. And that did it! Next second all of us, except Wol, were in the lake.
The water was only up to our knees, but the lake bottom was slimy black muck. As we scrambled to get hold of the canoe, Bruce and I and Dad got coated from head to foot with slime. Mutt, who had more sense than any of us, abandoned the canoe and headed for the muskrat house. Weeps, who must have thought this was the end, somehow managed to clutch hold of Mutt’s tail, and was towed to the muskrat house. Wol, who had been flying when the canoe upset and who now couldn’t find any place to land, kept circling over our heads, hooting at us to help him down. The crows were going wild; all the ducks and geese in the marsh were excited too; now they started to quack and honk until there was such a row you couldn’t have heard a cannon being fired.
It took us nearly an hour to get back to shore. Dad pushed Bruce and me into the flooded canoe, somehow; then he waded ahead towing us. On the way we stopped at the muskrat house and rescued Mutt and Weeps. Wol finally grew so tired that he had to land somewhere, and he flopped down on my father’s head.
This accident made us so angry with crows—any crows—that we could cheerfully have wrung the neck of every crow in Saskatchewan. Next morning Dad got out his shotgun and swore he was going to even up the score. He decided he would hide at the edge of a bluff near the lake, where the crows used to gather, and try to call them into range of his gun with a wooden crow-call. Bruce and I and Wol went with him, but we stayed out of sight in the middle of the bluff while Dad tried to get the “black devils,” as he called them, to come close enough to be shot.
But crows are wise birds in some ways. They can recognize a gun a long way off, and some of them must have spotted Dad’s shotgun. He blew and blew on his crow-call, but though there were lots of them around, they all stayed a healthy distance away. Eventually Wol got bored and the first thing I knew he had walked right out into the open and climbed up on a fence post.
The crow-call hadn’t worked. But Wol sure did.
As soon as they saw him the crows forgot all about being cautious, and about my father’s gun; they gathered in clouds and began diving at Wol.
Dad couldn’t miss. His shotgun was banging so steadily it began to sound as if a war had started. After each shot, the surviving crows would climb out of range. Then Wol would begin flapping his wings and hooting insults at them, and they would forget about the gun again.
The war with the crows lasted until Dad was out of ammunition. By then, there were a lot fewer crows around Dundurn.
When we got back to camp I was telling Mother about it, beginning with the way Wol had accidentally wandered out into the open.
“Wandered out?” my father interrupted. “Don’t you believe it! Wol knew what he was doing.”
And, come to think of it, Dad was probably right.
chapter 11
The spring when Weeps and Wol became three years old was a very sad spring for me. My father had taken a new job, so we had to leave Saskatoon and go east to the big Ontario city of Toronto. There would be no more sloughs, no gophers, no bluffs and, worst of all, no prairies in Toronto.
I hated the idea of moving; but most of all I hated leaving my friends behind me—both my human and my animal friends. We couldn’t take Weeps and Wol because they would have had to spend all their days locked up in a cage, and that would have been cruel. On the other hand, we couldn’t just turn them loose either, because they had been members of a human family for so long they wouldn’t have been able to look out for themselves.
All we could do was try to find someone who would give them a new home. I talked to most of my chums about this, and they all said they were willing to take my owls—but their parents wouldn’t hear of it. Then, one day, I thought of Bruce. He and his family had moved away from Saskatoon a while earlier and were running a fox farm about two hundred miles to the northwest. I sat down and wrote Bruce a letter, and a few days later I got this reply:
DEERE BILLY:
It is pretty good here. There are lots of ducks and we hav started the fox farm and got lots of pups. Dad says sure I can hav the owls. We hav a old fox pen I am fixing up to keep them and I am bilding a wood house in it to keep them warm. Rex is helthy and says hello to Mutt and says bring Mutt up here for a visit when you cum with the owls. There is a lot of Indians here and I go to school with a lot of real Indian kids. When you cum I will take you there and you can ride sum of their horses.
So-long,
Your old pal
BRUCE
I showed the letter to my father.
“Sounds fine, Billy,” he said. “What do you say we drive the owls up to Bruce’s place on Friday afternoon, and stay over for a visit until Sunday night?”
I said, yes, of course. And that was what we did.
It was a wonderful trip to Bruce’s. The sloughs were full of water and the water was covered with ducks resting on their way north. We saw prairie chickens dancing on the side of the road; and there were more meadowlarks and red-tailed hawks than you could shake a stick at. The owls rode with me and Mutt in the rumble-seat, and they had a wonderful time. When we got to the farm, Bruce’s mother had a big feed ready for us.
On Saturday Bruce took me to the Indian Reservation to meet his pals. One of them, a boy about my age named Harry Wild Hawk, loaned me a cayuse, and the three of us rode all over the old prairie that day, chasing coyotes and jack rabbits, on horseback.
On Sunday Bruce and I stayed around the farm and I helped him finish off the cage where Wol and Weeps would sleep at night. That was a sad business, though, and I kept wishing that Saturday could have gone on forever.
Wol and Weeps didn’t seem to suspect anything. I think they were having too much fun to be suspicious. Wol went off and explored the big poplar bluffs behind the fox farm. And then he walked all around among the fox cages, hoot-hooting at the foxes, and daring them to start something.
Weeps found his way to the meat house, where the fox food was ground up in a big mincing machine; and the hired man fed Weeps so many scraps that he could hardly walk at all.
Sunday night we put the two owls in their new cage. Weeps was asleep almost before I could turn the catch on the door, but all of a sudden Wol seemed to sense that something was wrong. He gave a funny sort of hoot and then he jumped over to the door and put his head against the wire mesh. I reached down and tickled him behind his “horns” for a minute and he seemed to think things were all right again. He climbed back up to his perch and fluffed out his feathers for the night.
I said: “Good-by, old owls. You look after each other. Someday, maybe, I’ll be back….”
BOOKS BY FARLEY MOWAT
People of the Deer (1952, revised edition 1975)
The Regiment (1955, new edition 1973, paperback edition 1989)
Lost in the Barrens (1956)
The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be (1957)
Grey Seas Under (1958)
The Desperate People (1959, revised edition 1975)
Owls in the Family (1961)
The Serpent’s Coil (1961)
The Black Joke (1962)
Never Cry Wolf (1963, new edition 1973)
Westviking (1965)
The Curse of the Viking Grave (1967)
Canada North (illustrated edition 1967)
Canada North Now (revised paperback edition 1967)
This Rock Within the Sea (with John de Visser) (1968, reissued 1976)
The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float (1969, illustrated edition 1974)
Sibir (1970, new edition 1973)
A Whale for the Killing (1972)
> Wake of the Great Sealers (with David Blackwood) (1973)
The Snow Walker (1975)
And No Birds Sang (1979)
The World of Farley Mowat, a selection from his works
(edited by Peter Davison) (1980)
Sea of Slaughter (1984)
My Discovery of America (1985)
Virunga: The Passion of Dian Fossey (1987)
The New Founde Land (1989)
Rescue the Earth! (1990)
My Father’s Son (1992)
Born Naked (1993)
Aftermath (1995)
The Farfarers (1998)
Walking on the Land (2000)
High Latitudes (2002)
No Man’s River (2004)
Bay of Spirits (2006)
THE TOP OF THE WORLD TRILOGY
Ordeal by Ice (1960, revised edition 1973)
The Polar Passion (1967, revised edition 1973)
Tundra (1973)
EDITED BY FARLEY MOWAT
Coppermine Journey (1958)
Copyright © 1961 by Farley Mowat
School paperback edition copyright © 1970 Farley Mowat
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Mowat, Farley, 1921—
Owls in the family
eISBN: 978-1-55199-199-3
1. Owls—Fiction. I. Frankenberg, Robert. II. Title.
PS8526.O89092 1989 C813’.54 C89-093766-4
PR9199.3.M69092 1989
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
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