Owls in the Family (3 page)

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.”

Funny how some kids are. One minute Georgie Barnes was trying to kill the little owl with stones, but the moment I bought it he began to act as if he wanted to be its nurse. He climbed into the barrel and handed it out to me, and then he followed me home and helped me clean some of the oil off it with a rag. He told me the big kid had found an owl’s nest in a bluff near Sutherland, and had shot the old owl and all but one of the young ones with his .22 rifle. He only brought the last young one home as a sort of joke he was going to play on his dog.

It was a pretty sick little owl. I guess it hadn’t eaten anything for a long time, and the stones and the oil hadn’t done it any good either. It was too sick to sit on a branch of the tree in Wol’s cage, so I put it on the floor of the cage while I went to the house to get some hamburger for it.

When I got back, the new owl was lying on its side and Wol was standing over it. I thought he must have taken a whack at it; but Georgie said No, that wasn’t what had happened. Georgie said the new owl had just fallen over by itself, and when Georgie tried to pick it up again, Wol jumped down out of the tree and wouldn’t let Georgie near it.

When I went into the cage and held some meat out toward the new owl, Wol hunched down, spread his wings and hissed at me as if he were saying: “You leave that bird alone, or you’ll have me to deal with!”

“Easy, there!” I told him. “Take it easy, Wol. This little fellow’s hungry, and I’m just going to feed him.”

I don’t know if Wol understood me, but he stopped hissing anyway. I held some bits of hamburger against the new owl’s beak and after a while he took a piece. Finally he ate the whole lot, and then he staggered to his feet and stood there, swaying back and forth. Before I could touch him, Wol sidled over until the new owl was leaning right against him. Then the new bird closed his eyes and seemed to go to sleep.

That’s the way we left them. By the next morning the new owl was up on the branch with Wol, and from that time on, Wol was never lonely.

When Dad got home from the office that evening, I told
him all about it. I told him the new one was called Weeps, because of the weepy-whistle noise he made all the time.

“
Two
owls!” my father cried, and banged his hand against his forehead. “Now we’ll never get another maid! All right, Billy. BUT NO MORE OWLS—you understand?”

He needn’t have worried. Two owls was all I wanted, anyway.

chapter 5

Though there were only a few more weeks left of school before the summer holidays began, each day seemed a hundred years long. I could hear the river boiling over the sand bars as I sat at my desk, and I could smell the sticky-sweet smell of the young poplar leaves. Our school stood right beside the river, and every now and then a flock of ducks would go over the playground,
quack-quack-quacking
as if they were laughing at us for being stuck inside, while they were flying free across the wide prairie. What made it even worse, for me, was just sitting there wondering what my owls were doing.

After school I would jump on my bike and pedal like forty over the bridge and down our street. When I got close to home I would give a couple of owl-whoops to let Wol and Weeps know I was coming. By the time I skidded into the yard and parked my bike, they would be tramping impatiently up and down the cage. As soon as the door was
open they would come waddling out as fast as they could, ready for play.

Wol liked to scramble up on the back of an old lawn chair, then he would take a wild leap and try to land on my shoulder. If he missed, he would nose-dive into the lawn; but it never bothered him much. He would hop back to the chair, climb up, and try again until finally he made my shoulder.

Weeps was different. He never believed he could do anything by himself, and so he would just sit on the lawn and whimper until I picked him up and put him on my other shoulder. I think Weeps’s spirit must have been broken in the oil drum, because as long as I knew him he was always afraid of doing things.

With both owls riding on my shoulders I used to go down the street to where our gang played games in an empty lot. Can-the-can was a favorite game that spring; sort of a combination of baseball and football. We used an inflated rubber beach ball that belonged to Murray, and when all the kids got chasing it, Wol would get so excited he would join in too. One time he got in the way of the ball just when someone kicked it, and it knocked the wind clean out of him. The next time the ball came near him he made a jump and got hold of it with both sets of claws. There was a hissing noise and the ball went limp. Wol was pleased as
punch, but
we
weren’t, because it was the only ball we had.

All the kids, except Bruce and Murray, were a bit scared of the owls, so when I had them on my shoulders I could go anywhere in Saskatoon and be safe as houses. Even the tough kids down by the flour mill kept their distance when I had the owls with me. Those owls were better bodyguards than tigers.

Wol and Weeps grew fast. Weeps would eat anything he could get and still be hungry; but Wol was fussy about his food. At first Wol would only eat cooked butcher’s meat, hard-boiled eggs and fig cookies. Later on he would eat anything that came from our table, even vegetables. (All except parsnips, which he hated.) Occasionally both owls would eat a dead gopher that some kid had shot or snared as a present for them; but they didn’t really like their supper raw.

By the middle of June, when they were three months old, my new pets had reached full size. Wol was a little bigger than Weeps and stood about two feet high; but his wing-spread was nearly five feet across! The claws of both were about an inch long and as sharp as needles; and their big hooked beaks looked strong enough to open a tin can. Weeps was a normal owl color, sort of a mottled brown, but
Wol stayed almost pure white, with just a few black markings on his feathers. At night he looked like a ghost.

Although they were grown-up now, neither of the owls seemed to know what his wings were for. Because they saw us walking around, they seemed to think they had to walk around too. Maybe if I had been able to fly, they would have learned to fly a lot sooner; but the way things were, both owls tried to do what we kids did. They saw us climbing trees, and so they took to climbing trees.

It was pretty silly to watch Wol climbing. He used to really climb. First he’d jump up to a low branch and then he’d use his beak and his claws to half-lift himself and half-shinny to the next branch. My pigeons used to circle around sometimes and watch him. They must have thought he was crazy. People sometimes thought so too. One day Wol was climbing a poplar in our front yard when a man and a woman stopped on the sidewalk and watched him, with their mouths open.

Finally the man said to me: “What on earth’s the matter with that bird? Why doesn’t he
fly
to the top of the tree?”

“He can’t fly, sir,” I replied. “He never learned how.”

The man looked at me as if I were crazy too, and walked off without another word.

The day Wol actually learned to fly was one I’ll remember for a long time. He had climbed a cotton wood in the
back yard and had got way out on a thin little branch, and couldn’t get back. You never saw an owl look so unhappy. He kept teetering up and down on the end of the branch, and
Hoo-hoo-HOOING
at me to come and get him out of his fix.

Dad and Mother came out to see what was going on, and they started to laugh; because who ever heard of a bird that couldn’t get itself down out of a tree? But when people laughed at Wol it hurt his feelings and upset him.

What with the laughter, and the fact that it was suppertime and he was hungry, Wol got careless. Finally he teetered a little too far forward and lost his balance.

“Hoo-HOOOOOO!” he shrieked as he bounced through the branches towards the ground. Then, all of a sudden, he spread his wings; and the next thing any of us knew, he was flying…well, sort of flying. Not having done it before, he didn’t really know what he was doing, even then.

You could tell he was just as surprised as we were. He came swooshing out of the tree like a rocket, and he seemed to be heading straight for me; but I ducked and he pulled up and went shooting back into the air again. He was still
hoo-hooing
like mad when he stalled and slid back, downward, tail-first, and hit the ground with an awful thump.

By that time I was laughing so hard I had to lie on the grass and hold my stomach. When I looked up at last, it
was to see Wol stomping into his cage. He was furious with all of us, and I couldn’t persuade him to come out again until next day.

At supper that night my father said: “You know, I don’t believe that owl realizes that he’s an owl. I believe he thinks he’s a human being. You’ll have to educate him, Billy.”

It wasn’t quite as bad as that. Wol eventually did learn to fly pretty well, but he never seemed to like flying, or to trust it. He still preferred to walk wherever he was going.

Weeps never learned to fly at all. I tried to teach him how by throwing him off the garage roof, but he wouldn’t try. He would just shut his eyes, give a hopeless kind of moan, and fall like a rock without even opening his wings. Weeps didn’t believe he could fly, and that was that.

Just before school ended, Wol learned a new trick which bothered me a lot. He discovered that if he took a good swipe at it with his claws, he could tear a hole in the chicken wire of the cage. Once he learned to do this it was impossible to keep him penned up when he didn’t want to be.

This worried me because there were a lot of tough alley cats, and tough dogs too, in Saskatoon. I was afraid if one of them ever got hold of Weeps or Wol, when I wasn’t around, then that would be the end.

After a look at the owls’ claws and beaks, Mother said she thought it would be the end of any cat or dog that tackled Wol or Weeps; but I still worried.

One night Wol had a little argument with Mutt about a bone, and Wol got mad and wouldn’t come down out of
his tree to go to his cage at dusk. I called him and called him, but he just ignored me, and finally I had to go off to bed and leave him out.

I slept pretty lightly that night, with one ear cocked for trouble, because I knew the cats would be about. Sure enough, just at dawn I heard a squawk and a scuffling noise outside. I hopped out of bed, grabbed my air gun, and whipped out of the house as fast as I could.

Wol wasn’t in the tree. In fact there was no sign of him anywhere in the front yard. I raced around the corner to the back, expecting to find him dead and eaten; but, instead, I found him asleep on the back porch steps. He had his feathers ruffled out the way birds do when they are asleep, and it wasn’t until I got right up to him that I saw the cat.

Wol was sitting on it, and only its head and tail stuck out beneath his feathers; but enough was showing so I could see that this cat wasn’t going to bother anybody any more.

I pulled Wol off, and he grumbled a little bit. I think he’d found that cats made good foot-warmers.

It was a big ginger tomcat that lived two doors down the street and belonged to a big man who didn’t like kids. This cat had been the terror of the birds, other cats, and even of the dogs in our neighborhood for years.

I got a shovel and buried it at the bottom of the garden. I suppose the cat had thought Wol was some new kind of chicken. Well, he found out differently.

Dogs were no problem to my owls either. Though Mutt was no owl-lover himself, he wouldn’t let any strange dog chase them—not without a fight. Several times he saved Weeps from a mauling. But he didn’t need to look after Wol.

There was a German shepherd who lived near us, and one day this dog met Wol out walking, and decided to see how horned owl tasted.

I heard the ruckus and came running. But by the time I got to the street Wol was sitting on the dog’s back, digging his claws in for all he was worth, and ripping chunks out of the dog’s ears with his beak. The shepherd headed down Spadina Avenue
yip-yip-yipping
till you could have heard it in Timbuctoo.

Wol rode him for three blocks, and might have ridden him right out of town if the dog hadn’t dodged through a hole in a board fence and knocked Wol off. I had chased after them on my bike, but by the time I got to the fence Wol had picked himself up, given himself a shake or two to settle his feathers, and was his usual friendly self. He gave me a cheerful “Hoo-HOO-hoohoo!” and jumped up on the handle bars for a ride home.

Word seemed to get around after that, and the neighborhood dogs took to crossing over to the other side of the road when they saw Wol coming.