Owls in the Family (4 page)

chapter 6

On the day school closed for the summer, the T. Eaton Department Store announced it was going to sponsor a pet parade two weeks later, and there were going to be prizes for the most interesting pets, and the best displays. Bruce was the first of our gang to hear about it, and he came right over to my house to tell Murray and me.

“Hey!” said Bruce, after he had told us all he knew. “With the animals we got, we could win a dozen prizes. What about it?”

Murray and I didn’t need much convincing. We spent the next couple of days planning what we’d do.

First we decided to hitch Mutt and Rex to my old express wagon. We would fix it up with colored cardboard and stuff, so it looked like a circus wagon. We planned to put an old fur muff of my mother’s around Mutt’s neck to make him look like a lion, and we were going to paint black stripes on Rex so he would look like a zebra. Then we decided to build a circus cage on the wagon, and fill it with different kinds of gophers. Finally, we decided to have
the owls riding on top of the cage, all dressed up in dolls’ clothes.

We had two weeks to get things ready, and we really worked.

First we built the circus cage, and when we were finished it looked just like the real ones that used to come to Saskatoon with the Bailey Brothers Circus every summer. Ours wasn’t as strong, though, because the sides were only cardboard, painted red and blue and yellow. And instead of iron bars, we used chicken wire to keep the gophers from getting out.

When it was finished we made a hike out to the bluffs near the exhibition grounds, because that was a good place to find wood gophers. We caught six of them, and on the way home we snared about a dozen striped gophers that were living in a cutbank by the roadside. Together with the thirty ordinary gophers we already had, this added up to an awful lot of gophers, and there wasn’t going to be room for all of them in one circus cage.

Murray fixed that.

“Why don’t we make another cage out of my wagon?” he suggested. “Then we’d have twice as much chance to win first prize.”

It was a dandy idea, so we went ahead and built the second cage. Then we decided to put some of our white
rats with the extra gophers in the second one, to make it different.

The day before the parade—which was on a Saturday—we had everything ready. I had borrowed some dolls’ clothes from Faith Honigan, who lived on the next block. Murray had got some washable sign paint from his dad, so he could paint the black stripes on Rex. We had found a set of real dog harness for Mutt, and we had made a second set for Rex, out of twine. The cage-wagons were all finished and stored away in our garage so they wouldn’t get wet if it rained.

On Sunday morning, I didn’t even wait to eat my breakfast before I rushed out to the garage. Murray was already there, but Bruce didn’t come along for about an hour, and we were getting worried he might not make it at all. By the time he showed up we had the gophers and the white rats all loaded and I was trying to get the dolls’ clothes on the owls. Bruce came into the yard with a shoebox under his arm, and a big grin on his face.

“Hi-eee!” he shouted. “I guess we’ll win the first prize sure. Bet you can’t guess what I have in this box?”

Murray and I couldn’t guess. I shook the box a couple of times, and whatever was inside was pretty heavy. I was just going to untie the string and open it when Bruce grabbed it away from me.

“No, sir,” he said. “Don’t you do that! We might never catch this critter again!”

“Aw, come on!” I begged him. “What you got in there, anyway? Come on, Brucie. You have to tell us.”

“Don’t have to—don’t aim to!” Bruce said. “Just you wait and see.”

Murray and I pretended we didn’t care what he had in his shoebox anyway. I went back to putting the dolls’ clothes on the owls, and it wasn’t easy. Weeps just stood there and whimpered while I pulled a pink dress over his head and pinned a floppy hat on him. But Wol took one look at the sailor suit I had for him and then he rumpled himself up into a ball and began to clack his beak and hiss. It took two of us to hold him down while we got him dressed, and by the time we were finished he was in a terrible temper.

We couldn’t trust him to stay quietly on the wagon-top after all that fuss, so we decided to tie him to it with some twine around his legs. That made him madder still.

While Bruce and I were working on the owls, Murray was trying to paint the stripes on Rex. Rex didn’t like it, and there was about as much black paint on Murray as on the dog. Then Murray said he might as well finish what Rex had started, so he smeared black paint all over his own face and said he would go in the parade as a Zulu warrior.

Just before we were ready to start for downtown, Bruce
took the paintbrush and printed some words on the shoebox; then he tied the box to the top of the second wagon. What he printed was:

SU
RPR
IS PET D
O
NO
T
F
E
EED

We harnessed up the dogs, with Mutt leading because he knew how to pull in harness and Rex didn’t. Rex didn’t seem to want to learn, either. He kept pulling off to one side, and every time he did it he almost upset the wagons. We had an awful time getting our outfit all the way downtown and we were nearly late for the parade, which started at ten o’clock. One thing, though: by the time we did get there, old Rex was just about worn out and he had stopped acting like a bucking bronco.

The parade formed in front of the Carnegie Public Library and then it was supposed to go about six blocks to the T. Eaton Store, where the judges’ stand was.

It seemed like a million kids were there with every kind of pet you ever saw. One little boy, about five years old, was leading a Clydesdale horse as big as an elephant, and the horse had B
ABY
on the blanket it was wearing. If that thing was a baby, I hope to eat it!

There were a lot of goats, and it was a hot day, and you could smell goats all over Saskatoon. Some of the girls were wheeling cats along in baby carriages, and the cats were
wearing silly hats and were pinned down under lacy covers. Some of them were yowling fit to scare the dead. There were more dogs than you could shake a stick at—every kind of dog you ever heard about, and a lot of kinds that nobody ever heard about.

Right in the middle of the parade was a boy leading a pet skunk on a string. He had the middle of the parade all to himself, too. Nobody was crowding
him!

There were pet rabbits, ducks, chickens, geese, a couple of pigs, and a bunch of pedigree calves. There was even one little boy carrying a quart jar full of water, with a bunch of tadpoles swimming around in it.

You’d expect lots of trouble, what with all the animals and the fact that it was a hot day and everybody was excited and there was so much noise. But there really wasn’t much trouble. There were dogfights, of course; and one dog, who wasn’t even in the parade at all, made a go for a cat in a baby carriage and that stampeded one of the goats. But some salesmen from the store were in the parade too, and they got things quieted down, though one of them got bitten on the leg, a little bit.

It took about an hour for our outfit to get opposite the judges’ stand. There were five judges, some women and some men. The Mayor of Saskatoon was one of them.
There were two Mounties beside the stand, dressed in their red coats. A lot of parents were jammed up against the stand too, so they could cheer if their kids won a prize.

I’d had a good look at the parade by then, and there wasn’t an outfit that had a patch on ours. We were sure to win a good prize, and I figured it would be first prize. We
had a little trouble though when we got to the stand, because Rex was so tired he just lay down and wouldn’t get up again. But that only made the judges laugh, and they came down from the stand to take a good look at our entry.

I overheard one of the woman judges tell another woman that ours was the best rig she had seen, and “Isn’t it cute the way it’s decked out just like a real circus?” The first prize seemed to be right in our pockets, when the president of the T. Eaton Store, who was also one of the judges, saw the shoebox on top of the second wagon.

“Hello,” he said. “Now here’s a good idea. Look at this, Sam! These boys have a special pet in reserve. That’s what
I
call smart merchandising!”

Well, of course, everyone crowded around to see what the special pet was; and Bruce, with a silly smile on his dopey face, untied the box and lifted up the lid.

What was in the box was—a rattlesnake.

I guess you can imagine what happened next. All the people shoving and pushing to get away from us got the animals so upset that they began to stampede too. The skunk got crowded into a storefront, and that scared him, and he did what skunks always do when they get scared. There were calves and goats going every which way, and the dogs all went crazy and started chasing anything that
ran—and that was everything there was. Our two cages got upset and squashed and all the gophers and white rats went skittering off under people’s feet. Wol climbed up on top of my head and kept beating his wings so I couldn’t see too much of what was happening, but I could still hear it. Women were screaming, and one of the Mounties had hauled out his big revolver and was waving it in the air, while the other one never stopped blowing his silver whistle. All you could hear was yells and howls and barks and screams and yowls. I tell you, there never had been anything like it in Saskatoon for a hundred years.

We didn’t stick around any longer than we could help. We saved the wagons, our two dogs, the owls, and that darn snake. Bruce grabbed the shoebox the moment the ruckus started and stuck to it like a bur until we got back to my place.

“Gee,” he said, as we were getting a drink from our garden hose. “If I’d lost that old snake I’d have got my britches tanned from here to Mexico. It belongs to our hired man, and it’s been his pet for fifteen years—ever since he was a cowboy down in the Cypress Hills. It’s so old it hasn’t any teeth, nor any poison either, but he sure is fond of it all the same. It sleeps right with him in his bunk….”

I still think we should have won first prize.

chapter 7

When the owls first came to live with us, Mutt didn’t think much of them. He was jealous of all my pets, and he was particularly jealous of the owls because they took up so much of my time.

He never did get on very well with Wol, but after a few weeks he got so he could tolerate Weeps. I think this was because Weeps was so helpless, and because Mutt had to defend him from other dogs and from the neighborhood cats. And, of course, Weeps got very fond of Mutt, knowing he could depend on the old boy to protect him. Whenever Weeps was let out of his cage he would start searching around for Mutt. Once he spotted him, Weeps would give a little whoop of relief and go scuttling over to his protector’s side. If Mutt was lying down, Weeps would snuggle in between his paws. Sometimes he would get so close that his “horn” feathers would tickle Mutt’s nose, and then Mutt would sneeze and almost blow Weeps over backward.

If Weeps got to be too much of a nuisance, Mutt would try to hide from him, under the garage. But that wasn’t
much use. Weeps would squeeze under the garage too. He hated to let Mutt get out of his sight for even a minute.

Mutt’s relations with Wol were another story. Wol wasn’t afraid of anything that walked, flew or crawled; and that included Mutt. As far as Wol was concerned, old Mutt was something to be teased and pestered, and Wol used to tease the life half out of him.

Mutt was an absent-minded sort of dog. Instead of burying a bone he didn’t happen to be using at the moment, he would often forget about it and leave it lying on the grass. That was a mistake, because sooner or later Wol would see it, swoop down and carry it off. It wasn’t that Wol liked bones himself (not having any teeth, he couldn’t chew them), he just liked to take them away from Mutt. Once he had the bone, he would put it somewhere where Mutt could see it or smell it—but couldn’t reach it. Sometimes he would put the bone in the crotch of a tree just high enough so Mutt couldn’t jump up and get it, or sometimes he would hide it in the gutters of the porch roof so that the nice rich bone smell would drift down and torment Mutt until he was nearly crazy.

Another of Wol’s tricks was stealing Mutt’s dinner. Mutt used to be fed on the back porch, about five o’clock each afternoon. When Wol was feeling particularly bored or ornery, he would play the dinner-stealing game. Having
waited until Mutt started eating, Wol would scoot around to the front of the house and set up such a ruckus that it sounded like two dogfights and a catfight all happening at once. Mutt always fell for it. As soon as he heard the row he would come tearing around the corner,
woof-woof-woofing
, and ready for trouble. But while he was peering around in his shortsighted way, to see where the trouble was, Wol would have flown over the top of the house and be gobbling down Mutt’s dinner on the back porch. When Mutt got back and found the plate empty he would look very puzzled. Being absent-minded, he couldn’t always remember whether he had finished his dinner or not. All he knew was that he still felt hungry.

But Wol’s favorite game with Mutt was the tail-squeeze.

Mutt was already a fairly old dog when the owls came to live with us, and during the heat of the summer afternoons he liked to have a snooze under the poplar trees in our front yard. He had hollowed out a bed for himself in the moist earth beneath the trees where he could lie in comfort until the sun started to go down and the air began to get a little cooler.

Wol, on the other hand, never seemed to sleep at all, although according to the bird books horned owls are supposed to sleep all day and hunt all night. Perhaps because
Wol had never read those books he was just as active in the daytime as at night, and maybe more so.

On summer days, when I was away somewhere and there were no kids around to play with, Wol would get bored. That was usually when he would play the tail-squeeze game.

After first making sure Mutt was really fast asleep, Wol would begin to stalk the old dog the way a cat will stalk a bird. He always did it on foot; I think because he felt it wouldn’t be playing fair to use his wings. Starting from the front porch, Wol would sneak across the lawn moving so slowly and carefully he hardly seemed to move at all.

If Mutt happened to raise his head he would see Wol standing stock-still on the grass and staring innocently up at the sky, as if he were wondering whether it was going to rain. After a long, suspicious look at Wol, Mutt’s eyelids would begin to droop, his head would sag, and soon he would be fast asleep again. He snored, too, and as soon as the snores started, Wol would continue his slow and careful approach.

Sometimes it took Wol an hour or more to cross the lawn; but he did it so quietly and cautiously that Mutt never really had a chance.

When he had sneaked up close enough, Wol would
raise one big foot and—very, very gently—lower it over the end of Mutt’s long and bushy tail. Then Wol would let out a piercing scream and at the same moment he would give the tail a good hard squeeze.

Poor Mutt would leap straight into the air, yelping with surprise and pain. By the time he got his bearings and was ready to take a bite out of Wol, the owl would have flown
to the limb of a nearby tree from which he would peer down at Mutt as much as to say: “Good heavens! What a terrible nightmare you must have been having!”

Mutt would roar and froth around the tree, daring Wol to come down and fight like a dog. Then Wol would make things even worse by closing his eyes and pretending to go sound asleep.

Although Wol loved practical jokes, the funny thing was that he never really harmed other animals if he could help it. Of course, if something tried to hurt
him—
that was different. Then Wol could be dangerous. But he certainly wasn’t the fierce and bloodthirsty kind of bird that owls are supposed to be. He wouldn’t even go hunting on his own; if a gopher or a white rat happened to get loose on the lawn, he wouldn’t touch it. However, there was one kind of animal he would attack, and that was a skunk.

It seems that all horned owls just naturally hate skunks, though no one knows the reason why. What’s more, horned owls are the only things I know of that will eat a skunk, and they even seem to like the taste.

Our house in Saskatoon stood close to the river, and along the bank of the river was a regular jungle of bushes and poplar trees which made an ideal place for skunks to live. Because they didn’t have any enemies in town, the riverbank skunks had become so cocky they would stroll
along the sidewalk in front of our place as boldly as if they owned it.

That was before Wol came to live with us.

Cocky as ever, one of the riverbank skunks decided to take a walk down Crescent Avenue one summer evening just after Wol had learned to fly. The skunk came strutting along the sidewalk quite sure nothing in the world would dare to bother him. He ambled along, taking his own time, until he got under the overhanging branches of our poplar trees…

Mother and Dad and I were having dinner. The dining room windows were open because it had been such a hot day. All of a sudden there was a great
swooooosh
of wings—and there, on the window sill, sat Wol. Before any of us had time to move, he gave a leap and landed on the floor beside my chair. And he hadn’t come empty-handed. Clutched in his talons was an enormous skunk. The skunk was dead, but that didn’t help matters much because, before he died, he had managed to soak himself and Wol with his own special brand of perfume.

“Hoo-hoohoohoo-HOO!” Wol said proudly.

Which probably meant: “Mind if I join you? I’ve brought my supper with me.”

Nobody stopped to answer. We three people were already stampeding through the door of the dining room, coughing
and choking. Wol had to eat his dinner by himself.

It was two weeks before we could use the dining room again, and when Mother sent the rug and drapes to the cleaners, the man who owned the shop phoned her right back and wanted to know if she was trying to ruin him.

Wol didn’t smell so sweet either, but he couldn’t understand why he was so unpopular all of a sudden. His feelings must have been hurt by the way everybody kept trying to avoid him. After two or three days, when even I wouldn’t go near him, or let him come near me, he became very unhappy. Then an idea must have come into his funny head. He must have decided we were mad at him because he hadn’t shared his skunk with us! So one day he went down to the riverbank and caught a second skunk, and brought it home for us.

By this time he was so soaked in skunk oil that you could smell him a block away. Some of our neighbors complained about it, and so finally my father had to give Wol a bath in about a gallon of tomato juice. Tomato juice is the only thing that will wash away the smell of skunk.

Poor Wol! By the time Dad was through with him he looked like a rag mop that had been dipped in ketchup. But he got the idea, and he never again brought his skunks home to us.