Owls in the Family (6 page)

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. Some
times 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.

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 Saska
toon 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:

D
EERE
B
ILLY:

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

B
RUCE

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….”