The Tale of Oat Cake Crag

by Susan Wittig Albert

  The badger’s explanations may have partly satisfied the Professor’s curiosity about this Water Bird, as Bosworth had said the thing was called, but they had raised even further concerns in the owl’s mind. No matter what Mr. Baum’s machine ate or didn’t eat, and no matter that it bore such an innocuous (and misleading!) name, it was an undeniable threat to the people and animals around Windermere. The noise of the beastly thing obviously terrified horses and sheep and cows. It was only a matter of time before a horse became so frightened that it lost its head and plunged over a cliff and killed itself and its rider, or the cows refused to give milk, or the ewes abandoned their lambs.

  The Professor shuddered at the thought of dead horses and motherless lambs. But there was worse. Motor-car engines were notorious for stopping unexpectedly in the middle of nowhere and not starting again until they were towed to a mechanic who could bully them back into operation. What would happen if the aeroplane’s engine stopped when it was high in the air? Why, the thing would come right down, that’s what would happen—and it wouldn’t come down in a graceful glide, like other respectable birds, landing lightly on the earth, then giving its wings and its tail a shake to settle its feathers.

  No.

  It would fall straight down.

  Fall like a stone.

  And whoever was standing beneath it would be smashed flat. If it happened to fall onto a house or a barn or a church, many persons might be smashed flat. And then there would be a great hue-and-cry and letters to The Times and threats of lawsuits, none of which would matter in the slightest, of course, to those who were smashed and dead, although the lawsuits might bring some comfort to the living.

  The Professor scowled, reminding himself irritably that this sort of thing was exactly what one had come to expect from these presumptuous humans, who had no respect for their place in the Great Chain of Being. If Mother Nature had intended them to fly like owls and angels, she would certainly have given them wings. But Nature had not chosen to do so, and attempts by humans at flight—like that of the legendary wax-winged Icarus—could only end in ignominy, or worse. Flying was a business that ought to be left to the professionals. To himself, for instance.

  But Mr. Baum and his pilot obviously intended no such thing. They had loftier goals, and the more the Professor thought about the impertinence of their uninvited, unwelcome invasion of his skies (his skies!), the more incensed he became.

  How dare they? How dare they! Really, something must be done, and the sooner the better.

  But Mr. Baum had already plummeted (like Icarus) from the lofty heights of Oat Cake Crag and perhaps would not survive the night. Nothing to be done there. Moreover, the owl was rather full of vole (it had been a truly delicious meal), the hour was late, and the wine had put him into that pleasant state which is known to the colonial Australians as half-cocked. And of course, there was absolutely no point in flying across the lake in the middle of the night to do something about the Water Bird, since the creature was clearly not nocturnal and would be sound asleep in its barn until the next day.

  Which is why the Professor put up no resistance at all when a nap crept up stealthily behind him and seized him by the scruff of the neck, throwing him bodily down upon his bed and refusing to let him up until the sun had risen above the eastern shore of Windermere, crossed the lake to Claife Heights, and was peering into his windows.

  The owl woke from his slumber refreshed and hungry. As he was preparing breakfast (coffee, toast, and a lightly scrambled pigeon’s egg with a bit of kipper), he recalled his intention of the night before.

  “Yes, indeed. Something must be done about that Water Bird,” he muttered to himself as he tucked his napkin under his chin and sat down to his egg. “But in order to know what, I shall first have to learn more about the creature’s flying habits. I must spy out its strengths and vulnerabilities. I must know something of the man who flies it—who he is and what his purposes are. I shall reconnoiter.” He munched on his toast, giving the matter more consideration. “But perhaps I should take a sandwich. I might not be back until tea.”

  So when breakfast was over and the washing-up done, the owl made a sandwich of thickly sliced ham and onions between slices of buttered bread spread with his favorite Dijon mustard, and wrapped it in brown paper. Then he donned the khaki flying vest that he wore on longer aerial missions and stuck a pad and pencil stub in one pocket, a folded map in another, and the sandwich in a third. He wound a green wool muffler around his neck and put on his daytime flying goggles, the ones with the dark lenses. (As you know, owls’ eyes are adapted to night flight, and sunlight is uncomfortable.)

  His preparations concluded, the Professor flew up to the top of his beech tree and took off in the direction of the lake. As he flew, he noted with some pride the power of his wings, the way he could change direction with the slightest flick of his tail, and how aerodynamically suited his feathers were to the flow of the air. If his engine failed (he could scarcely comprehend such a thing), he would not fall but would merely swoop down to the nearest treetop. All perfectly natural. All entirely perfect, just as Nature intended. And if you are thinking that perhaps our owl is just a little too smugly self-satisfied, I hope you will reconsider. In his owlness, he embodies everything to which the flying machine’s designer and builder might aspire. In my opinion, he has a right to feel smug.

  Now, as it happened, the Professor’s flight path took him directly over Oat Cake Crag at the very same moment that Mr. Heelis picked up Mr. Baum’s spyglass and began looking across the lake. Curious, the owl tilted his wings and circled overhead, wondering what the four men were doing and why they had climbed the crag. It seemed clear that their activity had nothing to do with his mission, however. So the owl left them to their own devices, took a visual sighting, and flew across Belle Isle (the long island in the middle of the lake) to Cockshott Point, where the flying machine lived when it was not in the air.

  The lake itself was no more than about three miles wide, so the owl’s flight was not a long one. It was, however, quite bouncy, for the breeze was blowing briskly from the north. The Professor was glad he was wearing his vest and woolen muffler, although he wished he had thought to bring some candied ginger. Ginger is a good remedy for airsickness, and after being buffeted and bounced about, the owl was feeling distinctly queasy. If he hadn’t been on such an important assignment, he would have turned around and flown home, for it was no sort of weather to be flying for fun. He was relieved when he arrived at his destination.

  Cockshott is a grassy point, a favorite of trippers, ramblers, and people who just want to stand and admire the lake, which is certainly one of the loveliest in all England. The pretty finger of land juts out into the water very close to the picturesque, shore-side town of Bowness-on-Windermere. (The novelist Arthur Ransome called this town Rio, in his stories of Amazons and Swallows, which you may have read as a child.) When you visit, you will see that the busy little harbor is home to dozens of sailboats and fishing boats as well as the ferry that crosses over to the western side of the lake. It is really quite crowded most of the time, with boats going to and fro and hither and yon, just as it was at the time of our story.

  And at the time of our story, Cockshott was also home to the Water Bird. When the flying boat was not in the air or on the water, it took shelter in a large, rickety-looking wooden hangar, with wide doors that opened at both the front and the rear. The hangar was built right at the lake’s edge, with a steep wooden slipway that slanted down over the rocks and into the water below. As the owl arrived and took up his observation post on a nearby pine tree, he saw that the machine was just emerging from its hangar and sliding gingerly down the slipway, winched down by ropes and accompanied by several men. This appearance had already attracted an excited crowd of spectators, pushing and jostling along the shore, pointing and shouting as the Water Bird slid clumsily down the ramp. The owl took out his notebook and pencil and began jotting down as much as he could make out of the mach
ine’s appearance, construction, and operation, as a good spy should do.

  Now, I should like to give you some technical details about this aeroplane that our owl is likely to miss. If you have no interest in the history or mechanical operations of this machine, you might wish to skip the following four paragraphs and go on to the one that begins “But in a few moments ...” If you do, please be assured that you won’t miss any important bits of story, although the description of the machine might help you to understand what is about to happen when Water Bird takes to the air.

  Very well, then. If you have ever seen a biplane—that is, a plane with two canvas-covered wings, one stacked on top of the other like two pieces of cardboard held apart by toothpicks—you can easily picture how the Water Bird looked. Or you might want to look for a photograph in a book about early aeroplanes, under its name. I did, and discovered this interesting information: “The Lakes Water Bird is remembered as the first consistently successful British seaplane, developed by the Windermere based Lakes Flying Co, during 1911.”

  Oh. You thought this aeroplane was something I had made up for the purposes of our story? Oh my dears, oh no, oh not at all! Water Bird was very real, and the way people—and especially Miss Potter—felt about it at the time was just as I have told you. In fact, in its day, the affair of the seaplane was rather a cause célèbre, with discussions in Parliament, articles in The Times, and a great deal of hullabaloo.

  But to go on. This particular aeroplane was built in Manchester, England, and first flown on May 19, 1911. Then it was brought to Windermere, where its wheels were replaced with a pontoon and airbags and where it was flown for the first time on the following November 25. (If you are keeping track, you know that this is just four months before the beginning of our story.) The aeroplane’s top wing was forty-two feet long, the bottom thirty-two, and the body just over thirty-six feet long. Unlike most modern planes, this one was known as a “pusher,” and had an eight-foot-six-inch propeller mounted in the rear so that it pushed the plane forward, rather than pulling it through the air, as a forward propeller does. The motor (if you care about such things) was a fifty-horsepower Gnome nine-cylinder rotary engine, which is about the size of the motor on your neighbor’s outboard motor boat. Since the Water Bird was a hydroplane, it had no wheels, but rather a central mahogany pontoon or float, with a cylindrical airbag (known locally as a “Wakefield sausage”) slung under each of the lower wings. When it settled into the water, it was buoyed up by the pontoon and stabilized by the airbags. Like all early planes, Water Bird lacked a cockpit or any sort of enclosed body, and was mostly a matter of wings, a tail, and struts. The pilot sat on the leading edge of the lower wing and managed the motor, rudder, and ailerons. There was a second seat behind the pilot, in case someone wanted to fly along.

  And in this case, someone did, as the Professor, still taking notes in his lookout tree, could plainly see. The pilot, a wiry, dark-bearded fellow, sat in front, giving orders to the men who were assisting Water Bird down the ramp. A passenger was perched in the second seat, holding on to the struts with both hands and looking as if he already regretted his wish to go up in the air—and they hadn’t even left yet.

  But in a few moments, the machine, the pilot, and the passenger were safely bobbing on the water in front of the slipway. Someone gave the propeller a hard turn, and the engine sputtered to life. The spectators cheered and threw their hats in the air and shouted, “Good luck! Stay out of the water!” and “Hope you come back in one piece!”

  And then the hydroplane began to move, maneuvering clumsily amongst the crowded moorings and out to the choppy open water of the lake, where the wind was blowing hard—too hard, the owl thought, to make a takeoff possible. But this did not deter the pilot. After a moment, he turned the aeroplane into the wind and speeded up his engine. The propeller turned faster and faster until it was nothing but a blur, and the Water Bird began to bounce and skip across the white-capped waves, its wings tipping first to one side and then the other. The Professor thought it looked for all the world like an ugly, ungainly duckling who wanted to fly but wasn’t exactly sure how to get off the water and into the air.

  And then, as the owl watched, Water Bird took to the sky, rising just a few feet at first, then higher and higher, until it was twenty, then fifty, then a hundred feet in the air. From the crowd on the shore came a great shout, whether of triumph or disappointment the owl couldn’t say. He knew enough about the human temperament to suspect that half of the spectators longed to see the aeroplane fly successfully whilst half longed to see it crash.

  But if the owl wanted to find out more about Water Bird’s strengths and vulnerabilities in flight, he would have to get closer. He pocketed his pad and pencil, flew out of his tree, and stroking with his powerful wings, easily caught up to the aeroplane, which seemed to be having a bit of a hard go, struggling to gain speed and altitude against the powerful headwind. The owl himself, a much more accomplished flier, did not like flying into such a blustery breeze, but he was on a serious spy mission and now was not the time to worry about a few gusts.

  So for a few minutes, the Professor (not wanting to call attention to himself) cruised just behind and below the lower wingtip, out of sight of the pilot and the passenger. He noted that the engine was very, very loud (imagine a motor boat’s outboard motor running at top speed not ten feet from your head) and that its violent operation seemed to make the struts hum and vibrate. He saw that the flimsy wings flexed in the air currents, and that the rudder swung from side to side as the pilot steered the machine. He also saw there were clumsy-looking hinged flaps on the trailing edges of the wings, apparently used to maintain or restore the flying balance, and that the pilot operated these by bamboo poles.

  “Poles!” the Professor thought scornfully. “How very primitive.” He flexed his own sturdy wing feathers, which were perfectly configured to do exactly the same thing without a single conscious thought on his part—and certainly required no bamboo poles. None of his other observations struck him as very significant, though. The machine did not appear to be at all sturdy, and the pilot had to manipulate a great many moving parts, and of course, the engine had to operate continuously to keep it from falling out of the sky. But Water Bird was flying. In fact, it was flying very well.

  And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. The motor, which had been running more or less smoothly, gave a series of abrupt hiccups, coughed, sputtered, and stopped. In the dead silence, the owl could hear the panicked passenger cry out, “What’s happened? Why has it stopped?”

  The pilot was working furiously to get the engine started again, but he was unsuccessful, and the aeroplane—which was really very rickety—put its nose down, hesitated for a heartbeat, and then began a perilously steep dive toward the water, some hundred or so feet below. The passenger gave an earsplitting shriek. The Professor, amazed, held his breath. He had never seen such a thing before. Would Water Bird fall into the lake and sink like a stone? Or would it plunge like a loon beneath the waves and come up a little farther on with a fish in the pilot’s lap?

  It didn’t do either. The pilot, still wrestling the controls and with the passenger screaming hysterically in his ear, managed to pull the machine up at the last minute so that it landed on its center pontoon. It hit the water hard, bounced ten feet into the air, then bounced again, and again, one wing up, one wing down. Then one wing-tip airbag caught the surface of the water and spun the machine around. Both men were catapulted out of their seats and into the water, where they clung to the floating aeroplane, which appeared to have crumpled its right wing and broken its tail.

  “Help!” the passenger shrieked frantically. “Help, somebody! I can’t swim! I don’t want to drown!”

  “That’s enough,” commanded the pilot. “Be quiet. You’re not going to drown. Hang on. The Bird floats.”

  And so it did, after a fashion. Since one of the wing airbags was damaged, the aeroplane seemed to be listing heavily. Luckily, however, there was
a sailboat not far away and it came to the rescue immediately. The yachtsman dropped the mainsail, furled the jib, and paddled up to the floating plane. He pulled both men into his boat, the pilot obviously chagrined, the passenger clearly angry. “I want my money back,” the owl heard the passenger demand loudly. “I wasn’t counting on a crash.”

  It didn’t take long for a pair of small boats to rush out from Cockshott Point, attach lines to the floating Water Bird, and tow it back to shore, whilst the pilot directed the operation by shouting instructions from the sailboat. The Professor, curious, followed closely and perched in a nearby tree to watch as the pilot and two other men winched the crippled aeroplane back up the slipway and into the hangar.

  The spectators were watching, too, all of them exceedingly well satisfied. They had seen the aeroplane dive into the lake and could go home and tell everyone all about it (with plenty of exaggeration, of course). It wouldn’t be long before the entire district knew that the Water Bird’s engine had failed and that it had gone down right in the middle of Windermere with a mighty splash. It was only by the grace of God and the extraordinary skill of the pilot (and the lucky fact that a sailboat was nearby) that the lives of the two men aboard were saved.