Owls in the Family

by Farley Mowat

  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 a
ir 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.

  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:

  SURPRIS PET DO NOT FEEED

  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.