Owls in the Family

by Farley Mowat

  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 BABY 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 day
time 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.

  chapter 8

  The banks of the Saskatchewan River were very steep where the river ran through the prairie to the south of Saskatoon; and about two miles downstream from the city was a perfect place for digging caves. Bruce and Murray and I had our summer headquarters down there, in an old cave some hobos had dug a long time ago. They had fixed it up with logs and pieces of wood so it wouldn’t collapse. You have to be careful of caves, because if they don’t have good strong logs to hold up the roof, the whole thing can fall down and kill you. This was a good cave we had, though; my Dad had even come there and looked it over to make sure it was safe for us.

  It had a door made of a piece of tin-roofing, and there was a smokestack going up through the ceiling. Inside was a sort of bench where you could lie down, and we had two old butter-crates for chairs. We put dry hay down on the floor for a carpet, and under the hay there was a secret hole where we could hide anything that was specially valuable.

  The river ran only a hop-skip-and-a-jump from the door of the cave. There was a big sand bar close by which made a backwater where the current was slow enough for swimming. Standing right beside the swimming hole was the biggest cottonwood tree in the whole of Saskatchewan. One of its branches stuck straight out over the water, and there were old marks on it where a rope had cut into the bark. An Indian who was being chased by the Mounties, a long, long time ago, was supposed to have hanged himself on that branch so the Mounties wouldn’t catch him alive.

  We used to go to our cave a couple of times a week during the summer holidays, and usually we took the owls along. Wol had learned how to ride on the handle bars of my bicycle; but Weeps couldn’t keep his balance there, so we built a kind of box for him and tied it to the carrier behind the seat. Mutt and Rex used to come too, chasing cows whenever they got a chance, or racing away across the prairie after jack rabbits.

  We would bike out to the end of Third Avenue and then along an old Indian trail that ran along the top of the riverbank. When we got close to the cave we would hide our bikes in the willows and then climb down the bank and follow a secret path. There were some pretty tough kids in Saskatoon, and we didn’t want them to find our cave if we could help it.

  Wol loved those trips. All the way out he would bounce up and down on the handle bars, hooting to himself with excitement, or hooting out insults at any passing dog. When we came to the place where we hid the bikes, he would fly up into the poplars and follow us through the tops of the trees. He usually stayed pretty close, though; because, if he didn’t, some crows would be sure to spot him and then they would call up all the other crows for miles around and try to mob him. When that happened he would come zooming down to the cave and bang on the door with his beak until we let him in. He wasn’t afraid of the crows; it was just that he couldn’t fight back when they tormented him. As for Weeps, he usually stayed right in the cave, where he felt safe.


  One summer afternoon, when we were at the cave, we decided to go for a swim. The three of us shucked off our clothes and raced for the sand bar, hollering at each other: “Last one in’s a Dutchman!”

  In half a minute we were in the water splashing around, and rolling in the slippery black mud along the edge of the sand bar. It was great stuff to fight with. Nice and soft and slithery, it packed into mushy mud-balls that made a wonderful splash when they hit something.

  Whenever we went swimming, Wol would come along and find a perch in the Hanging Tree where he could watch the fun. He would get out on the big limb that hung over the water and the more fuss and noise we made the more excited he became. He would walk back and forth along the limb, hoo-hooing and ruffling his feathers, and you could tell he felt he was missing out on the fun.

  This particular day he couldn’t stand it any longer, so he came down out of the tree and waddled right to the river’s edge.

  We were skylarking on the sand bar when I saw him, so I gave him a yell: “Hey Wol! C’mon there, Wol old owl! C’mon out here!”

  Of course I thought he would fly across the strip of open water and light on the dry sand where we were playing. But I forgot Wol had never had any experience with water before, except in his drinking bowl at home.

  He got his experience in a hurry. Instead of spreading his wings, he lifted up one foot very deliberately and started to walk across the water toward us.

  It didn’t take him long to find out he couldn’t do it. There was an almighty splash and spray flew every which way. By the time we raced across and fished him out, he was half-drowned, and about the sickest-looking bird you ever saw. His feathers were plastered down until he looked as skinny as a plucked chicken. The slimy black mud hadn’t improved his looks much either.