'Hoo-Hoo-Hoo!'

I WAS on my way to my train, without even seconds to spare. He was going nowhere, and had the whole long night before him. I might have plunged on past him, but he stopped squarely in my path and looked over his shoulder at me with so quizzical, so challenging an air that it was my plans, not his, that were changed. And why not? What are trains or even the editorial demands of a morning newspaper when a screech owl bars one’s way within sight of the beacon of the Metropolitan Tower?

In the dusk of that April evening he looked like a parody of the Irishman of tradition. The tufts above his ears took the form of a battered, tilted hat. The long, folded wings made a shabby claw-hammer coat. Some trick of light — or of fancy — tucked a blackthorn stick beneath one arm. But most of all it was his posture, so erect, so sure, so ready for confab or conflict. I knew there was a twinkle in his eye, and close behind the twinkle the light of battle.

He looked at me over his shoulder, then looked away and walked ahead. It was not quite a strut, but something very close to it. He was not quite seven inches tall, and I was not quite six feet, but he had stopped me in my tracks. He paused again, and looked at me over his other shoulder. Victory was still his, and he walked ahead, his chest thrust out a bit farther. Far down the Greenway I could hear my train rumble into the station. In the house behind me Bryn, the terrier, was starting his after-dinner riot with an ancient shoe. They were sounds that no longer belonged in my world.

The little owl halted again and looked back. Never, by the way, did he look over the same shoulder twice in succession; perhaps there is a rule against it. This time he stood for so long that my eyes began to ache with the strain of peering through the gloom, and I moved closer. This seemed to be the very thing to do, for with another leisurely glance at me — over his right shoulder — my companion strutted on a little way, to pause and look and lure me as before.

It might have gone on indefinitely. After fifty yards and twenty minutes of it, though, the call of the office began to sound above the appeal of my strange adventure. I slipped across the street and started again for the station. My last clear view showed the little owl still in the middle of the sidewalk; still with his preposterous likeness to a Fair Day Irishman. I thought — at least I hoped — he watched my going with regret.

But I changed my notion later on. What he did say to himself was, much more probably: ‘Faith, there’s a stupid one! Gawking along behint me as if he thought I wanted the company of the likes o’ him, when all I did want was to get him away from where he was! ‘

For in the wreck of an apple tree just above the house there was a newmade nest — as we soon had reason to know. I began to suspect something of the sort when I returned at midnight. The long shadows among the trees were echoing with the little owl’s eerie cry, the velvet beat of his wings coming between the uplifts of his voice. He was very busy, indeed, and I stood for a time at the door reflecting upon the finer choice of a name for his kind the Southern darkies have brought to the North — the shivering owl. There is something of irritation in ‘screech’ owl; an unlovely name for an unlovely thing. But ‘shivering’ owl — there is imagination, description that falls just short of onomatopœia. It is a very picture of a name, of the dead hours of the night when his shattering cry wakes one to terror of the known and the unknown alike.

The next night brought proof of the sovereignty that had been established over what, by virtue of improvement and the payment of taxes, we had presumed to regard as our property.

Before the house stands an apple tree that has by dint of a deal of amateur surgery been wheedled into a luxuriance out of all keeping with its years. On a knoll above, reaching out their boughs to the apple tree in an almost completed arch, stand two pear trees that have persisted nearly as long beyond their generation. Somewhat late for dinner, that next night, Isabel hurried past these sentry towers. The apple tree was just behind her when, from the cover of its still unfolding leaves, came the raging owl.

Straight at her face he flew and, as she cried out in her fright, wheeled and drove at her again. He gnashed the mandibles of his bill at her — they must have been all of half an inch in length!—gnashed them so heartily it could have been heard yards away. He banked and turned, he zoomed and pancaked; the tips of his wings flicked her hat; only her crossed arms saved her face as she cowered, not in the least ashamed of doing it, before his attack. At last she made the shelter of the doorway, and from the pear trees came a jeering, savage ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!’

Summer came on. Night by night the little owl was to be heard on his rounds, sometimes raising his echoing cry in the woods of the park beyond the turnpike, but more often staying close by the homestead in the stump of the apple tree. Apparently the demands upon him were as great as they were insistent. Certainly his temper did not improve. His ‘shivering’ began to be punctuated with his harsh other call — an ‘ak-k-k-k’ that had both petulance and disgust in it. He seemed to be registering a vow that, although he had got himself into the mess of raising a family and would go through with it, never again would he let himself become involved. He seemed, indeed, a modern instance of the Confederate soldier of whom Roosevelt loved to tell, after he had been shot at Milwaukee, the soldier whose hardships and humiliations wrenched from him the oath, ‘If ever I love another country, damn me!'

We never saw Materfamilias during this period. She may have been occupied with some ornithological equivalent of making or mending; she may have been a feminist, determined upon the payment by her mate of a Portian pound of the vexations of the household. His bad temper strongly suggested some such exasperation. In any event, it was he alone we saw, and heard.

The full moon came. We watched from the porch one night as it rose over the trees in the park, and suddenly were aware that a great event in the owl family was toward. He flashed into view, wheeling and turning so swiftly, so beautifully, it was hard to follow him. She followed, less spectacularly perhaps, but as busily. For ten minutes they darted here and there in the growing radiance. Superficially there was no purpose in this sudden, mad activity.

Finally we began to see, instead of merely to watch. However wide the circle, however swift the flight, it was always in definite relation to the apple tree. We shifted our gaze from the aerobatics to the tree itself, and presently there took form in the uncertain light two wee owls, shoulder to shoulder on a branch just outside the hole that hid the nest.

One’s hand would have covered them both. Their solemn little faces seemed all eyes; their unpreened coats seemed something in which they had been bundled up, not anything that did, or was meant to, fit them. Round and round about them their parents whirled, and round and round their eyes followed them until one could fancy that their little mouths gaped in amazement and admiration.

But it was not a spectacle that was being staged, whatever the youngsters — or we — may have thought. Suddenly the father ended one magnificent circle at the top of its swing and, like an arrow, drove straight at the wee things on the branch. They rocked in the wash of his wings as he veered just enough to avoid actually striking them, and if, as they shrank from the terrifying attack, they did not gasp, we did!

Off into the shadows the father passed, and quite as swiftly, quite as brutally, the mother drove at the two on the branch. But she passed between them and the trunk, so that as they shrank from her it was outward. The whole matter was plain by now — home ties were being, not broken, but ruthlessly torn asunder. The splendid possibilities of flight had been demonstrated; the youngsters were forthwith to undertake it on their own. Fascinating as it was to watch, it still had its active element of cruelty. It was like dropping a baby into the water to teach it to swim; even more it recalled the Mexican tradition of the hardness of life in Tamaulipas — ‘ They throw the newborn babes against the wall; if they can cling to the ‘dobe, they take them down and let them live; if they can’t, they let them die where they fall.’

And yet there was a fitness in it. The owl is a bird of prey, and Schrecklichkeit cannot, perhaps, begin too early. ‘Brutal is as brutal does’ may be the guiding maxim of their philosophy.

The whole affair took another halfhour. The father’s second attack came from the rear, with the added terror of surprise. Like the mother, he too came between the youngsters and the trunk. That continued, indeed, to be the strategy of the parental campaign. At briefer and briefer intervals the attacks came, and with each agonized flinching from the menacing wings the youngsters found themselves nearer the end of their branch. Oddly, they kept as closely shoulder to shoulder as they had been when first we picked them out of the shadows. Each moved as the other did, and precisely the same distance.

It was not until the very end that there came a break in the silence that had been not the least surprising aspect of the incident. No sound at all came from the youngsters, but eventually the father had recourse to his ‘ak-k-k-k,’ and soon the mother took it up, always as they drove toward the fledglings, and at no other time. Plainly it seemed annoyance that the children clung so tenaciously to their perch.

The last drive was by both parents together; what they had failed to achieve turn and turn about they meant, obviously, to compel by concert. And they did. One to the right, one to the left, each screaming, they launched themselves at their young.

The next instant the branch stood stark and untenanted against the moon. Down toward the tangled grass below came the despairing beating of little wings; up toward the lower branches of a pear tree, nearest neighbor of the apple stump, the beating came, still more frantic; overhead came the even, velvet beat of older wings. And then silence again.

So far as we had any way of knowing, no other lesson was ever given — or needed. Before the moon had passed we saw four owls flitting noiselessly among the trees, and only by size was it possible to tell which were old and which were young. Then evenings and nights fell still; the saga of the apple stump might have been closed.

But there was one more book in it. June was passing when Isabel came home one evening as the sun was setting and its long, golden light streamed across the slope at whose crest the apple stump stands. As she had not in days, she turned toward the stump and saw, neatly in the centre of the entrance to the nest hollow, Father taking his morning ease.

His breast was as red-gold as the sun itself as he blinked in fat content with all the world. Gone was the diplomat who had lured me away from his home; gone the warrior who had put Isabel to rout; gone the harassed, unwilling breadwinner; gone the ruthless taskmaster; come was the slippered, idle old man.