Hooly
by HENRY WILLIAMSON
1
ONE April evening, coming home to tea from the farm, I stopped by the kitchen door on my way to wash, and spoke to my wife, who was kneading a whole-wheat loaf on the table. I noticed a wicker basket on the kitchen floor, and what appeared to be a small kneaded piece of dough in it. I was about to ask why the two small boys, Robert and Richard, were allowed to play with food in wartime, when something about the dough made me look closer. It seemed already to be covered with mildew. Going closer, I saw it was a nestling owl.
Richard, our youngest, came in at that moment and explained that it was “lost,” and had been brought to the door by a “little old boy.” Apparently this “little old boy” (aged about five years) had found the object under a brambleberry bush in the lane. “His father and mother,” explained Richard (also five years old), pointing at the object, “lost it — so the little old boy brought it to here, because you like owls.”
“But it is warm and comfortably covered with flesh,” I replied, kneeling by the basket, “so it could not have been lost very long. I expect its parents knew it was there, and will miss it tonight.”
“They do so want to keep it, and have a tame owl,” said Rikky’s mother. Rikky and Robby looked anxiously at me.
The owlet raised its long thin head and chirruped. It was the hunger noise. I remembered it from the tame owls of my own boyhood. Its beak opened and it tried to swallow my finger as I stroked the back of its head with my finger tip.
There was an air rifle in the cupboard, and some sparrows on the ridge tiles of the farmhouse roof. Richard and I went out to stalk them. Not long afterwards we returned, and one of the sparrows went, piece by piece, into the owlet’s crop. When I went back for more, the sparrows, who had meanwhile re-formed a row on the ridge tile, took immediate evasive action (to use current flying jargon) into the lane beyond. Thereafter they were never about in their old haunts more than half a second after the barrel of the rifle had appeared, though many a small lead-splash was left on the tiles just after legs and tail-feathers had vanished from view. “Huh, wise guys,” murmured Richard, regarding several such evasions. He waited with a catapult round the gateway, but the small piece of chalk flipped from his feeble engine sped even more harmlessly through the air. We returned to the farmhouse parlor to talk it over.
Our house is in the valley, facing south. An acre of garden slopes gradually to a river, and across this narrow stream is a small paddock of an acre or so, beyond which are the farm road and the Home Hills rising steeply to the skyline. On the hills are many rabbits, which tunnel and make their deep buries in the sandy southern slopes. I do not like rabbits; they are vermin; they pare the grasses and corn with their rodent teeth, and their urine poisons the soil. Whereas sheep will improve a pasture, rabbits will slowly destroy it. So I had no compunction in shooting them — only a vague resentment that after a long working day I should have to go out with a gun and bring one of the wretched little beasts back for the owlet, whose chirrupings were sharper with its hunger. So fitting together my light Gallyon 20bore shotgun, I set out to get one of the hopping gray animals.
It was easy the first night, but on succeeding occasions the rabbits grew warier, and sometimes it was dusk before I returned. Apparently it was my job to procure food for the growing Hooly, as we now called our owl. After working and scheming all day (for writing books and working 240 acres of difficult and hilly land require much energy), I had to force my reluctance aside and go shoot a rabbit every night. However, it was nice to be greeted by the fluffy little bird, and also by the enthusiasm of the youngest child, Richard.
Hooly grew rapidly; and as the spring advanced, and the bombers began to roar in the sky as they flew out over the North Sea, I was accustomed to find Hooly, on my return, waiting for me on the roof. If I walked up the path quietly, I could observe him before he saw me — he was a small monkeylike object walking on the roof ridge, setting one clawed foot before the other, carefully — until suddenly turning his dark eyes upon me, he slithered down the pantiles, to jump on my shoulder and flap and scream for food.
By this time Hooly had explored most of the lower rooms of the house. For a while he had slept happily in the hot-cupboard in the kitchen, always in his basket. From the first he had accepted all he saw; he never showed any fear. When tired of playing in the flower beds outside in the garden, he would walk into the kitchen, cross the floor, climb into his basket, and, stretching his legs out behind his body, lie flat, his head bowed and his face hidden. If one or other of our children touched the gray feathers of his head, beside the large cavities of the ears, he would not look up, but give a sleepy chirrup, and then go to sleep — a feathered kitten.
As he grew bigger his range of traveling extended all over the house. A favorite perching place was among the caps and gloves on the oak tallboy standing in the parlor. He flapped and hauled his way to the top, and there squatted in an attitude of complete relaxation. I have never seen another bird sleep like that; he reminded me of my old spaniel in Devon, who, after a walk through the fields to the sea, used to scratch himself a hole in the summer sands, and collapse into it suddenly, shooting his hind legs out seal-like, the pads of each foot turned uppermost.
Sometimes the owl played with an old green-andred glove, relic of skiing in the snows of New Hampshire eleven years before; he was indeed a feathered kitten, throwing up the glove and catching it with his mouth. Hooly was a nice little owl, and only once tried to swallow my ear lobe when I was somewhat slow in offering him portions of rabbit.
As his flight feathers grew, he took to climbing up the vines and creepers of the jasmine to the roof, and there he stayed after being fed — beside the chimney stack. He grew into a wild-looking bird, his big eyes as dark as grapes with the bloom on them. He accepted the tokens of affection — food and pollscratching — but gave no affection back. Nor did the children expect it, being wild, in the natural sense, themselves. Not “wild” in the civilized meaning of the word, for they were calm and selfcontained: it was never necessary to complain of their behavior towards others.
2
ONE night, as I was standing in the garden looking at the converging streams of hundreds of fourengined black bombers, flying slow and heavy and droning eastwards in the height of the wan and starry sky, a strange owl flew a few feet over my head and braked suddenly with its wide, soft wings. It startled me; and it startled Hooly as it alighted beside him. Seeing the apparition Hooly snapped his beak in alarm. At the same moment the big owl turned its head to take in any movement — the quick retinal stare of a wild creature, whose life is one calculation in motion after another. I kept quite still. The glance was of a second’s duration before the bird turned to Hooly, revealing that it carried a sparrow in its beak. With a swift movement the sparrow was transferred to a foot. With sideway striking motion Hooly snatched it, and at once the old bird flapped up and away.
It was most exciting, even exhilarating. I wished young Rikky had been with me. Hooly stood there, the dead sparrow in his foot. He took the best part of half an hour to break it up with pluckings and pullings; first one wing was swallowed, then another, and at last the skull was gulped down. After which he flapped and walked to the chimney stack at the other end of the roof ridge, and settled down to a rest. The night was silent; a few searchlights moved bleakly across the horizon; in the western sky the evening star was shining serenely, to be watched awhile with a sigh. Thoughts about the war were vain thoughts, and I went to my room, drew the blackout curtains, lit the lamp, and tried to read in order to be able to sleep before 5.00 A.M., when I got up to water and feed the farm horses.
In the morning I told the children about, the strange owl. Robert, the imaginative, said it might have been Hooly’s mother or father. Then why, I suggested, did Hooly snap his beak in sudden fear when he saw the old bird? Perhaps, suggested Margaret, the mother owl had known all along that her nestling had been in the hot-cupboard, and had waited her chance to get to it. John added that the old owl had probably heard Hooly chirruping to himself at night in the basket, and had bided her time to take him away. “Shall we catch the old owl and then we’ll have two?” I asked, to see the effect. “NO!” cried the children, with one voice. The next night Hooly was on the ridge when the big owl came again, this time with a young rat. Hooly thereupon dropped the stale rabbit pelt he was playing with and clumped and scratched his way to the chimney stack with the rat. Soon afterwards the tail of the rat was sticking out of his mouth as he huddled himself to doze among the blackened chimney pots. During the following day he was missing from his accustomed place, but at evening time, as the sun was sinking and once again the sky was thundering with the passage of the great nocturnal airfleets, we heard his chissicking cries. I crossed the road to the tall trees behind the wooden Village Institute hut, where dances and whist-drives and other social occasions took place, and he saw me and flew down and sat on my shoulder. I walked with him across the road and fed him as he perched on the old draw-well frame above the well outside the kitchen door. As soon as he was fed he flew up to the roof, flapping and clawing, to his favorite ridge.
The following evening when I called him he sailed on broad brown wings over the iron-sheet Institute roof to my shoulder. Two soldiers passed, walking up and down the village street to find something interesting, but though I was standing still in the road, and they saw us, they took no notice of an owl flying to alight on a man’s shoulder. Perhaps they were townsmen and saw nothing interesting in such a sight; perhaps they were anxious to find the fish-and-chip hut. It was said that the food in the camp was scanty and poor. And when the fish shop opened, once a week, on Friday, which was also payday in the farming week, the fried fish and potatoes were very soon sold out. Even so, I have often wondered why the two soldiers on that occasion did not give the owl a second glance; at the time there was always present in my mind an ironic connection between the dulled observation of the town mind and the dulling of life by war, which is never made by countrymen.
3
THE tall green trees of sycamore and ash, growing out of the old marlpit under which the Village Institute hut stood, became our tame owl’s day-hide and roost. Every evening I went out to call him; every evening, after chissicking cries to get me to fly to him, he was forced to fly to me: he glided down to my shoulder, a brown-and-yellow feathered face set with two dark eyes looming larger and larger until, with a flapping and a screaming of open beak, Hooly was clutching the shoulder of my old Mackinaw jacket. This happened for several nights, until one time when I went to call him, he was not there.
It was a Friday night. I knew it was Friday by the smell of frying fat wafted on the western breeze from the middle of the village. Nor did he return the next day. I wondered if the events of the previous night had affected Hooly, for later in the Thursday night — the last night I had seen him — a wounded pilot had fallen on a parachute in the woods; there had been a running fight with a Heinkel bomber, during which the German pilot had jettisoned the two 2000-pound land mines he carried. Suddenly, while I slept, a stupendous and pale blue flash had seemed to split the universe. Immediately afterwards, another flash and stunning reverberation, but not so metallic-hard. I thought my cottage was collapsing. Tiles showered into the road, and the ceiling of the adjoining empty bedroom collapsed. The first land mine had fallen on the edge of the chalk ridge above the village; the second on the clay of the marshes.
Later, I wondered if the explosions had killed Hooly, or broken his eardrums. lie, with the other living creatures of the district, was probably used to the bumps and shakings of odd bombs falling here and there, and of the blue-white stars of incendiaries which sometimes broke out of the darkness on the Home Hills across the valley at night. We felt the vibration through the earth of these distant bombs before we heard them in the air; so did the wild pheasants roosting in the woods, for the cocks always uttered their cucketting cries a split second before the heavy bomb-roll made to quiver slightly the very earth under our feet.
Well, I thought, at least I will not have to go shooting wretched rabbits any more. But in this I was mistaken; for on the Sunday morning I was awakened by a screaking in my bedroom, and there on the window sill was a little grayish monkey face and body, staring with misery in its eyes, its feet shifting as with pain. Seeing one of my gray woolen socks on a chair, Hooly flew to it, and standing on it, made a distracted pretense of swallowing it.
It was five o’clock in the morning; it was Sunday; it was the farmer’s day of rest; but how could one relax while those famished eyes stared with such anguish? Getting out of bed, I put on dressing gown and slippers and went downstairs to get Hooly’s Friday rabbit. But a cat had apparently taken it from where I had hung it on the outer brick casing of the circular draw-well. Meanwhile Hooly was facing me, perching on one of the disused ironbound buckets which until recently had drawn the water for the farmhouse. He flew down from the rickety bucket, and screeched into my face. I went to the larder, but found only some bacon and the remains of a potato pasty. Bacon, a ration of two ounces weekly each person, was far too good for him; so I stood still, considering what I should do.
Sunday, the day of rest! No matter, the truant must be fed. Ah, the air rifle, and perhaps a sparrow on the roof! But the sparrows, who had been chittering their comments in a row a moment before, were abruptly absent. Perhaps they had organized themselves into an Avian Home Guard, for when I returned round the corner to the well, there were a dozen or more around Hooly, mobbing him, and one old cock was actually pulling a feather from the back of his head. Seeing me, they scattered, end chittered in the lilac bushes, while the air rifle phutted towards one or another in vain.
So I walked down to the bridge and across the river and so to the cartshed which faced the chalk quarry. Sparrows chirped in their nests under the tiles of the “hovel,” — the Norfolk name of the shed, which, according to rough numerals in red brick let into the flint walls, was rebuilt in 1667, — but I would not take a fledgling sparrow from a nest, even for a starving owlet. Fortunately for my peace of mind a starling flew to a branch of an ash, and fell down as the little waisted pellet of lead spun through its chest. Starlings, I suspected, were rank-tasting, for the hawks and owls I had kept as a boy never ate them; but Hooly found this more palatable than a woolen sock.
4
THEREAFTER he took to being absent at twilight and came instead to my open window at dawn, crying and flapping his brown mottled wings for food and walking over the blanket to yell in my ear if I did not awake. Sometimes he visited other cottage windows; and from one cottage at least, occupied by a queer-tempered old soldier who worked on our farm — we called him Jack the Jackdaw among ourselves — Hooly departed hurriedly, accompanied by oaths and the slamming of the window.
There used to be a one-winged jackdaw about the farm premises, which climbed trees and fed alone on the meadows and generally looked an odd, lonely creature, with which I could not make friends. The wounded jackdaw looked like our Jack, who was dark, with a beaky nose; a wound from the Somme a quarter of a century before had made one arm and shoulder almost useless. Jack was a good worker, tidier than the other men, and always punctual; but in addition to his wound he came of a nervous family. During the farming depression of the thirties, he did not have regular employment, and when as a newcomer I took him on I soon saw why. I have seen him, with tears of impotence in his eyes, jerking the bridle of a cart horse with rage, and hitting the animal, though not dangerously, about the head.
At other times he would address inanimate objects, such as heavy harrows which, on a weedy field, constantly needed lifting to be cleaned, with puny cries of rage, swearing at them, kicking the iron frame, making a speech of misery and frustration to the wind in the middle of the field, while the horses stood patiently by, awaiting his word to go forward again. Jack was hard to talk to: he moved away, he could not listen. Once or twice I was the recipient of his speeches; usually a dour fellow, when he got going his arm waved, he yelled at the top of his voice, froth on his lips, until his hoarse voice grew feeble, and he was near sobbing.
At heart poor Jack the Jackdaw was a kindly man, living with two sisters who were normally as subdued and apart from what little village communal life existed, as he was. I understood Jack the Jackdaw, because I knew what it was to feel one’s resistance to life overcome by the tasks confront ing a man. I knew how he felt when the last of his nerve power was running out in those frenzied monologues, accompanied by waving arm and his ragged cap dashed to the earth; I knew, even as I knew myself, how much of his life had left him in sweat and fear and blood on the Somme battlefields. I had heard those tones, or overtones, coming from my jittery self; I had heard those tones, though with deeper penetration and cutting power, on the radio, coming from the east where now the bombers wore nightly flying; so I thought I understood our Jack, and his nervous curses when he had been awakened by an owl standing on his pillow.
Other people in the village, who had been casually amused by the sight of Hooly in the past taking food on my shoulder, tried to feed him, offering him pieces of bread or even fragments of wood or stones, to get him to fly down to them, for amusement. The singleness of the bird’s mind towards human beings was in disintegration, and he flew now to anyone and into any open window.
Robert, who was seven, once woke up and found Hooly pulling at his hair. Both Robert and Richard liked Hooly, of course, and welcomed him in their bedroom at any hour of the day or night; but not so their mother, who had to rise at six every morning, to give Windles, the eldest boy who worked on the farm, his breakfast. For in her bedroom HooK always behaved very badly. He saw himself in a mirror, and at once began to fight his own image. Loetitia had to turn the mirror round, lest the owl hurt himself. His beak-snapping rages kept her awake; and so I was not. altogether unrelieved when Hooly disappeared for the second time.
We said perhaps he had been shot; but no, Hooly returned within a week, flying down unexpectedly one sunset to the weathered oak frame of the drawwell. He screaked down at my face, but when I offered my shoulder, and went near him, he edged away. Obviously someone else had tried to handle him, instead of letting him perch in freedom on head or shoulder.
While he perched on the well three two-engined bombers wdth dark crosses on their fuselage flew in at roof-top height from over the marshes. They had come at wave-top height across the North Sea and with a flick of the stick had lifted over the cottages and the trees and dipped again, to climb over the wood on the hill-line across the valley, I saw the red points of tracers leaving them, as they banked to shoot up the camp beyond. Children were calling in the village with excited cries, but in a moment it was over; the Heinkels were gone, flying into a cloud which hung like a great quarry in the western sky. Soon three Spitfires were screaming around that dark cloud, circling like falcons.
Now a most extraordinary coincidence happened as I stood by the well. Nine swallows, with ringing cries, began to circle above and around the brick well, on the oak frame of which the owl was perched. First one, then another, peeled off and dived at the figure of the owl, swishing by within an inch or two of his amazed and jerky eyes, to zoom again and join the rotating ring six feet or so above the well. One after another they came down, sweeping up again and taking their turn to dive once more. They cut at Hooly from in front and from behind, and Hooly did not like it. He flew away.
It was then that I heard from the upper air the terrible grumbling roll of a Spit’s 8-gun squirt — the bullets cutting through fabric and metal and flesh and bone like a thunderous circular saw; and then a second shuddering, rolling roar; and after an interval, and more distantly, a third. Breathing quickly, and conscious that I was quivering within,
I was about to run into the farmhouse to call the children, when an owl hooted from the roof, and, turning, I saw a large bird perching on the chimney rim of my writing room stack, twenty yards away In the garden.
That, then, was the secret of the truant! The wild owl was hunting for and feeding our tame bird. It called Hooly with a sharp ker-jick, ker-jick! and flew away abruptly, followed by Hooly.
Meanwhile three Spitfires, with superchargers whining, followed by another section of three a thousand feet above them, hurtled across the sky. They flew towards the vast gold-lined cumulus cloud towering in the west, and up its craggy precipices they seemed to climb almost perpendicularly, to open formation like a shamrock, and, turning just before stalling point, to rave down again in separate arcs of three great circles, engines full on, to zoom up again as they waited for the remaining “bandit” to come out of the cloud. After three such circles they disappeared, and a moment later I heard again the heart-chilling, sullen roar of multiple machine guns in the unseen distance. The bursts were repeated, growing duller and far away — one-second bursts — and then came a long metallic roll which was the end.
To my surprise, Hooly came to the well on the following evening, and while the old bird perched in a damson tree, he flew down to my shoulder. He came by habit, that was all; he cried to me by habit, for he was not hungry. He came because of what a scientist would call an association of ideas; but what I would call friendship. The old owl had accepted the fact that Hooly had human friends and waited quietly until Hooly was ready to fly off again. I was relieved; it was one less thing to think about. I wondered if the old owl was Hooly’s mother after all.
About a week later we heard that a brown or tawny owl had been shot in a neighboring village for “attacking soldiers.” Was this the end of our little tame bird that had never known fear of any human being? I dreaded so; but the very next evening down by the duckpond on the farm I saw Hooly perched on a willow branch. He allowed me to stroke his head, while closing his large-grape-like eyes with pleasure; and, just as does a cat, he liked being scratched about the cars. Hooly looked very handsome in his new browns and blacks and whites, and the eyes had that full authentic keenness of perfect natural form. “Hooly,” I whispered,
“ Hooly.” He gave me a long stare; a baby chirrup came from the scarce-open beak; then, without a cry, Hooly flew into the twilight, following a dark and silent winged form — and so out of our lives. And in the years that followed, I liked to think that the white splashes on the asphalt floor of our corn barn — revealing where owls waited on the great ship’s-timber beams above for the rats below on the barley heaps — signified that Hooly, or Hooly’s children, were still our friends.