MATTIE WAS NOW A GISIGU—AN OLD MAN.
One evening when he was returning home, his acute hearing detected a faint rustling sound coming from the alder beds near the gravel road ahead of him. He stopped and listened, but the evening had grown silent. A rabbit rustling through the falling autumn leaves, he figured, and he moved on. The sound came again and from the same place. Again he stopped and listened, but again no sound came. Curious now, he stepped forward. The noise repeated as before. Something was close to the ground and moved only when he did, as if hoping his walking would disguise its own movement. Mattie crept toward the brush where the sound had come from, leaned down, pulled some of the branches apart, and looked inside.
At first he saw nothing. Then the faint sound came again, very close, and at that instant he saw the owl. It was a little saw-whet no more then eight inches long. It was entangled among the thick alders, and when it saw Mattie it stood absolutely still and stared at him, its bright yellow-orange eyes with their huge black centres staring without blinking. The ground was covered with the hapless owl’s feathers. Mattie could see it was injured but wondered why it hadn’t just walked away. Then he saw the wire snare around its leg. The owl had been following along a rabbit lead and had become snared. With its frantic efforts to break the wire, it had damaged its wing against the tangled trees.
Pushing the trees aside to allow him room, Mattie bent down. With a soft crooning sound in his ancient language, he approached the bird, which now cowered close to the ground with its big, limpid eyes fixed on the Indian. He pulled the snare stick, which had been driven into the soil, free with one hand and held the shivering bird to the ground with the other. Mattie twisted the wire loose from the snare stick and reached to free it from the leg of the bird. He felt the blood-matted feathers. In its struggles to free itself, the owl had embedded the thin wire into its flesh all the way to the leg bone.
The bird was in terrible pain, but while Mattie gently removed the bloody wire, it made no sound and didn’t move a feather. When the bird was free from its fetter it tried to stand, but fell back to the ground again. It looked up at Mattie pitifully. The owl could neither walk or fly. Mattie picked up the bird, which weighed a mere six or seven ounces, cradled it in the crook of his arm, and carried it home.
He coated the torn leg all around with the sticky myrrh from a spruce tree. He pounded the thin inner white bark from a young aspen tree into a pulp and, stirring more of the spruce gum into the paste, he encased the wounded leg in the natural bandage. The fragile wing was more difficult to treat. Fortunately for the owl, the wing bone wasn’t broken, only battered and severely bruised. More than half of the wing’s long, white-tipped outer flight feathers were bent and useless.
Early the next morning, Mattie walked down to the landwash and brought back several small, greenish kelp bladders. He popped each one of them, saving the glistening drop of salt water they contained, then ground the kelp petals into a medicinal paste as he had done with the aspen bark. He smeared the medicine over as much of the bruised wing as he could. And while Mattie administered his gentle healing, the bird neither moved or uttered sound.
Hoping the bird would not flap the wing too much, he placed it inside a small, uncovered pen. The owl didn’t try to fly out of the pen until many days later, when its wing had healed under Mattie’s frequent doctoring. During that time Mattie caught meadow voles and mice and sometimes frogs for the bird, which ate whatever Mattie brought it.
Early one morning, when Mattie went outside, the bird was gone. Mattie was very pleased. His healing had worked. Then he looked up and saw, perched in a nearby tree, the owl staring down at him. He left his garden and went walking along the road. Hearing the flutter of wings behind him, he turned and saw the owl following him, flying from tree to tree and sometimes landing on rooftops and fences along the roadside. Its wingspan made it look much bigger in flight.
The bird soon became known as Mattie’s owl—or that tall Indian’s owl, depending on who you talked to. Everyone was amazed to see it follow him whenever he moved from his house, day or night. One of the Mi’kmaq words for owl is gu’gu’gwes. Mattie called the bird Gu’gu, but only among his own people. To others in the community he did not use the Mi’kmaq word for the bird, but called it “little nightbird.”
The owl would follow no one else, not even when they tried to get it to do so. From the first morning when Mattie had seen the owl perched in the low branches of the tree, he had stopped bringing it food. But still, each morning when Mattie stepped from his door, Gu’gu was waiting in the same tree. When Mattie left the yard, the bird always followed.
The day came when Mattie was not able to rise from his bed. He was dying and he knew it. Even his indomitable will was finally defeated by the state of near-death. From Marie Mitchell Sparkes’s journal:
My Grandfather had been ailing for a while, but on this particular day, he asked my father to go and bring him the priest so that he could receive the last rites of the church. And as he had been a devoutful Catholic, it was his last wish to have a priest present in his final hours. Back in those days the nearest priest lived in the Scared Heart parish in Curling which was a few miles south of Corner Brook. And since there were very few cars around the area, the more frequent type of travel then was by boat. So my father got in his Dory and rowed the few miles to Curling and returned with the priest, who administered the Last Rites to my grandfather.
Later that night pop sat in the room by his father’s bed with the holy candles lit and slowly flickering, sending their light around the room.
My grandfather was awake and fully aware that it was his time to leave his earthly existence, he looked at my father and said “Johnny, I am going to sleep now” and with a sigh he closed his eyes for one final time.
And when Mattie Mitchell’s body was carried from his home in the glorious autumn of 1921, Gu’gu, Mattie’s “little nightbird,” followed the slow procession as it made its way to the hill where Newfoundland’s greatest frontiersman would forever rest. It was Indian summer, the time of year when hunters are mysteriously lured afield. And the Mitchell family laid their hunter down.
The gentle man who had contributed so much to the exploration and development of his beloved island home was buried on a hill in the west coast city of Corner Brook. Below him, the bay that he loved so much was calm and reverential in the still evening air. The mountain valleys were deep in shadow. But the lofty mountaintops were tinged with the soft reds and purples that only come in the autumn time.
And as the cool night came down out of the hills, a new yellow moon appeared and, as it had on that long-ago night on the beach with the American adventurer, had the old one in its arms.
The mound of dark new earth looked even darker in the shadows. And from somewhere very near, a lone owl sounded its skiew of requiem and flew silently away before the day came, and never returned.