“I hunted!” I hoot to Red, who’s pretending to be asleep in her nest. “I heard the root tweeting and I hunted it dead!”
“Gah! Owls! Don’t you ever sleep?” Red squawks, snapping her wings and stomping her talons. “That’s not hunting, Owl. That’s practice.”
“What are you talking about?” I chirp. “I heard the root and I pounced. It was in shreds when I finished.”
“It was a root, though?” asks Red.
“Yes,” I say, restating the obvious. Honestly, this bird listens to less than half of my hoots.
“I doubt it was an actual root,” she says, chattering on. “But regardless, if it wasn’t prey, it wasn’t hunting. It was practice to help you get into your instincts.”
Get into my instincts? “No way,” I squawk, flapping over to the rock perch to mute. “The root tweeted, and I killed it dead.”
“Fine. Seeing as you’re the expert hunter of the pair of us,” she grumbles, “I’m sure you’re right.”
“Now, that’s just rude.”
“Owl, I sleep at night. Please shut your beak.”
She rouses her feathers, tromps around her perch, and is silent.
Could she be right? Could my amazing feats of murder and destruction really only be practice?
Of course it’s just practice. Obviously only the Worst Owl—no, Worst Bird of Prey—in the Whole Forest thinks hunting a squeaking root is the same as hunting a mouse. Mice are cunning. Mice have legs. Mice are sneaky on their tiny sneaky feet.
I have to practice on living things. But where am I going to find a living thing?
Something small smacks into the wall of my nest. A buzzing thing. A bug!
Yes, perfect. I will hunt bugs.
Now, where is that bug?
I lift my feathers, twist and turn them, sculpting the sounds the way my wings work the wind. The night around me takes shape. Far away, I hear the leaves of the forest trees rustling. Closer, the blades of grass slipping along the stalks of their neighbors. Heartbeats—hundreds of them, some close, some far—pound out pulses, making the once silent darkness a thrum of noise.
It’s too much. I can’t hear anything but noise everywhere.
The bug buzzes, flying off, its wing-whipping whir getting softer and softer.
I failed. Again.
I’ll never hunt.
I close my eyes, bury my head as deep as I can between my wings, muffling the great roar of noise, that deafening blast of information I have no idea how to pick apart.
The first flicker of sunlight cracks across the stars, and somewhere outside my nest, voices whisper. And then the furless creatures are walking alongside the web around my nest. The Brown Frizz is radiating energy, but the Gray Tail looks half-asleep. They’re chirping at each other, and then they split the web.
The Brown Frizz is wearing her paw with meat and chirping, so I flap down as has become our custom. The meat sets my gizzard grumbling, and I decide that even the Most Pathetic Owl Who Couldn’t Hear a Bug Unless It Was Buzzing Up His Butt deserves to eat every once in a while. The Gray Tail slips the little strips of skin into my leg sparkles and the Brown Frizz grabs on to them.
I contemplate trying to fly off and tear those stinking skin strips right off my sparkles, but every time I attempt this feat, I end up in a bat hang, so I decide to give up that particular thought. At least for the moment.
The Brown Frizz begins walking with me through the grass. Red was right: my enclosed nest does look a bit like a smaller breed of the one that the furless creatures sleep inside. The forest I listened to all night looks thick and dark and full of menacing creatures hungry for a bite of owl.
“Brown Frizz,” I squawk. “I don’t think I am going to be a very good hunting partner. In fact, to be clear, I may never catch any prey that isn’t a root.”
The Brown Frizz does not seem upset by my hoots. Rather, her beakless maw is twisted into what I’ve come to understand as a sign of Good Feelings. She growls something and then holds out some meat.
“All right,” I say. “I will eat your offering. But I want to be clear—I am not a hunter, and I will only reliably kill roots.”
The Brown Frizz mumbles something and keeps making her Good Feelings face. Maybe she only wants to catch roots? No, that can’t be it. The Brown Frizz could very well catch a root on her own. No—she must know something I don’t. Or she just trusts that I’m more than just a root catcher . . .
“Well, you are certainly not what I expected.”
I whip my head around and there’s Red sitting on old Gray Tail’s featherless wing. She’s quite a big hawk, with a sleek head tapering to a long, sharp, hooked beak. Her red feathers seem to glow in the skinny shafts of sunlight.
“How’s that?” I ask, trying to ruffle up my dull tree-bark-brown feathers. I straighten out my ear tufts and fan my tail.
She turns her head, examining the yard around us. “I was expecting a half-plucked hatchling. You’re a real bird.”
That gets my feathers fluffed. “Half-plucked hatchling?”
She flaps her wings and flies to a stumpy tree sticking up in the yard. “With the way you were grousing all night about never being able to hunt and getting eaten by a clutch of field mice? I thought to myself, No way a full-grown owl would dare to even dream of such a pathetic end. But I see I was wrong on at least one count.” She gives me a long stare over her hooked beak.
She heard me? That was a terrible nightmare. How could she have heard anything? Great Beak—was I hooting in my sleep?
This is bad. Even for the Absolute Worst Great Horned Owl in All of Owldom.
“It was just a dream,” I chitter. I try to flap over to another one of those stumpy trees in the yard—it appears that the blighted corpses of several trees remain sticking up in the grass—but I hit the end of those blasted leg tails and end up hanging tufts down.
“That’s more what I was expecting,” Red chirps, her eyes bright.
She thinks this is funny?! “DO NOT LAUGH AT ME!” I screech, flapping and thrashing.
The Brown Frizz hisses. Her paw reaches out. Distracted, I forget to thrash and suddenly I’m upright. I grasp the clenched paw beneath me. The Brown Frizz’s heart skips along happily and she makes her Good Feelings face.
She helped me. Again. She always helps.
She holds out a little scrap of meat. I gobble it down.
She believes I can be a hunter. A hunter of more than roots. Of mice, of voles—of squirrels, even.
She believes in me.
Maybe I need to give this partnership thing a try.