“Finally!” I screech as the Brown Frizz opens the web on my nest. “I’ve been hooting for food since the last drop of the sun.”
“I told you the hooting wouldn’t make them come any faster,” Red squawks from her nest.
“How do you know it didn’t?” I chirp back. “The Brown Frizz may never have returned if not for my hooting.”
“The Brown Frizz is your partner.” Red rouses, stomps on her perch. “Partners always come back.”
I consider the Brown Frizz. She has on her Good Feelings face, but her heart is not in it. She holds up her big paw and makes her tweeting noise, and I swoop down.
“I can hear that there’s something wrong with you,” I hoot to her softly, trying to keep Red from listening in. “If it’s about what I hooted yesterday, I will make more of an effort to hunt things other than roots.”
The Brown Frizz’s heart becomes less jumbled in its rhythm, smoothes out, and the Good Feelings face deepens. Perhaps that was all she needed to hear.
“Not that I’m promising anything,” I add.
The Brown Frizz remains content. Maybe this is a part of our partnership arrangement. Maybe the only promise she needs is that I’ll try.
She puts the odious tails into my leg sparkles, and that just about gets me fluffed because truly those tails are the worst, but then she does something new. She attaches a long, thin vine to the end of the tails. Outside of my nest, she holds her fist near one of the dead trees.
“Hop onto the perch, Hatchling,” Red squawks. She’s perched right near an opening in her nest. Spying on me.
“I was about to,” I snap back. Though I was not. This partnership thing is confusing. One moment, the Brown Frizz wants me on her paw; the next, she wants me on the perch?
Once I’m on the perch, the Brown Frizz takes a step away from me. I glance at Red, check if she’s still spying. Of course she is.
The Brown Frizz whistles. Shakes her paw. She wants me to get back on the paw? But I just got off the paw! Is there meat? There’d better be meat.
I flap off the perch and onto the paw, and thank the thermals, there’s meat for my effort. I gobble it down. The Brown Frizz is all atwitter, hooting and trembling like something important is happening.
The Gray Tail appears from the furless creatures’ nest. She seems excited by the Brown Frizz’s hoots. She hurries toward me and the Brown Frizz, and I see she has a small pile of delicious mice in her wing-toes.
“Give me those mice!” I command. I am the great horned owl around here. I should get first pick. Certainly before the Brown Frizz.
I attempt to lift off the paw and—PELLETS! I’m tufts down again and swinging like a bat.
“I just cannot get enough of seeing you hanging from your talons,” Red twitters from inside her nest.
“Go stuff your beak in the sap.”
The Brown Frizz dutifully sits me back up on the paw. But now I’m fluffed. I’m hungry and Red’s a bumble-footed booby and these leg-tails are worse than a midsoar cloudburst. The Brown Frizz tries to get me to go back onto the perch, but I’m not having it.
“There will be mice or there will be no flapping from this owl!” I screech. I stomp on the paw and look everywhere but at the stinking perch and finally the Brown Frizz makes her growling-sigh noise and grumbles to the Gray Tail, who nods her head.
The Brown Frizz takes me back to my nest, removes those terrible tormenting tails, and lifts her paw, and I fly up to my favorite spot, way high near the top of the nest. The Brown Frizz then holds out her paw again, whistles, and—Great Beak, she has a whole mouse?
I swoop down, crash into the paw, and gobble that mouse.
Once I have it down, I notice that the Brown Frizz is staring at me. She is quite fascinated by me. Of course she is, seeing as she is an ugly furless creature and I am quite the great horned owl specimen.
“Yes, fine, admire away,” I hoot, stretching my ear tufts and rousing my feathers. She did just give me a whole mouse. I should give her something in return.
“This is another part of partnership, you dud,” Red screeches. She’s outside now, gliding over the grass and then swooping up onto the Gray Tail’s paw. The Gray Tail feeds her a scrap of meat. “The small human is trying to connect with you.” Red flaps away and lands on one of the perches and turns her head, basking in the twilight.
So that’s what partnership is? Flapping from paw to perch? How is this helping me learn to hunt?
The Brown Frizz grumbles something to me. I turn my head to pay attention. She lifts the little patches of fur that grow above her eyes.
I decide to look at her the same way. Perhaps this is what Red means when she chirps “connect”?
I raise my ear tufts and then sink them down and out, flattish, the way the Brown Frizz has her face furs. I stare deep into her brown eyes, the way she’s staring deep into mine. It does give me a bit of a buzz in the gizzard, being this close to a big animal like a furless creature, listening to her heartbeat pound in my ears.
She whispers something to me. Her breath ruffles the feathers along my beak. I don’t even need to look to know she’s wearing her Good Feelings face; I hear it in her heart, can feel it coming off her in waves.
“I feel it too,” I chirp back.
She spreads the pink edges of her beakless maw across her cheeks in a smooth, curving line, wrinkling the skin around her eyes.
I try to make my beak curve, but it’s no good. Instead, I do what Mother used to do to me. I knock my forehead against the Brown Frizz’s skull and nibble the bridge of her soft nostril tube.
She chirps again, rubs her forehead against my beak. The world feels as safe as when Mother used to tuck me beneath her wing in the nest. This partnership is for more than just learning how to hunt. I get that now. What Red means by partnership is what I call family.
The Brown Frizz’s heartbeat is all aflutter and she’s cooing like a mourning dove. And I realize my heart is pounding along with the Brown Frizz’s pulse. Just like with Mother and First when we were in the nest together. I’ve missed my family so much—is a great horned owl allowed to admit that? I don’t think I’m supposed to feel lonely . . . but I do. I can’t wait for night to pass so I can get in a few hoots with Red at daybreak, so I can fly with the furless creatures. I wonder if I’m maybe not cut out to fly alone in the world. I think that maybe I need this partnership as much as the furless creature.
It may not be what I imagined when I thought of hunting in a pack, but maybe family doesn’t always look just one way.
“We can be a family, Brown Frizz,” I chirp to her.
She growls back softly, our hearts pounding together, and I feel it from talons to tufts: a connection, strange but strong.