OLEAN -- Descriptions of small-town living at mid-century recently rendered in this space have drawn favorable reaction from some readers, and this being the nostalgia-soaked holiday season, I'll repeat a tale from five decades ago that recently amused my freshman class when I told it.
It's about an owl.
I have two older brothers. The oldest, Bill, in his youth wanted to be a veterinarian. He was always bringing home injured strays -- cats and dogs that healed and prospered under his amateur attention.
In his late teens, as the second half of the 20th century dawned, Bill -- winter hiking in the frozen fields north of our little town -- found a big and injured snowy owl (Nyctea scandiaca), sometimes called an arctic owl in the Adirondack region of this state. They are quite majestic. Modern film viewers will recall the friendly feathered mail-carriers in the first Harry Potter movie.
Some idiot had winged Bill's owl with a few pellets of bird shot, but no major bones were broken, and there was little flesh damage. It could hop a ways, but could only fly for about 10 yards before flopping back to earth. He brought it home, intending to heal it. The owl seemed to understand. It -- we weren't accomplished enough to determine its sex -- kept quiet and calm while being transported.
Bill parked it on the top of my father's favorite wing chair, where the owl remained stolid for about an hour -- at least until my mother came home from grocery shopping.
Now for a brief digression: My father had a colorful uncle named Frosty. His real first name was DeForest, given him by my Francophile great-grandfather who parceled out French-sounding names to his children to stress the Gallic genes in our family. Frosty was a kind of Gyro Gearloose character from the old Donald Duck comics -- always inventing something, usually workable and of great value, that he kept to himself because he didn't want others to make use of it, copy it or profit from it. Uncle Frosty was also an amateur taxidermist, his output at the time of this story being a couple of medium-sized smallmouth bass and a ratty-looking pheasant.
"Ohhhh," my mother cooed upon spying the motionless owl on my father's best chair. "Frosty's getting much better at stuffing things. Is that his latest effort?"
The great white bird blinked, clacked its beak three times and ruffled its good wing. My mother dropped about a dozen eggs and several vegetables on the living room floor.
"Bill Hanchette!" she directed. "You get that lousy bird off that good chair and out of this house this instant! And clean up those eggs."
Soon, my middle brother Jim and I found ourselves helping Bill -- with our father's approval -- build a big, roomy cage in the barn out of industrial mesh, chicken wire and old wooden slats. Bill fashioned this avian "recovery coop" around a window he deliberately left open. He held the idea the owl would only fly away when its wing fully healed, and he didn't want to impede its progress. Bill envisioned the noble bird, nursed to health, silently gliding through the open window northward to freedom under a full winter's moon on a clear, pristine, below-zero night, turning to buzz the barn in a lone lap of gratitude. So did Jim and I, once we heard this fanciful denouement.
The big white bird was well-behaved, but as it healed and increasingly moved about its wire "recovery room," feeding it became a problem. At first, it nibbled sullenly on a few bits of the dog's dry food, but you could tell it would waste away on that makeshift diet. Bill consulted his animal books. Rodents, he proclaimed. We must find small- to medium-sized rodents. Dead or alive would do fine. The owl would swallow them whole.
Well, we didn't have much access to mice or rats in the house or barn, because our cats always polished them off first. Fluffy, an amiable gray and white longhair that looked incapable of doing harm to any living thing, was especially deadly. But wait, there was a possible solution, Bill realized.
Our little paper mill town of Brownville had a huge woodpile next to the railroad tracks, about a block down the street. The logs were unloaded and stored there for later use in making finished cardboard. Neighborhood kids were forbidden by parents to go near the mountain of randomly piled timber, for fear that climbing on the logs would jar some loose and down on your head. Mice and rats lived warmly under this woody heap, however. When winter rolled around, the freezing temperatures would drive them to seek shelter in nearby cellars, barns, garages and woodsheds.
There, predicted Bill, we would find provender for our owl.
Being the oldest, of course, he dispatched Jim and me to test this theory. I was about 6 or 7 at the time. In my memory, it was sort of embarrassing to knock on a neighbor's front door and ask if anyone had checked the family mousetraps that day: "Uhh, Mrs. Smith, got any dead mice today?"
Later, it would remind me of a Monty Python movie or other grim medieval epics in which "Bring out your dead!" was a common phrase. But once the good residents of our little stretch of homes realized we were feeding a much-admired species of bird -- and I guess because I was cute in my snowsuit or something -- I started bringing home enough newly deceased mice to feed a circus. I would drop them by the tail into a small brown paper bag. Sometimes I even emptied the traps for the generous housewives. Anything for science. I also gained somewhat of a celebrity status among my peers.
The owl, ruffling its feathers first, really would scarf down the entire rodent in one or two gulps, even the big ones -- just like Bill said. Then, the owl would sort of smile and wink, as if to say "Not bad, got anymore?"
My little pals loved it, and would show up for feedings. Bill even got the owl to catch a couple in mid-air. That was dynamite. But all good things come to an end, they say. One day the owl was there. The next it was gone. Bill described its impressive departure just like we had pictured it: silent and snowy and moonstruck.
Now, roll tape forward about 50 years. With some time on my hands last spring before I got into the teaching business, I was reading "The Conservationist," New York State's excellent environmental and wildlife magazine. The slick publication often features positive stories on inspired wildlife care, or rare bird sightings or other happenings of nature. A brainstorm hit me. I would write about our owl for "The Conservationist."
To pad the story, I launched into some research -- and actually learned a few things.
For instance, it was the belief of North Country folk along the St. Lawrence River and in the Adirondacks that rarely seen snowy owls only crossed into New York State from Canada every seven years -- probably because of near famine. I had always considered that mere lore, mostly because as a child I heard stories of snowy owl sightings (and shootings) far more frequently than every seven years. I figured the snowy owls came south whenever they damn well felt like it. But, this, from "The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds":
"In the Far North where it breeds, (this great white owl) depends largely upon the lemming supply for food. Lemmings undergo periodic population changes (due to population explosion and subsequent epidemics), and when their numbers decrease, the owls must migrate southward to avoid starvation. In our latitudes the owls prey on rabbits and other game, or even on dead fish on ocean beaches. In large refuse dumps they prey on Norway rats."
Hot dang, I was fleshing out my article into a major piece. Maybe a cover story, I dreamed.
Nearly finished, I decided to check on accuracy and fill in details by calling my brother Bill, who never pursued his dreams of veterinary medicine, instead excelling in industrial management and trade consultancy. Bill listened quietly to my plan -- very quietly. Ever notice how sibling appellation seldom changes? Some 50 years later, my brother used his favorite nickname for me: "Well, Jason, I never really told you this because you were just a kid, but that snowy owl didn't exactly -- er, ah, umm -- fly away that night."
What could he mean? Was I hearing correctly, after all these years of harboring that romantic ending?
"You remember how Quinn (our father) used to wear that battered old fedora hat everywhere? Well, one night he went out to the barn to check on the owl. It had pretty well healed, and was probably hungry, and it apparently thought the fedora resembled a rodent or some sort of food -- and the owl attacked him. Tore the fedora and knocked it off his head, and then sunk a talon into his scalp and left a gash that took Doc Fox eight stitches to close."
Now, my beloved father Quinn -- who died 23 years ago this very week -- was a compassionate and friendly man, if somewhat impulsive and colorful. But some things he would not tolerate, such as an eight-stitch attack upon his balding head by a large feathered predator or destruction of his beloved fedora.
"That's right," continued my brother, who could almost hear my silent fear over the telephone. "Quinn went into the house, got his shotgun and blew away the owl."
My first thought was that I must have been elsewhere at the time, since I would have heard the thunderous blast from my father's old 12-gauge Remington. My second thought I enunciated: "My gosh, Bill, I can't sell a story on our father killing an owl in a rampage over his hat to a magazine called The Conservationist!"
As usual, my oldest brother had a practical solution: "Try sending it to 'Guns and Ammo' magazine."
So far, I've been able to refrain from that. As I said, some of my students -- probably conditioned by years of playing violent and addictive video games -- got a big kick out the yarn. It was probably one of them who surreptitiously stuck some self-adhesive owl stamps on my office door.
They're probably from some wildlife fund or something, and whoever did it found stamps depicting the correct species -- the great snowy owl. I'll probably leave them up until next semester.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 3 2002 |