THE LITTLE BROWN OWL HUNTS FOR FOOD
Wise-as-a-she-wolf had not been gone from the clearing of Whispering
Grass more than ten minutes before the little brown owl that had once
been Bright Robe made his appearance from the gloom of the woods and
perched on one of the poles at the peak of the lodge. The old woman
looked up and saw the round, yellow eyes staring down at her with such
a hateful glare that she knew them for the orbs of the cruel magician.
Her heart weakened within her. She could not remove her eyes from
the threatening, baleful regard. But as the owl did not come nearer,
courage returned to her by slow degrees. She remembered that, no matter
how murderous the bird’s designs upon her, he was but a bird after all,
with no power to change his shape until five long summers were passed.
So, suddenly, she turned away, snatched a fagot from the ground and
hurled it upward through the smoke-hole in the peak of the wigwam. But
the owl was already in the air, floating back to the dense shades of
the forest.
The owl did not move again from his retreat in a thicket of pines,
until night. He was hungry; and as soon as darkness fell he ventured
from his perch to look for food. The thought of raw flesh was not
repulsive to him, for he had even eaten it in his human form; but he
had grave misgivings as to his present ability to kill. He knew that he
must fly very quietly, peering about for mice and birds, and, at the
first movement in the moss or foliage, pounce down and strike with his
claws. So shrewdly did hunger gnaw him that he quite forgot, for the
time being, the indignity of his position.
He moved through the forest ways like a drifting shadow, sometimes
close to the ground, sometimes among the pointed tree-tops. For several
hours he hunted high and low, far and wide, without detecting so much
as a sign of life in woodland or barren. At last he lit on the tip of a
little spruce tree and peered sharply about on all sides and listened
intently. He heard a slight rustle at the foot of the tree but could
see nothing. Again the rustling sound came to his alert ears and
he saw something moving on the ground, beyond the lowest branch of
the tree. It must be a mouse he thought, and the idea fairly made his
little beak water with anticipation of the feast.
[Illustration: “THE ASTONISHED BUNNY HAD DEALT HIM A SHREWD BLOW WITH
ONE OF HIS BIG HIND LEGS.”]
He marked the spot, and pounced. His claws hooked into a hairy mass.
Something snarled and sprang. With a terrified squawk he bounced to one
side, just out of reach of a pair of snapping jaws, and flew swiftly
into the top of a pine. He had mistaken the tail of a fox for a mouse.
The owl learned several more useful lessons that night; but he made no
kill. He was knocked about by a white hare, on which he had pitched
with a magician’s scorn of the powers of a hare; but he was only a
very small owl after all, and the astonished bunny had dealt him a
shrewd blow with one of his big hind legs. The only mouse that he had
discovered had escaped him with ease; and, most bitter of all his
experiences, he had been hunted himself by a great white bird whose
wings were as silent as his own. Just before dawn, he returned to the
lodge of Whispering Grass and found a few scraps of frozen fish near
the store-house of bark and logs.
He ate these ravenously, tearing them with beak and claws. When his
hunger was satisfied, he examined the store-house carefully. It was
a very small building, raised on four stumps to a height of several
feet from the ground. The walls were made of logs, fitted tightly and
strongly together, but it seemed to him that the roof was composed of
nothing more substantial than a few sheets of birch bark. He scratched
at the bark with his claws and jabbed at it with his beak. He got quite
beside himself with rage; but his desperate attempts to tear the roof
of the old woman’s store-house, so that he could carry away her meat
and fish, proved futile.
At last, weary from his exertions, he flew to a near-by tree to think
the matter over. He did not care greatly about the food, for its own
sake, for a very little of it would keep him in plenty; but he wanted
to steal and destroy it so that Whispering Grass would starve. A bright
idea occurred to him. He would go to a lynx, or a bear, and tell him
that much good food lay close at hand, with only a roof of bark to
cover it. And perhaps he could even persuade some big animal to destroy
old Whispering Grass herself. Surely the mention of his true name would
be enough to induce the fiercest beast in the forest to do his bidding.
The little owl lurked in a tree-top all day, planning his revenge on
the old woman. As soon as dusk fell, he flew to the clearing and beheld
Whispering Grass squatted in the doorway of her lodge, eating her
evening meal. A dish of meat lay on the ground beside her and the smell
of it awoke a man’s appetite in the stomach of the fluffy little bird.
He perched on the top of the lodge and stared down at his enemy and her
repast. He made no sound, and she did not look up. Suddenly he dropped
upon the dish, sank his claws into the largest slice of meat, flew
swiftly back to his tree and swallowed it to the last tough shred.
The old woman knew, in a moment, that the thief was Bright Robe, for
no other owl would have sufficient courage to take food from so near a
human being.
“He might even attack me,” she mumbled, “and claw my eyes out.”
So she carried her supper into the lodge, fastened the flap across the
doorway and put more wood on the fire. Terror of the evil magician was
like a cold wind upon her back.
After finishing his meal, the owl set out in search of a lynx or a
bear. The little victory over Whispering Grass made him feel quite
like his old self; but he did not forget the lessons that he had
learned the night before. He flew cautiously, avoiding the open spaces
for fear of the big white bird. He investigated every thicket, entering
from above as a matter of discretion. Though he was looking for a lynx,
he did not want to find one unexpectedly, and he suspected the lower
branches of every tree of sheltering a crouching fox.
After several hours of searching, the little brown owl happened upon
an old she bear. She was hunting mice and seemed to be in a cranky
humour; and when the owl accosted her politely, in the language of the
woods-people with which he had become familiar during his long life as
a magician, she did not so much as look up at him. The owl was nettled.
“Do you hear me speak?” he asked.
The bear grunted and began to amble away.
“Hold, hold,” cried the owl. “If you are hungry, I can tell you where
to get food in plenty.”
At that the bear halted and turned.
“Hungry,” she grumbled. “Would I be grabbing at little mice if I were
not hungry, you miserable, fleshless bunch of feathers?”
“If you talk like that,” replied the owl, “you may go fill your paunch
with moss and twigs.”
The bear grumbled more than ever. She did not like owls, for they had
the reputation of pretending to know a great deal, and, in reality, of
knowing very little. Also, she had once tried to make a meal off one of
these scrawny birds, in a time of famine. On the other hand, she was
far too hungry to turn her back on any chance of obtaining a full meal.
“You must excuse my rudeness,” she grumbled, “but I’m really so worried
about the scarcity of fish and soft roots and the activity of the
hares, that I scarcely know what I say. I believe you mentioned food.
What kind of food?”
“Pemmican and smoked salmon and dried caribou meat,” said the owl.
The old bear sat up and pressed her paws to her stomach.
“If I could only believe it. But you owls are all liars,” she mumbled.
“I only appear to be an owl,” said the little bird. “I am, in reality,
the great magician Bright Robe.”
The bear paid no attention to this remark.
“Where is the food?” she asked.
“In the clearing of that old woman called Whispering Grass,” the owl
informed her.
“In her store-house?”
“Yes.”
“And is the old woman dead?”
“No,” replied the owl. “She is not dead yet.”
“Perhaps you mean that you intend to kill her,” sneered the bear.
“If you carry away her food, then she’ll die of starvation,” said the
wicked little owl.
The bear was quite inarticulate with fury and disgust. She ran to the
tree on which the bird was perched and clawed at and shook it.
“You feather-head,” she managed to growl, at last, “do you want me to
get my hair all eaten off again by that old woman’s red fire? I know
her store-house, you rascal. It is as strong as a rock. I tried to
break into it once, when I was younger, and she came out with a stick
of fire and hit me a hundred times.”
Before the owl could recover himself from the unexpected outburst of
wrath, the old she bear had ambled swiftly into the depths of the
forest.