She sat in the deepening twilight awaiting the coming of her lover. The
wind whispered in the rustling tree tops, but she heeded it not, though
she turned her handsome head sharply when a thoughtless katydid near her
sent forth one shrill note.
“He is late tonight,” she murmured softly, as she gave a graceful little
shake to her fluffy brown suit and settled herself anew. Then she bent
her beautiful head and gently scratched her ear with her right
reversible toe.
There came no sound of wings, but the branch on which she sat quivered
beneath an added weight, and she rolled her round eyes affectionately
toward the new comer, a great horned owl, with a welcoming gurgle, in
which was a note of expectation. Her lover was a handsome fellow, with
great tufts over his ears, and he had brought a “gift for his fair,”
though it was not a dainty box of bonbons produced from his overcoat
pocket. He lifts his broad wings, bends his head, and produces from his
crop a newly caught frog. His mistress nestles close, with fluttering
wings and upturned beak, and receives the great dainty with an evident
pleasure which delights him. He tries again. This time the convulsive
effort brings forth to light a field mouse, garnished with two
grasshoppers and a black cricket, which his lady receives with the
pretty infantile attitudes and flutterings which all ladies think so
becoming and attractive. Then they snuggle up close together, as is the
way of lovers, and sit so still they might have been mistaken for a pair
of stuffed owls—indeed one of them was—save for the occasional turning
round of the head in that mechanical way affected by owls, for they are
watchful, as all wood creatures have need to be.
“Why didst thou tarry so long, my brave?” she finally murmured, as she
fondly toyed with the soft mottled feathers on his broad breast.
He lifted his feathery horns angrily at the remembrance. “The blue
terror caught sight of me as I looked forth from the beautiful dark home
in the dead oak tree which I have selected for thee, my beloved. It was
just as the gaudy daylight was giving way to the pleasing blackness of
night that I came forth, thinking all the little day flyers would have
been asleep, but a belated bluejay saw me and, with lifted crest and
shrill voice, raised the hue and cry. The robin left his mud daubed nest
in the orchard across the road, the titmouse from his home in the knot
hole of the rail fence, the nuthatch, the butcher bird and hosts of
others all came, with piercing scoldings, sharp pecks and fluttering
wings. I might have gone back into the darkness of our new home and so
saved myself further annoyance, but, light of the world,” as he rolled
his eyes fondly toward her, “I wanted not the blue terror to know where
thou wouldst lay thine eggs—he is an egg thief, himself, thou knowest—so
I sailed away into the open, and, O, the clamor they raised. And see,”
showing two or three broken feathers, “what the bold blue terror has
done, the strong voiced and strong winged bluejay.”
“How I wish I had been there,” muttered the lady owl vengefully through
her clenched beak. “I would have torn his blue crest from his wicked
little head.”
“And I would have taken his head along with it, at least as far as that
black necklace of which he is so proud, if he had but given me the
chance,” laughed the owl grimly. “It’s my usual way, only there were so
many of the light, active little things that when I turned toward one
another would come at me from the other side, so that my only safety
from annoyance—for that was all they could do—was in my swift and silent
wings.
“It seemed,” he went on, his great eyes blazing at the recollection, “as
if all the birds in the woods joined the mob, friend and foe flying wing
to wing, the most innocent seed bird and the bloodiest thief fighting
side by side, and I had to buffet them with wing and claw, though they
kept beyond reach of my beak,” he added proudly, and he passed his great
feather-clad claw caressingly down his polished black beak, curved like
a scimitar, and as strong and sharp.
“Thou knowest, my beautiful one,” he continued, “how the bluejay and the
woodpecker fight one another, but tonight they joined forces as if they
had been friends from the dawning of creation; and when the butcher bird
cried out, ‘He ate three of my children yesterday,’ the
titmouse—forgetting the thorn on which that same butcher bird impaled
her first husband in the early summer—replied in fullest sympathy, ‘And
he stole one of my lovely eggs only a week ago,’ and then she screamed
with all her tiny might and flew at my head as boldly as if she had been
an eagle. The little pests!”
“Never mind, my hero,” murmured the lady owl as fondly as a coo dove, “a
man has his mosquitoes, a dog has his fleas, there is a horsefly for the
horse, and these little birds are our mosquitoes, our fleas and our
flies. Who-who-who,” she stammered in her rhetorical flight; “who has
not his troubles in this world?”
“Who-who-who,” echoed the owl.
S. E. McKee.