The Dog Who Wouldn't Be (13 page)

When school began again that fall I experienced some difficulty with the owls, but in particular with Wol. My school was on the opposite side of the river, a good three miles from home, and I reached
it by bicycling over the Twenty-fifth Street bridge. When I began going to classes in September the owls were indignant, for they, who had been my constant companions all that summer, were now left alone. They did not readily accept this new state of affairs and, during the first week of the term, I was late on three successive days as a result of having to conduct my tenacious pair of followers back home.

On the fourth morning I grew desperate and tried locking them in the big outdoor pen – which they had long since ceased to use. Wol was infuriated by this treatment and he tore into the chicken-wire barrier with angry talons. I sneaked hurriedly away, but before I was halfway across the bridge a startled shout from a pedestrian, and the scream of brakes from a passing car, alerted me to some unusual happenstance. I had barely time to apply my own brakes when there was a wild rush of air, a deep-throated and victorious “Hoo-HOO!” and two sets of talons settled themselves securely on my shoulder. Wol was breathless from the unaccustomed business of flying, but he was triumphant.

It was by then too late to take him home again, so I went resignedly on my way to school. I left him in the yard, perched on the handlebars of my bicycle, and insecurely tied with binder twine.

My third class that morning happened to be French. The teacher was a desiccated female whose spiritual home may have been Paris, but who had never actually been farther east than Winnipeg. She was affected, humorless, and a tyrant. None of us liked her. Yet I actually felt sorry for her when, in the midst of the declination of an irregular verb, Wol whumped moodily in through the second-story window and slid to an unsatisfactory halt upon the top of her hardwood desk. The exclamation with which she greeted him was given in very old Anglo-Saxon, without even a hint of a French accent.

I had an interview with the principal after this incident, but he was a reasonable man and the upshot was that I escaped corporal punishment on the understanding that my owl would stay at home in future.

I achieved this end, but only at the cost of giving the owls the free run of our house. Some ten minutes before I was due to leave for school I would invite Weeps and Wol into the kitchen, where they were allowed to finish off the bacon scraps left from our breakfast. Apparently Wol accepted this as a sufficient bribe, for he made no further attempt to follow me to school; and Weeps, who always accepted Wol's lead, gave me
no more trouble either. Mother, on the other hand, was not best pleased by these arrangements.

Although the majority of the human residents of Saskatoon knew about, and were inured to, our owls, there were at least two occasions when Wol and Weeps were the unwitting cause of some alarm and despondency to members of the human species. One of these took place in a prairie hamlet to the north of Saskatoon. It was in August, and my parents had decided that we should spend a week end at Emma Lake, a resort area far to the north. We loaded our camping gear aboard Eardlie and the six of us – Mother, Father, myself, Mutt, and the two owls – set out.

Having ridden in the car on several previous occasions, the owls had developed a preference in the matter of seating arrangements. Their chosen roost was the back of the rumble seat, where they were exposed to the full force of the slip stream. They loved it, for it offered them the same exhilarating thrill that all small boys experience when they thrust a hand out of a car window and let the wind act on it as it does upon the wing of an aircraft. My owls exploited this adventure to the limit. As soon as the car was in motion they would extend their great pinions as if in flight. If they
then slanted the leading edges downward, the rush of air would force them into a squatting position. But when they tipped the leading edges upward, they would be lifted clean off the seat, and only the grip of their talons would keep them from soaring aloft like kites.

There was not sufficient room to allow both of them to bob up and down together, so they learned to alternate. While one was going down, the other would be coming up, in rhythmic frequency. Intoxicated by the rush of air, they would often break into song, and my father, caught up in the spirit of the thing, would punctuate their excited hootings with blasts on Eardlie's horn.

Mutt also rode in the rumble seat, his eyes protected from the inevitable prairie dust by his motorcycle goggles. Thus the complete picture of Eardlie on the highways included a vignette of Mutt sitting stolidly between two active owls, and staring straight ahead through his outsize goggles with a kind of dour resignation.

At the time I never considered the effect that this apparition must have had upon the drivers of farm wagons whom we passed; and upon the drivers of other cars who passed us. But I have since had some penitential thoughts about the matter.

On the day we started north the sky was threatening, and we had only gone fifty or sixty miles when a thin drizzle began to beat upon the windscreen. The drizzle quickly thickened, and we halted to erect the canvas hood over the front seat. By the time we had finished, the rain had become a downpour, and when we drove off again, the rumble seat and its occupants were receiving a mighty scourging from the storm. Mutt wisely hunched himself down into the seat well where he was less exposed to the fury of wind and water, but the owls refused to abandon their exposed perch. They even seemed to be enjoying the pelting rain, although their feathers were soon plastered to their bodies, and their great wings hung sodden and drooping.

Eardlie was the one who really suffered from the deluge, and he began to cough and sputter alarmingly just as we entered one of those two-elevator, one-store, one-garage villages which sprout like toadstools on the western plains. The garage in this particular village was a scrofulous frame shanty with a single antiquated gasoline pump in front of it. A black doorway gaped in the façade and, presuming that this led to the workshop, my father wheeled Eardlie through the thickening gumbo
of the street and into the interior of the building.

The garage was dark and gloomy. A single meager light bulb glowed dismally, high up among the rafters, and by its wan and pallid rays we could barely distinguish the clutter of old tractor parts and rusted scrap that almost filled the place. The proprietor was not immediately in evidence and we were about to dismount and go searching for him when my eye was caught by movement near Eardlie's right rear fender.

A man was crouching in the shadows there, apparently brooding over an old inner tube. He had a tire iron in his hand and he seemed quite oblivious to our presence.

We waited with what patience we could muster until he finished communing with the tube and then, very slowly, he began to straighten his back and stand up to our level.

His face came into view about three feet away from the rumble seat. I can see that face as clearly now as I saw it then. It was pallid, deeply lined, and petulant, and smeared with grease that had stiffened a week-old beard. It was wearing a look of querulous animosity, but this began to change as the eyes focused themselves on the car and its passengers. The pallidity of the face was accentuated in a
startling manner. The jaws began to move as they might in a ruminant – though they were chewing on nothing more substantial than empty air.

It was then that Wol chose to shake himself. He spread his wings to their full extent, gave a little leap, and sprayed water far and wide. The shake transformed him, increasing his apparent size about threefold as his wet feathers came unstuck. The transition was startling enough; but when he concluded the performance by loudly clacking his great beak, by flipping the membranes sickeningly over his yellow eyes, and by giving throaty voice to his relief – the effect was devastating.

The garageman's face indicated that at least
he
found it so. The tempo of his jaw speeded up and his face registered a look of fearful, and then desperate, incomprehension.

Perhaps Mutt was as curious as were the rest of us, for at this moment he chose to thrust his goggled head over the edge of the car for a closer look, peering in his shortsighted manner into the garageman's face.

The man had had enough. He moaned low in his throat, threw the tire iron recklessly over his shoulder, but did not stay to hear the crash of broken glass as the sole window shattered. He was gone by
then, running down the muddy street, his lank arms held high above his head and the rain beating into his face.

“Oh, Jesu!” he was crying. “Oh, Sweet Jesu! I never
done
it, that I'll
swear!
”

Mother was shocked. She felt that this was a foolish and sacrilegious thing to say. But how could she know? I have often speculated since on the nature of that man's hidden crime, for there must have been small enough scope for sin in that desolate and meager little village.

More than a year elapsed, and Wol had become a full-fledged member of the family, before he struck once more at human sanity. He had, by this time, become a house owl, making almost as much use of the house as we did ourselves. It was useless to try to deny him house privileges, for he had learned that when he came and banged on the window panes with his horny beak, we would hasten to admit him before the glass gave way. During the warm seasons we resigned ourselves to leaving one of the living-room windows permanently open, and by this portal he would come and go as the mood was on him.

In the summer of Wol's second year, Saskatoon was enriched by the arrival of a young curate who
had just graduated from a divinity school in the east. The curate was of an earnest persuasion and he made it his first duty to pay a call on every one of the members of our parish (to which he was attached). It was a warm and balmy summer afternoon when he reached our house.

He rang our doorbell, and Mother was pleased to welcome him, for he was a well-favored youth. He had the high-domed forehead that is so often the mark of the stage cleric, but the hair above it was black and curly. Mother invited him into the living room for a chat and a cup of tea.

The young man made himself discreetly comfortable on our chesterfield, a massive and antique piece of furniture which was so placed that it faced the fireplace, with its back to the open window some six feet behind it. Balancing a cup gracefully in his hand, the young divine engaged Mother in conversation, the burden of which was concerned with my own lamentable absences from Sunday School.

Wol had been spending that afternoon ant bathing. This was a peculiar pastime in which he sometimes engaged, and which consisted of tearing an anthill apart and then fluffing the mixture of dust and angry ants through his feathers. He appeared to
find the sensation gratifying, although its purpose seemed inscrutable to us. At any rate, he finished his bath about 4
P.M.
and, feeling in an amiable mood, decided to come into the house and tell Mother about it.

To this day my mother swears she did not see him in sufficient time to warn her visitor. I believe that she saw him well enough, but was just too petrified to open her mouth.

Now Wol, in his maturity, had become a sentimental bird, possessed of the habit of leaping lightly to one's shoulder, there to balance himself while he tenderly nibbled the nearest human ear with his great beak, breathing harshly but affectionately into the face of his companion the while. Everyone who was acquainted with Wol knew of this habit, and some deplored it, for Wol was a carnivore and as a result he had the most atrocious breath.

The flight of an owl is noiseless; there is no warning rustle of pinions. Wol's arrival on the windowsill was as silent as the arrival of a puff of thistledown. He paused a moment in the opening and then, spying a pair of tempting shoulders on the chesterfield, launched himself across the narrow intervening space.

The object of his attentions shot straightway
into the air and began leaping ecstatically about the room. It was an ill-considered action on his part, for Wol lost his balance and, with a purely involuntary reflex action, tightened up his talons.

The curate now demonstrated that he was both an athletic and a vocal youth. He howled, and his bouncing became wilder. Wol, clinging for dear life now, and deeply disturbed by his reception, tightened up his grip once more and then – and it could have happened only as a result of his surprise and indignation – he forgot for the first and last time in his mature life that he was housebroken….

I do not recall any single catastrophe among the many which beset my family through the years that caused us quite as much embarrassment as this one did. Mother, who was a pillar of the church, suffered more than the rest of us, but my father and I were not exempt. I can but hope that the church officials noticed how well filled the Mowat collection envelopes were on succeeding Sundays. I hope too that the elders of the church had the common decency to reimburse their new curate for dry-cleaning expenses incurred, let us say, in the line of duty.

The stories of my family and Wol and Weeps that I have so far related are only high lights of a
relationship which, on the whole, was a warm and rewarding one. Even my mother, who had less reason than any of us for such an attitude, was fond of Wol and she forgave him almost everything during the three years he was with us. Though our owls were often underfoot, both actually and figuratively, we would not willingly have eschewed the chance to live with them.

But as it must be with the lives of most wild things which have been taken from the wilderness, the final fate of the two owls was a tragic one. When we left the west permanently in 1935, it proved impossible to take them with us; and so we reluctantly made arrangements with an acquaintance who owned a farm some two hundred miles from Saskatoon to care for our old friends. It was, of course, out of the question to turn them loose, for they would have been as helpless in the outer world as newborn owlets.