The Great Old Owl had a son. He was a bright, soft gray. Silvery in the moonlight, he flew with the grace of a night breeze, whispering through the bowing arches of the leafy forest and the still-warm summer fields.The Old Owl was very proud of her son. His eyes were sharp and his dive was quick. He would watch the night when she was gone. As the sun rose, she told him stories of those before, the Old Ones, who were huge, flying to the moon and back, carrying the young humans to their home on earth, protecting them from the hurricane and the tidal wave.
Now they were only the Night Watchers, destined always for the shadows on the edges of the magic time - the shadows between day and night, history and future.
The Young One listened, quiet. He listened and he watched.
In the dusk, he rose early and went to the edge of the fields, where the People were. They moved slowly over the ground like squirrels on their hind legs, but they were tall and some were very big. He watched and watched. Until he saw her.
Her head was bright gold, her movement over the ground graceful as if she was floating. And when she turned in question to his hoot, her eyes were big and soft and dark. He was obsessed. He followed her into the day, his hours changing to catch more glimpses of her. She bathed in the cold stream in the early morning, and with his big, radiant eyes he watched her. She gathered thyme and rosemary in the meadows and along the sea, and flying low in the late afternoon, wings slow with sleep, he would come behind her.
She was a tall girl, and she was a dreamer. She watched, too, watched the others pairing off and moving to small homes, having small babies. She wanted a home, she wanted babies. But she also wanted her time in the fields, her time in the forest. She wandered the lanes and wondered if it would ever come, that time for hearth and fire, rather than the time for windy nights spent gazing at the crashing waves. Her legs were brown with sunlight when she realized the time had come, and her companion, the gray owl, grayer now and thin with longing watched it too. The boys came, the men came, a blur of animals to him, focused as he was on her - her golden hair, her soft brown eyes.
He came upon her one early morning, after hunting. She was weeping. He brought her a rabbit - fresh and white and beautiful. He had cleanly snapped its neck. It looked still alive, warm even to the touch. He longed to have it, he was very hungry. But he brought it to her and offered it to her and she gazed at it, not at him, and went back to weeping. When he awoke, nearly dead from hunger, in the evening, he saw it still upon her window sill, cold and wet with an autumn rain that had fallen. He took it away, ashamed, and ate it cold in penitence.
He stayed with her still. She came home one night with a man and he heard her cries - but they were not cries of pain. She was with the man for many years after that - but the Young One's ardor had not dimmed. What was a two-legged love to love like his, the love of a Watcher? He could not comprehend it, nor did he care. Only once, when a dark magpie came to sing in her window did he feel jealousy - for she listened to it, and cocking her head to the side, spoke to it. But he could not understand her words. He attacked it, and it lay dead in the forest not long later.
Many years went by, and the Young One became old. But he would not go with any owls, he had no time and little interest. He followed her, and he protected her with the beats of his wings in the sky. She was never alone in the night, and though she never needed it, he was there in her defense. Although he knew not what against. She was never alone - and moreover, neither was he.
She had turned as gray as he. She was like a ghost of herself - slowly moving through, haunting, her own house. She sat upon her house's steps and knitted near-sightedly, humming a little tune to herself. The man was not with her any more. He had disappeared one day while the owl was asleep in the rafters, and a new mound had appeared in the church yard. The Young One watched still, she was still as beautiful; though her hair was no longer bright, her eyes were still soft as the back of a caterpillar. Small people came and gathered around her, and she smiled and laughed at them. Some pointed, and babbled in his direction, but he took no notice. She turned around slowly, and for the second time in her life, she looked at him. She smiled once, into his eyes, and turned away again.
The next day, there was no movement in the house. In the night the old lady had passed, and outside her window, a very old gray owl lay, silent and dead.
No comments:
Post a Comment