Life in the Court of Matane (20 page)

Evening came. We clambered our way up through the dense forest. The king no longer spoke. A bird hooted, softly and deeply. It sounded almost human. Then we saw it. The great horned owl.

The great horned owl is native to the area stretching from the northern tree line to the plateaus of Brazil. It is at home all across North America. You'd be surprised how tall it is. Sixty centimetres of plumage from head to tail. Its wingspan reaches one hundred fifty centimetres in flight. Great horned owls do not build nests. They commandeer the nests of others, where they lay and sit on their eggs. Unlike the brown-headed cowbird, they sit on their own eggs. They let others build a nest before throwing them out on their ear.

No matter where your travels might take you in North America, you can hear their clear hoot from dusk till dawn. You'll know it when you hear it. It's a clear and pure, almost artificial, hoo-hoo-hoo-hooo sound. The bird's size and its song announcing the onset of twilight are amazing. But it's neither size nor song that impresses ornithologists: it's the bird's migratory habits. Because great horned owls do not migrate. They are born, they live, and they die in the same place. Unlike other birds that change latitudes to satisfy their hunger, great horned owls never feel the need to move. They never get itchy feet. Their food supply allows them to live sedentary lives. They live on rodents, other birds, hares, small farmyard animals, and even cats and dogs. Working their way to the top of the food pyramid has enabled great horned owls to adapt to their habitats. Their position in the food chain has left them indifferent to the life cycles of insects and the growth periods of plants. A genuine threat to any small animal, great horned owls have learned that if they are to stay put, they must eat their neighbours. And they give no quarter. Few other birds have their capacity to adapt. Man is their main predator. They also have a surprising ability to adapt to all types of climate. From the chilly forests of the Rockies to the bayous of Louisiana, great horned owls feel right at home. From time immemorial, the hoots of great horned owls have swept across the vast land where I was born, across entire time zones, from the beaches of Newfoundland to Vancouver Island. Their song, along with that of the white-throated sparrow, makes up the soundtrack to our countryside. Whenever you hear their morose lament, you'll know that you're in my homeland.

When it spies its prey on the ground—still blissfully unaware of its fate—the great horned owl opens its wings and glides down in the darkness. A second before it seizes the rodent, it lets out a piercing shriek to stun its victim. The animal is paralyzed, unable to flee as the great horned owl grips it vice-like in its talons. It might be a field mouse, but the great horned owl tends to prefer larger prey, like hens or hares. It doesn't matter how big they are: great horned owls can carry away prey two or three times their weight. In the warm, living flesh of its victims, the great horned owl has found an alternative to the nomadic ways of most birds. It stays at home and devours its neighbours. This stroke of genius is worthy of admiration in itself. So when we saw it perched on a birch tree in the twilight, it seemed to be saying, “I'm staying put. I've been here since before paper was invented. You can nationalize the land all you like; it is of no concern to me. I was here before you were, and I'll eat the last of you before taking back these forests.” Years before a teacher handed me Baudelaire's
Les fleurs du mal
, I understood the meaning of his “Owls,” these strange gods that sit in meditation, darting their red eyes. His verses, in a nutshell, encourage us to stay right where we are. “Man, enraptured by a passing shadow, / Forever bears the punishment / Of having tried to change his place.”

Henry VIII had clearly never read Baudelaire. Or hadn't spent enough time on his owls. He must have preferred “A Passing Glance” or “A Carcass.” We were living the final days of Anne Boleyn's reign, apprehending it though not yet fully aware of it. Soon, the wind of Jane Seymour would rise up and sweep away all before it. A time of horrible infections and decomposed amours was at our door.

The hoots of the great horned owl accompanied us to our destination. We were on top of the mountain, our azimuth. The sun was sinking ever deeper into the St. Lawrence. On the other shore, the first lights were beginning to sparkle in Baie-Comeau. Down below, Route 4 and its houses, no two alike. I could see our white house quite clearly, my white henhouse with its idiotic Rhode Island Reds, and the big white shed where Henry VIII was building his boat, his great dream. Then the “green” zones, the welfare bums by the river, the forest with our very own partridge, and the nationalized Hydro-Québec towers. Everything the king had showed us that night, the whole country. I thought to myself that it was all very well, but we hadn't really learned anything. I thought that the king might have made a bit of an effort and, rather than taking out his compass to show us a lot of things we had seen thousands of times before, he might have, for instance, simply lit a fire at home and explained to us, before the flames, why he had always voted for René Lévesque. I didn't see what the walk was meant to teach us about our province's modern-day history.

Anne Boleyn, the queen of punctuality, turned the lights on and off in the dining room at the agreed hour. Three short flashes, three longer ones, then three short ones. An S.O.S. in the Quebec countryside. Night fell. We gazed at the world spread out before us as though for the last time. We had to start heading back through the forest. We were in for a few surprises on the way home. I realized that the forest, once plunged into darkness, becomes another place governed by other masters. As the sun's slanting rays fall, the great horned owl regains control over the darkened land. It's also at this clammy hour that certain mysteries of our existence are revealed to the mortals that dare venture deep into the shadows.

There comes a time in every boy's life when he realizes he always has been and always will be trapped in a forest forever. Whether he is born in the foggy port of Amsterdam, in the paddy fields of Indochina, or on the still-forested edge of the New World, there's no escaping this fate. There will always come a time when, amid Glooskap's vast creation, the boy will contemplate the profound solitude of existence. For some, this moment, which is as important as all of the Holy Church's sacraments, comes on a football field or in the thin arms of a tall blonde whose heart isn't really in it. In my case, it came that night in the forests of the Gaspé Peninsula. We descended into the shadows of the night, lighting the way with police flashlights. Taking an azimuth was out of the question. Compasses have the drawback of being useless at nighttime, when your destination lurks in the shadows. In such circumstances, all you can do is trust your senses and the lay of the land. Since we had followed the road the whole way up, it seemed obvious to me that the best way home would be to take the same route. But local forests are dense. It's easy to lose your way, and our king has long legs. He doesn't always wait for his subjects in the mad dash onward. My foot slipped on a moss-covered rock, and I fell face first into the frightening autumnal darkness. In the pitch dark, the noises of the forest took shape, amplified by the ancestral fear that has accompanied them since the dawn of humanity. Man may well be able to send faster and faster rockets into space, build bigger and brighter cities, and put up longer and longer bridges, but a mere hoot from an owl in the depths of the Canadian forest will always make his blood run cold.

When I came to, the king and my sister had disappeared. I was alone between two fir trees. I had lost the compass and the flashlight. The nervous flapping of a bat out hunting between the treetops set the tone. The great horned owl sent out its sad lament. I had never heard it so close. What you first notice about the great horned owl in the dark of night is its two piercing eyes that sweep down upon you like misery onto humanity. Before you realize what's happening, it's already too late. The bird was perched on the branch of a nearby fir tree when I opened my mouth to cry for help. Before I could even let out a cry, it opened its beak to speak. Now, there will be those among you, dear readers, a marginal minority—albeit a noisy, troublesome one—who will refuse to hear what the great horned owl has to say. Such people are easily identifiable by their grey clothing and the terse creases that form around the corners of their mouths when they reach their twenties, while their peers are still smooth-skinned and youthful. They're the type who never eat dessert. Easily recognized and therefore avoided, this species is not completely without merit, since it excels in other spheres of human activity, such as designing forms for the revenue ministry and drawing up management policies for computerized data collection protocols and running supply chains for petroleum derivatives. These people will dismiss the great horned owl's speech out of hand. But at this point in my story, there can't be too many of these bores left among my readers. Their hectic schedules prevent them from devoting time to a phenomenon as improbable and untoward as a conversation between a child and an owl. They probably wouldn't have bought this novel at any rate.

The fact that an owl spoke to me in the woods of the Gaspé Peninsula surprised me less than the learned and pedantic tones he adopted. His accent and tone of voice reminded me of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Sister Jeannette, Madame Nordet, and Japanese cartoons had prepared me for people walking on water, multiplying fishes, and panpipe-playing frogs, so I was able to take a nighttime encounter with a talking owl in my stride.

“Are you hurt, sir?”

“Not too badly. My foot hurts a little.”

“You'll be fine. Are you lost, sir?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“How amusing. If I perch on top of that birch tree over there, I can see the mice running around outside your house.”

“So you know where I live.”

“I know everything worth knowing within ten square kilometres. You do realize you are on my land?”

“Am I bothering you? I don't eat your field mice.”

“That's not the point. I am a solitary being. Impatient and fiercely territorial.”

“Yes, but we don't belong to the same species.”

“You don't understand, young man. For me, there are two types of creature.”

“What are they?”

“First, there is me. Then, there are the others.”

“That's quite a simplistic way of looking at the world. I don't imagine it wins you many friends.”

“I don't think you understand. An owl doesn't make
friends
. Anything that doesn't belong to my species is likely to become dinner.”

“Even me? But how would you manage?”

“All I would have to do is gouge out your eyes and peck away at your head for long enough. You are well fed. You look tasty enough.”

“But I don't understand. You never attack humans.”

“Because there is still plenty of easier prey to catch. But make no mistake. The day I'm hungry enough, you're all going to get it. And you are on my land, after all.”

“Yes, you said that already.
I
thought we were on
our
land. The king said so. This is our country. Before us, there were the Micmac, but they're all gone now. He never said anything about owls!”

“Hoo! Hoo! Listen to the little prince! Please inform His Majesty that this country belongs neither to you nor to the Micmac. Glooskap gave it to the great horned owl. You'll all leave soon enough!”

“I really do hope so, believe me. Do you know Jacques Brel?”

“Was he a Micmac?”

“No, he was Belgian. He always sang about leaving. You remind me of Jacques Brel. In “L'Ostendaise,” for example, he sings: ‘There are those who live and those who are at sea.'”

“Never heard that one. Is he still alive?”

“No, I think he's dead.”

“—or at sea! Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! Ha! Ha! Ha! I'm the life and soul of the party this evening!”

“You're quite lighthearted for an animal that's supposed to symbolize wisdom.”

“Since when has wisdom precluded lightheartedness, my dear boy? Besides, I have wings and I can fly, I'll have you know.
I
am no slave to gravity.”

“I... I don't know. Sages are meant to be profound and…”

“Boring! They'd bore you to death, they would! Your species has never managed to be wise and lighthearted at once. That's their Achilles heel. They take themselves far too seriously.”

“Great horned owl, please could you show me how to get home?”

“Yes, I dare say I could.”

“Will you? I've lost the king and he's not the type to look back. He won't come back and get me.”

“You seem to find that a shame. What does he owe you, this poor king?”

“Well, nothing really, apart from the fact that the whole trip was his idea.”

“And you followed him?”

“Yes, I didn't have any choice.”

“We always have a choice. That's what I tell my fledglings before I send them packing.”

“You chase your fledglings from your territory?”

“Of course. You don't think I would leave, do you? I am a sedentary creature. When the rest of creation is one's larder, there is no need for one to keep moving around.”

“You never move?”

“No. I hunt within a ten-kilometre radius. That's it. All of North America is divided into territories, each ruled by a great horned owl. No one treads on its talons. That was a promise from Glooskap.”

“Glooskap promised you that?”

“Yes. Very clearly. He made this a land of sedentary creatures. We are the birds of the Gaspé Peninsula. We are born, we live, and we die in the very same place. What happens elsewhere is of no concern to us and is therefore of no importance whatsoever. Anyone who calls this into question is quite welcome to leave and look for answers elsewhere.”