Northern Borders (13 page)

One sub-zero morning in the middle of March when I opened the henhouse door to let the Orpingtons outside to eat, they refused to come off their roost. As usual, I dumped a large pan of chicken feed onto the packed snow inside their pen. But only with great difficulty was I able to harry them out. Instead of going inside the barn to start chores, I waited behind the milk house door to see what would happen next.

Now the hens were fluttering frantically around Jack, now piling up against the shut henhouse door. Jack let out a long, quavering crow, then hunkered down on the packed snow with his panicked flock.

I was so intent on watching the hens that I didn't see the huge white bird until it was halfway across the pasture from the river. It seemed to materialize from the sky, advancing swiftly over the snowy contours of the pasture with its wings impossibly white and wide. For a moment it hovered on rapidly beating wings directly over the chicken pen. The hens below were frozen in terror. Even Jack couldn't muster another warning.

The great white bird plummeted with its talons extended. It struck a hen in the back of the neck, swooped up out of the pen at a steep angle, and bore the bundle of tawny orange feathers back across the pasture. But instead of carrying its prey into the evergreens beyond the river, the bird landed in a soft maple tree not far below the frozen spillway of my grandfather's dam.

Just behind me in the milk house doorway, a harsh voice spoke. “I was wrong if I do say so, Austen,” my grandfather said. “However fierce your winter weasel is for its size, it can't hold a candle to a white snow owl. Now there is a fierce customer. I haven't seen a snow owl in this neck of the woods for years.”

Except on the covers of my grandfather's cigar boxes, I'd never seen a snow owl before. I hadn't even recognized this one as an owl until my grandfather told me what it was.

The bird was perched on a low limb of the soft maple, facing away from us toward the river and woods. Maybe it heard my grandfather speak because abruptly it swiveled its head around in our direction. It was as if the owl's head was on a separate mechanism from its body, like a toy of some sort. But this bird was no toy. It was an alien-looking creature a full two feet tall, and except for its amber eyes and the faintest gray cross-hatchings on its back, it was totally white. Even its talons were covered with thick white foot feathers.

For what seemed like a long time my grandfather and I stood in the milk house doorway, watching the snow owl watch us. Finally, for no apparent reason, the bird rotated its head forward in a single clockwork motion, glided off the tree branch, and disappeared into the fir trees across the river, with the limp hen in its claws.

“Put the chickens back inside and feed them in there,” my grandfather told me. “Don't mention any of this to your grandmother. This afternoon we'll rig up something that'll make Mr. Owl think twice before he carries off another hen.”

 

That afternoon when my grandfather picked me up at school he had with him in the back of his lumber truck a brand-new roll of fine black netting, the kind my grandmother draped over her ripening strawberry beds and raspberry bushes to discourage blackbirds. On the seat beside him sat a small brown paper sack of metal staples.

“Can't he tear right through that net?” I said.

“No doubt,” my grandfather said. “But he doesn't know that. He'll be afraid of getting his feet tangled up in it.”

As we approached the pasture across from our barnyard, I spotted the owl. It was perched on the low branch of the soft maple tree where it had landed with the dead hen the day before, and it was staring straight at the chicken pen. The bird made no move to fly when my grandfather and I got out of the truck and unrolled the black netting on the snow. It continued to watch us as we stretched the net over the top of the pen and stapled it to the four cedar corner posts. Now the pen was totally enclosed, top and sides.

Just as we finished I happened to look up and see my grandmother at the kitchen window. Caught between the bold gaze of
the snow owl and my grandmother's silent presence, I felt an intense discomfort.

“There's Gram,” I said. “At the window.”

“Let Gram be at the window,” my grandfather said without looking toward the house. “That's a good place for her. You go shoo those chickens out here, Austen. We'll see what Mr. Snow Owl makes of this setup.”

The chickens began to flutter frantically around the henhouse as soon as I entered. Two or three nearly escaped through the chute in the ceiling, but with feet and arms flying, I drove them out into the pen, under the protective netting.

Immediately they began to rush around like frying pullets in butchering time. They cackled wildly and Jack gave several alarmed outcries. Then they huddled in an orange mass against the door, just as they had that morning.

But the owl, sitting huge and spectral on the maple limb, apparently wanted no part of that net. My grandfather nodded, and told me to go change my clothes and meet him in the barn for chores.

Inside the kitchen I pulled off my felt boots and started upstairs to put on my barn clothes. “Come over here, Tut,” my grandmother said.

As we stood side by side at the window, my grandmother grasped my left wrist with her right hand, and her fingers on my wrist felt as strong as the talons of the owl.

“Gram, Gramp said to meet—”

“Hark,” she said.

Far to the southwest, the setting sun was resting on the shoulder of Mount Mansfield. The mountains to the east were a deep purple. Overhead the sky was an icy blue, and the snowy pasture and the frozen river beyond it had acquired a sympathetic blue tint. Even the owl's feathers had a bluish cast.

As my grandmother continued to grip my wrist, the owl suddenly launched itself into a flat trajectory. It came soaring toward our buildings no more than ten feet off the ground and its bluish wings seemed to brush the lavender-tinged snow on the higher knolls of the pasture. This time it did not hover above the pen. It dropped straight onto the flimsy berry netting with terrific force,
bearing it down onto the massed chickens and pinning them to the snow beneath like so many flopping fish.

Without a second's hesitation the owl took off again with a dead bird and the netting in its talons. I thought it would rip the entire net loose. But the ascending owl simply yanked the dead hen through the small rent in the net made by its claws, like a feather duster being yanked backward through a keyhole. Once again it flew straight to the soft maple tree, where it began to devour the Buff Orpington, feathers, feet, beak and all.

“There,” my grandmother said, releasing my wrist. “Now we know.”

 

That evening my grandfather got out his
Birds of North America
book with its gorgeous colored plates and studied the section on great snowy owls. Occasionally he looked up over his reading glasses to provide us with a short commentary. “Your white snow owl usually stays up in the Arctic year-round,” he said. “It eats mice, mainly. Mice and lemmings. Every few winters when the lemming population drops off, it ventures down below the tree line for food. The snow owl is actually a most beneficial bird. It can eat its own weight in rodents every two days.”

“This one eats one of my chickens every day,” my grandmother said. “I want you to shoot it first thing in the morning.”

“Shoot it! That bird is legally protected by the federal government,” my grandfather said angrily, though on most occasions he had little good to say about any governmental entity. “It's strictly against the law to harm one. There's a penalty of one hundred dollars for shooting a snow owl.”

“Not up here in Siberia, there isn't,” my grandmother said. “Or if there is, it isn't enforced. You get your gun and shoot it first thing tomorrow morning.”

I was amazed. My little aunts had confided to me in a Sunday School lesson that when my Grandmother Kittredge was a small girl growing up in Scotland, her older brother had been killed in a hunting accident. Since then she had been terrified of guns; and although she did not interfere with my grandfather's hunting, or forbid me to
go hunting with him, I knew that she worried herself sick whenever we went to the woods with a gun.

“As soon as the weather breaks, that bird will fly back north,” my grandfather said. “In the meantime the chickens can eat inside, like normal chickens in the wintertime.”

“And let that white demon lay siege to them? Why, they'll never lay again, Mr. Kittredge.”

“I won't be a party to shooting a protected animal,” my grandfather nearly shouted. “I might go so far as to scare him off, but that's all. He'll be gone by sugaring season anyway. Shoot him I will not, Mrs. Kittredge. That's final.”

 

The next afternoon when I got home from school the owl was sitting in the maple tree again, waiting for the chickens to come outside. Before starting chores my grandfather went down in the meadow with his double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun and fired twice over the bird's head. It flew back into the woods across the river, and to my great relief, we didn't see it again for the rest of the winter.

April came, and with it mud season. Overnight the Hollow road turned from white to brown. Everything smelled like mud. The maple sap ran hard and early that year, and we were busy night and day, gathering sap and boiling it. As usual, school closed for a week so that Hollow kids could help out at home with the sugaring.

Throughout sugaring season my grandmother insisted that we continue to keep the chickens inside. Even so, they refused to lay more than five or six eggs a day. When I went into the henhouse to feed them, they crowded together on the roosting pole, clucking in alarm.

“They know,” my grandmother said. “They know it's still out there, lurking in the woods.”

“It's gone back north,” my grandfather said. “To Labrador. I'm of half a mind to go myself come spring, and take Austen with me.”

“It's there,” my grandmother said. “And I don't mean Labrador.”

But as the days continued to lengthen, and the soft spring light
illuminated the greening hillsides, One Eye Jack's confidence began to revive. He crowed earlier each morning, trying to encourage his harem. Breeding time was approaching. Jack was a fine, brave rooster, who had lost his right eye defending the henhouse from an egg-sucking rat two years ago. For three summers in succession he'd been named Grand Fowl of the Show at Kingdom Fair. But the rooster's efforts to rally the traumatized hens were futile. They could not be induced to go outside to eat, and they laid so few eggs now that my grandmother said we might as well let them brood their nests and replenish the dwindled flock with new chicks.

“I suppose we're fortunate to still have Jack,” she remarked after supper one Friday evening in early May as she went to the kitchen window to check the temperature.

The evening before, the spring frogs across the pasture near the river had sung for the first time, though tonight was cold again, threatening snow. “Twenty-eight and dropping fast,” my grandmother said.

The words were hardly out of her mouth when a terrific commotion broke out in the ell.

My grandfather jumped up from his chair and grabbed the lantern off the table. With my grandmother and me close at his heels, he rushed through the woodshed into the henhouse. The chickens were shrieking from their roosts like so many banshees, and on the floor directly under the chute in the ceiling the huge white owl was mantling its outspread wings over the limp body of One Eye Jack.

My grandfather grabbed a long forked support pole out from under the central roost and jabbed it at the snow owl, which reared up and spread its wings like an eagle and hissed at us fearlessly.

“Destroy it!” my grandmother cried. “Kill it with that stick or I will.”

I don't know whether my grandfather would or wouldn't have killed the owl. He was still holding the lighted kerosene lantern in one hand, and if he'd dropped that our entire place could very well have gone up in flames. Before he could decide what to do, the owl flew straight up in the air through the opening in the ceiling with the lifeless remains of my grandmother's prizewinning rooster in his talons.

“Quick, get your gun,” my grandmother said. “He's trapped in the hayloft.”

“He isn't trapped,” my grandfather shouted. “He'll get out the same way he got in. Through the cupola window.”

Sure enough, when I ran outside into the barnyard there was the owl, just visible on top of the cupola against the night sky, devouring the rooster my grandmother had been counting on to reestablish her laying flock.

“He doesn't allow much to go to waste,” my grandfather said a minute later as all three of us stood in the barnyard, looking up at the owl. “We have to give him that, at least.”

“No, we don't,” my grandmother said. “All we have to give him is a double load of buckshot. Fetch your shotgun this instant.”

Without replying my grandfather went inside and got a hammer and some nails. He disappeared into the ell, and a few minutes later we could hear him hammering.

When he came into the kitchen from boarding up the chute in the henhouse ceiling, he went to the window and looked out into the dark barnyard for a long time. I thought he might be about to change his mind. Maybe he would shoot the owl after all.

Finally he turned away from the window. “It's commencing to snow again,” he said to no one in particular. “Big flakes. Sugar snow.”

“What did I say, Tut?” my grandmother said to me. “Snow in May and white Arctic owls. Siberia. You and I will deal with that creature tomorrow morning if your grandfather won't.”

 

It was still dark when we got up the next morning for chores. When it was light enough in the barn to extinguish our lanterns, my grandfather went to the milk house door and looked out. After a minute he beckoned for me to join him there. It had snowed six or eight inches overnight. Once again the barnyard and the road, the pasture and the evergreen woods beyond the river were white. It was bitterly cold and the wind was gusting hard out of the north.