The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (10 page)

* * *

In time, of course, she mastered the landings too, learning by trial and error to pick the moment to ‘flare’ her wings. As she approached the selected landing spot her body began to swing down from the horizontal towards the vertical, rotating around the axis of her shoulder joints. Simultaneously, she began to bend her wings up at the ‘elbows and wrists’ into shallow L-shapes, and to flare them – tilting the leading edges upwards to increase the angle of the ‘aerofoil’. Meanwhile, her tail spread downwards in a near-vertical fan. The tilting slowed the airflow over the top surface of her wings and so reduced the lift beneath them, while the presentation of the underwing surfaces and tail-fan acted as air brakes, cutting her forward speed. At this point, as the airflow above the wing broke up, an aircraft might stall and fall out of the sky; but at the
critical moment Mumble extended the
alula
feathers part way along the leading edge of her wings, which both sped up the airflow and increased the wing area – the principle behind the leading-edge slats that airline passengers see and hear thumping out during final approach.

Meanwhile, she had been extending her legs and swinging them forwards in front of her near-vertical belly, spreading the taloned toes to give a wide reach. Lift was killed at the moment of touchdown, but not always forward speed – usually she sank down as surely as a helicopter, but if she was excited she still made a fighter pilot’s fast, flashy combat landing. Either way, the first part of her to make contact with a perch was the tough, nubbly soles of her feet, at which point the talons instantly snapped closed to grip.

For a pick-up of prey rather than a landing, she glided in on horizontal wings with her legs extended. She kept her speed down but did not kill all the lift, bringing her feet forwards at the last second to make her hit, before another wingbeat lifted her away again. (When an owl is hunting in near-total darkness, and so relying completely upon its ears rather than its eyes, it cannot make its usual confident pounce straight on to its target. Alerted to the prey’s general location by hearing a first sound, it points its head in that direction and glides along that bearing with legs dangling. It needs a second sound to confirm the exact distance to the target; then it throws its head back, flares its wings, spreads its talons and strikes.)

* * *

One thing that I had not expected was the discovery that Mumble sometimes used her spread, lowered wings to support some of her weight when grounded. I first noticed this when she was playing boisterous hunting games on the plastic-covered sofa, but a more dramatic example was an attempt one evening to land on a four-string set of clotheslines stretched above my bath. Attracted by furious squeaking, I found her trying to deal with the trampoline effect caused by the sudden arrival of her weight on the separate stretchy cords. She was bouncing around, gripping two of the strings with her feet and trying not to do the splits as her weight pushed them apart. Wobbling and lurching, she extended her wings out and down in the ‘mantling’ pose like a spread cloak, resting them on the cords to stabilize her balance. (The spectacle reminded me of a David Attenborough natural history programme on TV, featuring a primitive Venezuelan bird that retains a vestigial claw on the
alula
in the leading edge of the wing – a survival from the reptilian past, which the young bird uses to help it clamber around the treetop nest.) This confident use of her wings as general-purpose limbs surprised me; I had expected her to be completely protective of them.

* * *

During the summer of 1978 I broke my left ankle, resulting in six weeks in a plaster cast from knee to toes. (The event
was supremely unheroic: I slipped on wet grass while knocking a tennis ball around with a friend’s little daughter – who, incidentally, subsequently grew up to illustrate this book.) As anyone who has tried it will know, although the initial pain wears off in a few days, and you soon learn to get up a reasonable speed over level ground by swinging between the crutches, the inconvenience of trying to follow the simplest domestic routine while wearing a heavy cast is infuriating. I also felt ridiculous in public, with one leg of my oldest pair of jeans hacked into rags that were held together with safety pins around an increasingly grubby cast. Since showering was impossible, and taking a bath ridiculously difficult, a feeling of shamefaced squalor also crept over me as time went by.

The cast made the chore of getting through the Double-Reciprocating Owl Valve to carry Mumble in and out of the flat complicated and time-consuming, and I tended to leave her free indoors as much as I could. One evening during September I went out to the nearby cinema for a couple of hours, leaving Mumble loose to roam the hallway–bathroom–kitchen–living-room circuit. When I got home at about 10.30pm, she was gone.

I lumbered frantically around the flat, calling her and checking every cupboard and corner. To my fury, I found that I had carelessly left a small upper window in the kitchen open a crack too wide. Mumble had never shown any interest in it before, and I had grown complacent. I began to face the fact that my owl was gone, and – worse – that she would have very little chance of surviving for
long, out there amid the concrete, the traffic, and the other humans whom she had never learned to avoid. It was miles to the nearest stretch of woodland, and anyway she had never been shown how to locate and catch edible prey. It was not even the mating season, when I could have hoped that she would meet up with a male attracted by her call, and might conceivably learn from him how to hunt. I cursed my careless stupidity, and I realized immediately how miserably I would miss her presence around the flat on otherwise solitary evenings. (It is my character to respond to probable bad news by imagining the very worst that could happen, and then steeling myself to cope with it; that way, anything less than the worst comes as a relief.)

Rather hopelessly, I turned on all the lights and opened all the windows, just in case she was close enough to find her way back in if she wanted to. But she had never before seen the apartment block from the outside, and had no way to orientate herself – how was she to recognize one lighted box among sixty-four identical boxes? I peered out and down and sideways, at the narrow concrete ledges that ran around the block at each floor level, but there was no sign of her. And even if I had spotted her, what could I do? I have no head for heights; I couldn’t have climbed out and along an inches-wide ledge even if I had been fit, let alone with a leg in plaster.

I hung out of the windows, feeling futile, but giving Mumble’s ‘suppertime’ whistle until my lips cramped. When I finally gave up and went wretchedly to bed, I left a chick hanging on a string from the catch of an open
window, with a light on behind it. I had the crazy hope that eventually, when that was the only lit window in the blackened building, she might notice it and be attracted inside.

* * *

After a long time I finally slipped into a miserable half-sleep, but at about 2am I came fully awake again: I would
not
accept this without one more try. I tugged my slit jeans on over the cast, slipped into a moccasin and a blanket jacket, and went around the flat peering and whistling out of the windows. The night was cooler now, and windier. The stacks of lower buildings that surrounded the foundation deck of my block were mostly in darkness, and apart from lone cars on the main road about the only sound I could hear was made by occasional drunks, reeling out of a nightclub-cum-dancehall at street level in a neighbouring block. My attention caught by this, I happened to be looking straight down into the well beside my block when, silhouetted against the faint wash of security lights at ground level, I saw it – a little, black, broad-winged shape, gliding across.

Exhilarated that I seemed to have a chance at last to do something positive, I grabbed a torch, Mumble’s travelling basket and a bagged chick, and hobbled to the lift (I didn’t need the crutches any more, but I still moved like a bad imitation of Long John Silver). Almost as soon as I lurched around the concrete deck to that side of the building and whistled, I heard a croon. I shone the torch upwards,
and there she was, on a ledge about 30 feet up the office block next door.

The next solid hour and a half (I swear) was among the most nerve-racking of my life. Grimly, I staggered back and forth around the foot of the building, whistling and waving a dead chick at the night sky. I was constantly worried that any one of a number of scenarios might suddenly develop. I was afraid that Mumble would get bored and fly off into the distance, never to be seen again. I was worried that a neighbour’s bedroom window would fly open, a torch beam would pick me out, and an angry voice would demand to know what that lunatic was doing lurching around at this time of night, waving a dead chicken in the air.

It was always possible that I might have to explain myself to a policeman – I was already trying to ignore some very old-fashioned looks from a night security guard inside the lit window of one of the ground-floor offices. Perhaps my worst fear was that one of the happy drunks leaving the dancehall doors about fifty yards away would decide to come round the corner to relieve himself in the shadows. (I could just imagine the conversation: ‘Wotcher doin’, mate? Tryin’ to catch an owl, eh? ’Ere, Steve – Steve! Bloke ’ere wiv one leg, tryin’ to catch ’isself an owl … Let’s ’elp ’im, shall we?’)

Mumble moved about regularly, from ledge to wall to ledge, almost always within sight, never within reach. She spent a long time looking down from her perches and talking to me quietly, especially from the pierced
concrete-block wall around a boiler room; only 10 feet tall, it was tantalizingly climbable – for a man with two functioning legs. I had to turn off the torch to search for the flash of her white breast against the dark backgrounds, and sometimes when she was out of sight bits of windblown litter glimpsed from the corner of my eye would raise futile hopes. Once or twice she peered down at me intently, dropped her head between her toes, and seemed about to launch herself towards me – then the rattle of a rolling tin can or the rustle of a discarded sheet of newspaper would distract her, and it was all to do again. I became increasingly tired and confused, alternately cursing this infuriating fowl and, in times when I lost sight of her, rehearsing in my mind a post-Mumble life, and realizing glumly how much I would now hate living here without her.

It must have been at around 3.30am when, stupid with fatigue and disappointment, I sat down on the edge of a concrete planting trough to rest my plastered leg, which was now aching painfully. I had not been able to catch a glimpse of Mumble for some time. At least the drunks had long since dispersed, and the night was silent apart from the wind. I put the basket down beside me, slipped the slimy chick into my pocket, and pulled out a smoke and my lighter. As I bent my head to rasp the wheel of the Zippo, I heard a clicking sound. It was Mumble’s claws, on an iron railing beside me.

She stood a yard from my hands, bobbing her head, peering at me and squeaking. I dropped my cheroot, sneaked the chick out of my pocket, and extended it
towards her, muttering abject endearments. She hopped on to the top of the basket, craning for her supper; I withdrew it. When she jumped down level with the basket I let her grab one end of the chick, but didn’t let go of it. She chittered with irritation, and pulled – I steered the tug-of-war backwards – and at last the moment came when I could shove the whole situation into the basket, let go of the chick and slam the lid shut.

On the way back up in the lift I was muttering dopey baby-talk, and Mumble was ripping busily into her late supper. Once inside the flat I stumbled around slamming all the windows again before I released her. She behaved as if nothing whatever had happened. Despite being almost nauseous with fatigue and relief, I sat up for another half-hour watching her fondly, while she finished her gory meal, had a brief but apparently satisfying grooming session, stretched, crapped and went happily to her night cage for a long sleep. I couldn’t be bothered to struggle out of my clothes before I collapsed on my bed.

* * *

In the aftermath of this bad scare, I was forced to recognize what Mumble had quietly brought into my life, and what I would have lost if that night had turned out differently.

She had moved into the flat at a time when I was chewing over the cold cud of some fairly discouraging insights into my own character and the probable future shape of my life. The timing had been purely coincidental, and I had been completely unaware of any gift that she
might bring me apart from a pleasant distraction. I was buying a pet bird, that was all; after the Wellington fiasco the idea that it might lead to any real two-way relationship had seemed remote.

Mumble’s arrival had indeed distracted me from glum introspection: I had had to pull myself together and think hard, right now, about practical problems – before she destroyed something valuable, or disappeared into the plumbing, or got injured, or was discovered by the Feds and banished. But she had also offered me her unexpected gestures of trust – perhaps even of affection? What’s more, she was providing me with a nightly cabaret. Funnily enough, I have never enjoyed human slapstick comedy, and I would rather spend an evening filling in my tax return than watching Charlie Chaplin movies. But I was now discovering that it was quite impossible to sustain a mood of self-centred depression while an indignant ball of feathers was doing squeaking pratfalls all over the place. This was food for thought, and for some optimism.

I decided that it was high time I learned more about my new flatmate, so that I could prepare myself for the ways in which she might behave when she had finished growing up. Mixed marriages can work well, but they aren’t straightforward; if Mumble and I were going to have a long-term relationship, it would be a good idea to find out a bit more about her family.