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  “Why?”

  This time I did not have to wait for the answer.

  Great-grandmother turned and looked straight at me. “She could not understand because you were not speaking owl talk. You were talking as the human beings do.”

  “But that is how you and I talk all the time,” I said. “Why do those two-legged ones speak the same words that we do?”

  “Because it is the other way around,” she said.

  “You mean we talk to each other with human words?” It was very confusing to me. “Why is that so?”

  This led to the longest silence my great-grandmother had ever forced on me. We sat there so long that my impatient rocking scraped all the bark from the branch under my feet. Moon moved almost the entire way across the sky as I waited for an answer.

  My great-grandmother finally turned to me and sighed.

  “Wabi,” she said, “you and I have a special gift that most owls do not have. We are able, if we listen closely, to understand the speech of many other beings. Not just owls, but humans and other creatures toooo.”

  “Why?” I asked. As usual, one answer was not enough to satisfy me.

  Great-grandmother shook her head. “On another night, I will answer you. Now the moment is not right.”

  Then she flew away, leaving me with even more questions for which I had no answers.

  CHAPTER 7

  Listening

  LISTENING IS VERY IMPORTANT. EVEN the dullest owl knows that. Our survival depends on using our ears, even before we use our eyes, our wings, and our talons.

  “Wabi,” Great-grandmother said to me soon after she began caring for me, “always remember that you have two ears, two eyes, two wings, and two feet. But you have only one mouth.”

  I understood what she meant, or at least I thought I did.

  Two ears to hear food. Two eyes to see it when it starts to run. Two wings to sweep down on it. Two feet to grab it firm. And then, of course, one mouth was plenty enough to eat it.

  I know now that Great-grandmother meant more than that. I was asking so many questions that it probably seemed to her as if I had more than one mouth. I hadn’t discovered yet that curiosity can get you into more trouble than listening and looking, flying and grabbing. But I was about to learn.

  For some reason, I had decided to watch the setting of the Day Fire all by myself from a tall broken cedar at the edge of the big swamp. I had not told my great-grandmother where I was going. After all, I was a big owl now, even though I was still young. What did I have to be afraid of?

  That, of course, was a question I should have been asking myself.

  That night, though, as I sat there watching the colors of the sky-edge change, I was not thinking of questions. Instead I was just enjoying how it all looked. There were no owl words to express how I felt, but I had learned some new words that seemed right. Since my great-grandmother had told me we were using human words to talk with each other, I had begun to pay attention to those two-legged beings who lived near the waterfall. Some evenings I would sit hidden in a cedar tree to watch and listen and remember what they said about things. So I spoke some of those words now.

  “The sky color is so pretty now,” I said, and then I sighed. A bit too loudly, as it turned out. Someone else heard me.

  “Young one,” a quavery voice called out from deep in the swamp. “Young one, do you hearrr meeee?”

  I turned my head to listen more closely to that voice. It was a voice I had never heard before. It was . . . strange. I might have said it was pleasant, but somehow it made me feel uneasy. Yet it was an attractive voice, a voice that made me curious. I knew immediately that I wanted to see the one who had that voice.

  “Young one, come hhhhhheeeerrre,” it trilled, “into the swaaaammmp. I have something forrrrr you.”

  What could it be? What did it have for me?

  I turned my head way around to see if my great-grandmother was anywhere near so that I could ask her those questions. Then I remembered that I had left her two ridges away, in the valley of many cliffs. If I wanted an answer, I would have to go and see for myself.

  I flew slowly toward that voice as it continued to call. My curiosity was great, yet somehow I knew that something was wrong. There was an edge to that voice that was... what? Hungry? I began to feel suspicious.

  “Come a little deeeperrrr, into the swaaaamp. I have something forrrrrrrr you.”

  On I flew, just a little above the ground, following a trail that wound and wove farther into the swamp. If a two-legged young one had been following that voice, that little human being would have been lost long ago.

  “Heeerrre, come heeeerrre,” the voice called. And then it stopped.

  The trail ended. I dropped down and landed on a grassy hummock. I was a little ways back from the edge of a deep, dark pool of water. A few bubbles rose to the surface and broke, releasing a very nasty smell. Perhaps a young human being would have walked closer to that water to look into it, entranced by that voice. But not I. Now I knew for sure that something was wrong.

  I had noticed a pile of rocks back around the last bend in the trail. I flew quietly back and picked up two of them. Then I flew back to hover just above the place where the trail ended and the black water began. I dropped my first rock on the trail, then the next, even closer to the water’s edge. The thump of those rocks on the earth sounded like footsteps to my ears—and to the ears of someone else as well.

  “ARRRRRHHHHH, I HAVE YOU!” A big shape burst up from the water. It rose so high that it almost struck me with its big head as I hovered there. I had to flap my wings and bank quickly to one side to avoid it. But it was not looking up. Its huge yellow eyes stared straight ahead at the bank as its two long-clawed hands struck at the spot where my second rock had fallen, the spot where a young human being would have been standing.

  “ARHHHHHH?” the creature said, staring at its empty hands. “I don’t have you?”

  I had landed on the top of one of the red willows that grew at the opposite edge of the pool. My perch was four times as high as the creature had leaped, so I was fairly certain I would be safe. I cocked my head to study it. Its body was like that of one of those two-leggeds I had begun to watch all the time in their village below the great waterfall, where they lived in those peculiar nests that they built upside down and on the ground. From the shape of its body, the creature seemed to be a woman.

  But this was not a human woman. It was three times as large as the biggest human I had seen. Its head was like the head of a giant toad. Its mouth was wide enough to swallow a small two-legged person whole. I knew what I was looking at. It was a true monster, one of the terrible non-animal beings that hunt humans.

  My great-grandmother had told me about such creatures. Back when the world was formed, some creatures had come out wrong. Perhaps it was because there was a force in the world that hated good things. So it tried to spoil the beautiful creation the Great Darkness made. It twisted some beings and made them into monsters. There were not as many of them as there were of normal beings, but these monsters were greedy, powerful, and dangerous.

  “Luckily,” Great-grandmother added, “they are also stupid.”

  She had told me the names of some of those creatures. It was clear to me which one this was. Mamaskwa. Toad Woman.

  “Wheeeere did my food go?” Toad Woman said, shaking her head as she looked around.

  I whistled from the top of the tree. “Stupid one,” I said, “look up here.”

  Toad Woman stared up at me. “Hrrrrrrmpph,” she said in her quavery voice. “You are not good food. Why did I think you a human being? You are a nassssty owl.”

  Her words made me angry. If I had been a person, one of those helpless little human nestlings that I sometimes watched as they stumbled about on feet even more uncertain than a fledgling’s wings, she would have eaten me. As she had probably eaten others.

  But even though I was an owl and not the one she had thought to lure to her big mouth, she
was still staring at me with hungry eyes. She had also stealthily moved close enough to my side of her pool to grasp with one big hand the tree in which I was perched.

  “Commmme heeerrre,” she trilled.

  I was not about to do that. I jumped up into flight just as Toad Woman yanked the red willow out of the bank and down into the water with her.

  “Nasty owl?” I called down to her. “You don’t know how nasty I can be.”

  I flew back to that pile of rocks and picked up the biggest one I could lift. Then I flew back, gaining height as I did so. I hovered carefully over the pond that was far below me, took note of the dark shadow there, and then dropped that heavy rock. Down it fell, down, down, and then . . .

  THONK!

  “WAAAGGGH. THAT HURT ME.”

  Good, I thought as I flew back for another rock. Hrrllll. Get used to it.

  I didn’t drop rocks all through the night. I took several breaks to fly off, catch a mouse, a vole, a squirrel, a tangy shrew. But I came back faithfully. That pond of Toad Woman’s was not as deep as I had thought it to be. When Toad Woman stood up in the deepest spot, her head was almost out of the water. From above I could always see her, even when she ducked down as far as she could. Not far enough to keep those rocks from hurting when they hit. Eventually I used up all of the rocks in that pile and had to find another one. But there were lots of other piles.

  I came back the next night, and the one after that. Owls can be very determined. On the fourth night, though, when I returned to the pond, there was no sign of Toad Woman in its dark waters. However, I did see wide tracks leading off in the direction of the sunset.

  I flew to the top of the biggest pine and stared off in that direction. If I followed her trail, I supposed I could find her.

  Great-grandmother landed on the limb next to me. I hadn’t told her what I had been doing every night, but I realized now that she knew. She had probably been watching the whole time.

  “She is gone, Wabi,” Great-grandmother hootuled. “You have done enough. The little ones of our village are safe now.”

  “Our village?” I said. “Don’t you mean the little ones of the human beings?”

  Great-grandmother turned her head to look in the other direction. She didn’t say anything, even though I waited and waited. But then another question came to me.

  “Great-grandmother,” I said, “why did Toad Woman think I was a human at first? Was it because I spoke human words?”

  “Wabi,” Great-grandmother said to me, “that is part of the answer. But there is more that I am still not ready to tell yoooou. You must find out for yourself.”

  CHAPTER 8

  People-Watching

  DID MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER MEAN FOR me to spend more time sitting in the cedars at the edge of Great Waterfall Village watching the human beings? Before, I had only gone once in a while to wonder at their curious ways. Now, though, hardly a night—or a day—went by without my spending time there, studying them closely.

  I liked watching their little ones in particular. They spent so much of their time in play. We owls do a bit of playing—dropping things in flight and catching them, bouncing up and down on supple branches—but those human little ones were much more inventive. They played alone and with each other and with the four-legged ones that were always following them about.

  They made their own little upside-down nests, copying the ones their elders wove from branches and grasses and big pieces of birch bark. They twisted and wrapped fibers to make strings and then took supple little tree branches to fashion bows and arrows like the elders used. They played a game where they shot at little hoops they rolled across the ground. It looked like fun to me. I enjoyed watching them play it.

  So it went day after day as I kept on listening and learning about things that an owl would never use. Such things as clothing. I did pity them for having to wear clothing. The Great Darkness clearly loved owls much more than humans. We owls were given feathers to wear. Our feathers kept us warm in the coldest winds and cool during the times of heat. Humans had to put on leggings and breechclouts, shirts and robes and hats. They even had to cover their tender feet, which were not tough like an owl’s, with moccasins. Poor, pathetic things.

  Of course, at first, I did not know what clothing was. So it was that, one day in early summer, I saw something that shocked me. I was perched near a place where the river flowed into a calm little pool. It was early morning. Along down the bank came one of those humans, a big male. That human walked right down to the water’s edge and then sat down and—wahh-ahhh!—pulled the skin right off his feet. I stared, certain that blood would start flowing. Instead, the human yanked what I thought was all of his skin off the top of his body. I almost fell out of my tree! The skins that this human had been wearing were not his own, but had been taken from other animals.

  Now I could see the shape of that human’s body, the play of muscles under the real skin, which was smooth and brown. The man waded into the stream and began to wash.

  He was not there long before another human came along, a small one whose clothing (I had now figured out that it was not her skin) was that of a little girl. She called softly to the first one standing knee-deep in the cool water. The man turned and showed his teeth at her.

  Is the man threatening the little girl? I wondered. It was the first time I had ever seen a human smile.

  But the little girl showed her teeth back at the man. She made friendly sounds as the man finished washing and then came to sit beside her. I listened closely.

  “Big Brother Melikigo,” she said, throwing twigs at his head, “why are you so lazy? While you’ve been busy washing your hair, the other men have been cutting trees for the new wigwam.”

  “Little Sister Dojihla,” the man said, “if you are so worried about building that wigwam, why aren’t you back there helping them?”

  I had not been watching and listening for long before I heard something else. It was the sound of stealthy feet creeping through the brush at the edge of the riverbank, stalking up slowly in preparation for attack.

  I turned my head to stare down into the brush. Some think that owls cannot see in the daylight, but that is not so. Our eyes are just so big that too much light is painful. I saw clearly what was getting closer and closer.

  It was a gagwanisagwa. It was not the worst or the largest of the non-animal monsters that hunted humans, but it was bad enough. It was not much larger than a big human, but it made up for its size in its bloodthirstiness. Its body was long and snaky, its many teeth sharp. The legs of the gagwanisagwa are short, and it cannot run swiftly for great distances. But it can move very quickly close to its prey. In this case, it would be two foolish humans.

  Great-grandmother had once seen a gagwanisagwa slip up on a small herd of elk in the night. Before she could make a warning sound, it was among them, slashing with its teeth. It killed every one of them, drank some of their blood, then left and did not return.

  The gagwanisagwa is a coward. If the man had his bow and arrows with him and was alert, this creature would not dare to attack. But now, with no weapons at hand, those two humans were defenseless.

  “Unfair, unfair!” I growled to myself.

  I flapped my wings and hooted loudly to get the attention of the two humans. They were too busy talking to hear me, but the gagwanisagwa did. The creature turned its black gleaming eyes toward me. It hissed softly and bared its teeth at me. It was not smiling.

  “Go away!” it growled.

  “WHOOOO-WHOOO-WHOOO,” I called again, louder than before.

  This time the little girl, Dojihla, looked up. “Why is that owl making so much noise in the daytime?” she said.

  Her brother, Melikigo, did not even look my way. “It’s just a bird,” he said.

  “BOOO-LE-WAAA-TIOOOO,” I hooted at them. It was the first time I had tried speaking the words of the two-leggeds to anyone other than my great-grandmother. Surely they would understand.

  “Did you hear t
hat?” Dojihla asked. “Did it not sound as if that owl said ‘Run away from him’?”

  Melikigo laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous, Dojihla.”

  I shook my head. Were all humans as stupid as him? How did they survive? How could an adult like Dojihla’s big brother behave as heedlessly as a helpless nestling?

  Yet it did not make me angry at him. Instead, my anger focused on that creature about to attack some of my humans. My humans.

  “Krrooo-oooo,” I growled. Then I lifted one foot, looked at my claws, and flexed them. Nice and sharp, I thought.

  The gagwanisagwa was still hidden, but it was now almost close enough to attack. I swooped down over the humans, who did not even look up, banked, and dove, claws held out, into the brush.

  I had been aiming at its eyes, but the gagwanisagwa moved its head a little too quickly. All I came away with was the larger part of one of its ears in my right talon.

  Ah well, try again.

  The gagwanisagwa snarled and struck at me, but I was out of its range with most of its other ear in my left talon and making my next circle to attack. This time I came in from behind, screamed, dove, and ripped a nice big patch of skin off its rump.

  In addition to blood, it also drew a yelp from the creature.

  “ROWP!” it yipped.

  That sound made Dojihla look up again toward the riverbank, where there was now considerable thrashing in the brush as the creature tried in vain to escape me.

  “What is that owl doing?” she said.

  “Just trying to catch some little bunny,” Melikigo replied in a bored voice. “It does not concern us. Let us go back to the village now.”

  And as I continued my attack, they wandered away, never knowing that I had saved them.

  CHAPTER 9

  Better to Be an Owl

  A NICE COATING OF SNOW had fallen over the land. I liked this season of snow. To me it was another sign of how much the Great Darkness cared for owls. The nights were wonderfully long in this season. And the fact that the nights were long for only this one part of the great circle of seasons made it all the better. If they were always long we might not appreciate them as much. It would be like eating nothing but one kind of mouse all the time.