The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (28 page)

Still, Mumble and I continued to make much of one another during our weekend sessions, especially during the summer moulting season. At other times of the year, particularly the winter months when she would have been mating and nesting, she might be aloof, or might even briefly relive her roughest ‘teenage’ behaviour. It was on an evening during one of these latter periods that I fell prey
– ridiculously – to a combination of too much red wine and a momentary mood of insecurity about our relationship.

On a still, cold, starry night I had fetched Mumble to bring her indoors, and was walking up the garden carrying her basket. When I had gone into the aviary she had been stand-offish, but not belligerent. Suddenly, I was seized by a mad impulse to test her true feelings. (Yes, I know – there was no excuse; life had long ago taught me that this sort of thing is always a bad idea.) I stopped, opened the basket and encouraged her to jump on my shoulder. We stood there together for perhaps ten seconds, while she looked around at what must surely have been a perfect night for an owl. Then she kicked herself into the air, and flew up to a branch of the old plum tree about 6 feet above me.

She seemed calm just sitting there, so, with my heart in my mouth, I walked very slowly away and went indoors, leaving the back door open behind me. During the next very long minute or two I called myself several kinds of fool. Why, in the name of sanity, had I deliberately put myself back in the same situation as on that awful night in London many years ago? What would happen if she heard an irresistible rustling in the grass in the next field – or if another owl called nearby?

Then there was a quiet rush of beating wings, and she flew straight in through the door and on to my shoulder again. All right – it was suppertime on a cold night, and she was no fool; but in my relieved pleasure at feeling her feathers against my cheek again I chose to tell myself that she had acted out of more than simple hunger.

* * *

And so our years together in Sussex rolled by and accumulated, and I find that I was seldom making diary entries during this period. Mumble’s routines of life as a country lady were well established, and with the exception of keeping a log of her moults and seasonal mood-swings I only felt the need to jot down observations if she did or experienced something (or ate somebody) unusual.

She was a familiar presence in our lane, and my nearest neighbours told me that they liked hearing the reassuring country sound of her occasional calls. Once or twice I noticed local children trying to peer across the garden fences or through the field-hedge to look at her. On these occasions I would tell them to get their parents to ring and arrange a convenient time for me to invite them all into the garden to meet Mumble properly, and to get the ‘induction lecture’ about Tawny Owls. Like me, not all of them had grown up in the country; their first exclamation was always ‘
Aaah
! – isn’t it
lovely
!’, and their first question was always ‘What does it eat?’ (They were also unfailingly amazed to hear that Mumble enjoyed taking regular baths.)

When I went into the aviary on these occasions she would fly to my shoulder for reassurance, landing rather hard; the presence of strangers always agitated her, and after a moment she would usually pounce forwards to cling, with wings fanning, to the wire mesh closest to them, which usually made them jump. I would use this
opportunity to stress that she was very much a one-man bird – and still a wild animal, not a big brown budgerigar. When the kids dispersed I got the impression that there would be a certain amount of boasting when they got to school the next day, but I did not give this as much thought as perhaps I should have done.

BY FEBRUARY 1993
Mumble was approaching her fifteenth birthday; she was not visibly ageing in appearance or vigour, and her behaviour seemed unchanged over several years past. The longest-lived Tawny Owl in captivity reached an astonishing twenty-seven years, and there seemed no reason to doubt that Mumble – safe, sheltered and well fed – would get a fair crack at that record.

(I used to tell friends that I had a fantasy about eventually retiring to a house with a tower, in which I would set up my study. I liked the idea of peasants walking home from the fields at night past the dark tower with just one lit room at the top, and crossing themselves nervously when they saw the silhouette of a bearded figure with an owl on his shoulder – ideally, against a background of flickering green flames. If you are going to be old, you might as well be scary.)

The notebook records that on 5 February that year Mumble showed the expected first signs of the restlessness that I had noted during previous annual mating seasons. During the winter months since October she had behaved towards me in a generally uninvolved way, and weekend caresses had only been permitted after quite lengthy
‘refamiliarization training’. She had usually been quite calm; but when I went into the aviary that evening she did a mild demonstration of what I noted in shorthand as ‘HHS’ (hooting and head-shot). She repeated the hooting and the jump to my head when I let her out of the night cage on the morning of the 6th, but when I lifted her down on my arm she didn’t do the whistling war-dance that would have added ‘plus WWD’ to my note. Instead, she sat quietly in the crook of my elbow and allowed me to nuzzle her head for a bit before she flew up to her perch.

From a couple of weeks later, there is a note that when I opened her night cage in the kitchen on the morning of Saturday 23 February, Mumble flew straight out and landed on my head, but she allowed herself to be lifted down at once, and there was no arm-kicking. After she had gone through her cycle of exploring the room, crapping from the tray-perch, stretching and having a rudimentary grooming session, I was delighted to discover that she was in the mood to enjoy a more thorough preening, sitting on my lap and holding her head up to be rubbed.

Later, while I was eating my fry-up, she was marching around at the far end of the long kitchen table, kicking up unpaid bills like autumn leaves, when she decided that she wanted to be on my shoulder. It would only have taken her a hop and half a wingbeat to cover the yard between us, but instead she chose to walk it – right across my Full English. Crooning softly, she then climbed up my chest, leaving a line of fried-eggy footprints up my bathrobe, before settling down to lean contentedly against my ear. (‘Good
grief
, Mumble …’)

It was a crisp, starry night. I had gone out to her at about midnight, but she showed no interest in coming indoors, so I fed her in the aviary and left her to it. She had grabbed the chick and carried it around for a while in her beak, bugling defiantly.

When I went out to see her in the morning before leaving for London, I found the aviary door pulled wide open. There was no padlock (what a complacent idiot I was), but it was fastened with a sturdy, stiffly fitting hook-and-hasp that needed positive force with two hands to open it; neither the strongest wind nor any animal could have opened the door like this. Mumble was nowhere to be seen, and I felt an immediate suspicion. I had noticed in the press that some sort of animal rights group was publicizing this as a ‘week of action’, and I wondered at once if some ignorant sentimentalist might be to blame, rather than a would-be thief. I had heard nothing during the night; but then, I had slept right through the 1987 hurricane, and my bedroom was at the front of the house. I was completely confident that if anyone but I had tried to go into the aviary Mumble would have attacked them furiously out of the darkness, and I allowed myself to hope that the intruder had received a usefully educational fright, plus eight deep gashes to the scalp.

In the meantime, as badly as I wanted to stay at home,
I realized that there was no point in searching for Mumble in the trees of the garden and the nearby fields during daytime. She would be tucked into the thickest cover she could find, sleeping through the daylight hours; I could go out late that evening, and try to tempt her into calling and showing herself. So I went to work; but I couldn’t concentrate, and in the afternoon I left London early. It was only when I got home that I made a really thorough search of the aviary. I had, of course, checked out her enclosed hutch that morning, but I had not thought to comb through the thick, tangled, knee-deep greenery on the ground.

And so it was that I found her; she was lying face down, wings and tail outspread, almost hidden in the middle of a clump of daffodils. There was not a mark on her, and she and the flowers around her were completely undisturbed – which again argued for a human rather than an animal intruder. All the evidence pointed to her having died instantaneously, in mid-wingbeat, from a heart attack (of which mature raptors, with their high-protein diet, are always at risk). If any strange human had come inside the aviary she would have flown around in frenzied rage and excitement, and it was plausible that this could have stopped her fast-beating little heart in the blink of an eye.

I picked her up and carried her indoors; her head flopped loosely, and when I held her softness to my face I found that I had a clogged throat and stinging eyes.

* * *

Over the next couple of days I wondered what to do with my owl. At first I considered putting her in the freezer and finding a vet qualified to do an autopsy, but there seemed no point – clearly, she had died neither of disease nor of violence. I remembered that many years previously I had wondered idly whether I should have her stuffed and mounted when she died, but now I was revolted by the idea. What would I be left with? A lifeless puppet – a mockery of everything she had been, and a constant reminder of my loss. The thought of simply throwing her body away never entered my mind, and nor could I bear the thought of burying her – what does a bird have to do with the cold, heavy earth?

In the end, I gave Mumble a Cheyenne funeral. I tucked her into the high fork of a leafy tree, with her face towards the hills and sky. The notebook reminds me that, for some reason, at the last moment I felt moved to tuck a few wildflowers around her. I stroked her soft feathers for the last time, pulled the concealing ivy over her, and left her there. When I got home I found myself not just choked up, but sobbing. Before that day I truly don’t believe that I had wept aloud in twenty years, and I never have since.

* * *

A wise old friend of mine once told me that he conceived of our relationship with animals in this way. Mankind has a ‘vertical soul’, capable of touching all levels of existence – from the satisfaction of animal appetites to the intellectual exploration of distant galaxies or the highest
flights of artistic creativity, and (since my friend Angus was a believer in a consciousness that survives physical death) that it travelled onwards and upwards thereafter. Animals, he said, have ‘horizontal souls’, in touch as we never can be with every manifestation of life at their own level, feeling and responding to all the tides of which we are unaware – but incapable of upwards movement.

Many ancient folk-mythologies speak of a time ‘when we all lived in the forest, and people could talk to the animals’. Some pockets of humanity – for instance, among the aboriginal peoples of Australia – seem to retain some sense of what it was like to live at that crossing-point of the vertical with the horizontal axis of consciousness, and to be, at least to some degree, aware of both. Angus believed that it is to our sick cost that the great majority of humanity has lost that horizontal awareness entirely, and that even minimal contact with other living creatures and the elemental tides that govern them is beneficial for our mental and emotional health. I did not share his whole belief system, but in that respect I instinctively agreed with him, and my belief was greatly strengthened by my experience of living closely with a wild creature.

Since my childhood I have been fond of both cats and dogs, but before I lived with Mumble I had never had cause to give much thought to my feelings about animals. During the years that we were together her company enriched my life; it saved me from too much self-absorption, and increased my daily pleasure to a degree that I would never have imagined possible. If, from this distance of time, I am
to make a rough-and-ready analysis of my feelings about her, I have to start from my feelings about life as a whole (please don’t be alarmed – I’m an Englishman, after all, and I shall be brief).

Like, I imagine, the majority of other people of my age in Britain, I was brought up in the Church of England, but drifted away from it in adolescence. I am not a practising or even a believing Christian; nevertheless, there is undeniably a ‘God-shaped hole’ in my feelings, and I regret that I am unable to believe in a life after death. This regret is not based solely on my honest envy of the evident comfort and strength that believers draw from their faith.

That’s part of it, certainly; but in my case, the regret also comes from a vague feeling that in a universe where nothing disappears utterly, but is only transmuted into something else, there ought to be some less wasteful end for something as richly complex as a human personality than simply switching it off and turning its container into leafmould or ashes. It appears to take most of us about seventy years to gain a workable understanding of human life, and to reconcile ourselves to its limits (if we ever do). For that achievement to be thrown away unused, while its container is recycled as fuel for the great engine of physical life, seems a bit spendthrift.