Free The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar by Martin Windrow Page A

when visitors have come round to see her. [My friend] Bella brought [her daughters] over for tea the other afternoon, and they were charmed by her. She let them sit close to her on the sofa and stroke her fluffy chest; the girls made satisfactory ‘
aaah
’ noises, and it was as much as I could do to stop them actually picking her up in their arms to give her a hug.
    She is growing at an astonishing rate, but still looks like a stuffed toy – though a badly frayed one, with lots of feathers pushing through diminishing patches of down (I find tiny bits of shed down everywhere). Her colouring is more marked now than a couple of weeks ago. The facial disc is sharp, with a hedge of tiny dark brown feathers growing backwards from its edges, and a dart of dark brown edged with white growing downwards between her eyes. The crown of her head is still covered with pale grey fluff, but this gapes apart when she bends her head, and is retreating backwards – soon it will be limited to the back of her neck. Otherwise, feathers are pushingthrough and joining up all over her: first came the wings and tail, then the back, then the breast and the edges of her face, and now the head. Since she was about ten weeks old her breast has been ermine – downy, creamy-white feathers with dark brown central streaks – but there are still thick, fluffy grey petticoats low down on her body.
    During the two months she has been living here her flying skills have improved steadily, from accurate, quite long-range powered jumps to deliberate flights from Point A to Point B. From her first day she could already make a single daring leap from the back of this armchair, out the living-room door, across the end of the hallway, through the open kitchen door opposite and on to the kitchen table – a good 12 feet. By about her fifth week here she was completing fairly complex circuits-and-bumps around several points, and was even managing to hover briefly in mid-air. But her landings are still lousy – very hard, barely controlled crash-landings.
    * * *
    When I came into the living room with this notebook she was sitting calmly on the back of my armchair. When I sat down she pranced up beside my head and started pecking at my hair. Then she hopped down on to the coffee table beside me, and from there to the right arm of the chair close by my elbow. She is sitting there now, 6 inches from my moving pen, apparently fascinated by it. With quiet care, she lifts her right foot and gently but firmly stabs thewrist of my sweater, before bending to give it a chew, but her heart isn’t in it. Her head bobs and weaves slowly, eyes following the pen.
    Every minute or so, when my writing hand reaches the end of a line nearest to her, she has a gentle chew at my hand, the pen or the edge of the page; then she seems to lose conviction, making vague claw-passes in mid-air like a punchy old boxer. Occasionally she jumps to my wrist and rides it for a while, which makes writing tricky. Sometimes she loses interest and rotates her head on its ‘ball mount’, staring straight upwards or over at the windows, but mostly she remains intent on the moving pen. She jumps from my wrist to the coffee table, has a quick fluff-up, stands briefly on one leg, then hops back to my raised knee; when the edge of the notebook nudges her she complains, with a soft ‘
kew … kew
’.
    Her vocabulary seems to be changing. For the first couple of weeks it was a single-note squeak or croon; she apparently speaks through her nostrils, since her beak remains nearly or actually closed while her throat-feathers swell. The only other sound she made was a rapid chittering when annoyed or frustrated – sometimes loud, emphatic and accompanied by beak-clacks, and sometimes a low, evil muttering. But over the past couple of months her range has developed, to a broken two-note sound like a rusty gate creaking, and very occasionally she has tried out a long, wavering whistle, as if she is practising