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

for a full hoot.
    At the weekend I’m going down to [my sister’s homeat] Petersfield, and I’m taking Mumble with me – she’ll be comfortable enough in the summerhouse overnight.
Diary:
30 July 1978
    The weekend at Val’s went well. I had the rear seats of the car folded down, and rigged a plastic sheet over the backs of the front seats and right back over the rear cargo area. (I also decided to wear my ratty old field jacket while driving – I don’t want owl-crap down the back of my shoulder when I’m wearing anything halfway decent.) She was quite happy in her temporary overnight quarters, and when I brought her indoors she let the family handle her. When she sat on [my nephew] Graham’s shoulder she was calmer than he was – which was fair enough, since it was his first time.
    During the drive back on Sunday night she rode the back of the passenger seat for a while, and sometimes went stomping back over the plastic sheeting so she could look out the rear window – she did this when the radio boomed out the choral opening to ‘Zadok the Priest’. But she spent most of the trip on the back of the driving seat just behind my neck, looking sideways or peering forwards around my head – silent, calm and balanced. Occasionally I felt a warm, companionable little nudge, as she turned and pushed her head against my cheek or ear like a sleepy child. The incredible softness of it brought back a sudden sensory memory, of my five-year-old self sneaking into the bathroom to experiment with one of Dad’s old badger-hair shaving brushes.
    When we got home and into the underground car park she had to go back into the cardboard box for the trip up in the lift, with me holding the open side of the box against my chest. (I’m still using a box to smuggle her in and out, because it’s less of a giveaway than a basket in case I run into somebody in the lift.) This time Mumble absolutely hated being put back into the box, and all the way up she clung flat to my chest with half-open wings, like a moth – though luckily she never hoots on these occasions. As soon as we were inside the flat and I eased my grip, she squeezed out through the widening gap, whiskery face first, and flew to her door-top perch, where she stood shaking out her feathers and giving me dirty looks.
    * * *
    When Mumble was sitting calmly on the back of my chair, I could turn my face and nuzzle her chest, with no reaction beyond a quiet croon and a shifting of her feet; but I didn’t try this on those occasions when she showed she was in a feisty mood.
    Typically, she would walk across the floor and jump up to my raised foot, then climb up the incline of my shin with the aid of half-beating wings. Pausing on my knee, she would then pounce into the crook of my bent arm, excavating it like a terrier, as if pretending that there was a mouse down among the side-cushions. If my sleeve was rolled up she used to peck her way gently up the hairs on my arm, as if she was eating corn-on-the-cob. She might then jump up to the middle of my chest, ‘footing’ itvigorously and making wheezing noises (she seemed to find it irritating when I was wearing a sweater, and would lift her feet fastidiously as if trying to get her claws out of sticky tar). These mock-hunts usually developed into pecking at my beard and moustache; if I got bored with this I would catch her beak gently between my knuckles, but there was clearly an inhibition at work here – she always pulled her punches, and even in her rare ‘berserker’ moods she never threatened my face.
    She could often be diverted by the rattle of my dropping a pencil on to the marble coffee table at my elbow. She would transfer all her attention to kicking it, picking it up, gnawing it, dropping it, then starting all over again, and sometimes she carried it off to continue the game elsewhere. I rigged up a swinging pencil for her, hanging crossways at the end of a leather thong from the gallows of her tray-perch, low