Free Lucifer Before Sunrise by Henry Williamson Page A

and then go to sleep—a feathered kitten.
    Rapidly his range of travelling extended all over the house. A favourite perching place was among the caps and gloves on the bottom half of the oak tallboy standing in the parlour. He flapped and hauled his way to the top, and there squatted in an attitude of complete relaxation.
    “He reminds me of my old spaniel, Rusty, in Devon, who after a walk through the fields to the sea, used to scratch himself a hole in the Malandine sands, and collapse into it suddenly, shooting out his hind legs with the pads of each foot turned uppermost.”
    Sometimes Hooly played with an old green-and-red glove, relic of skiing on the downs above Rookhurst with Piers Tofield, many years before. He was a feathered kitten, throwing up the glove and catching it with his beak. A nice little fellow. Only once did he try to swallow Phillip’s ear-lobe; but then Phillip was somewhat slow in offering him scrags of rabbit.
    He took to climbing up the vines and creepers of the jasmine to the roof, and after being fed remained beside the chimney stack. By June he had grown into a wild-looking bird, eyes large and dark as grapes with the bloom on them. He accepted all tokens of affection—and poll-scratching—but gave no affection back. Nor did the younger children expect it, being wild in the natural sense themselves. Not wild in the civilised meaning of the word, for they were calm and self-contained: it was never necessary to complain of their behaviour towards others.
    One late afternoon when Hooly was standing on the tallboy among his gloves and hats, a strange tom-cat leapt upon the window sill. It had come to see the two mother-cats, Torty and Eric, apparently. Its leap took it to within six inches of the owl’s face. It stopped, wide-eyed. Yellow-ringed eyes stared into grape-blue eyes; furred mouser face to face with feathered mouser. Sprang the trap of fear: snap of beak and harr of teeth. In the same instant a rushing apart—cat to garden—owl to air.
    *
    Between dusk and darkness of a late spring evening: Phillip standing near the draw-well: a shape passing silently over his head, to brake suddenly, black upon the stars. The apparition startled him, as it startled Hooly on the wash-house roof, for he snapped his beak in alarm. At the same moment the apparition turned its head to take in any movement—the quick retinal stare of a wild creature, whose life is one calculation in motion after another. Phillip kept still. The glance was of a second’s duration before the apparition turned to Hooly, revealing that it carried a sparrow inits beak. With a swift movement the sparrow was transferred to a foot. With sideway striking movement Hooly snatched it, and at once the large darkness flapped up and away.
    This was exhilarating! How he wished young Jonny had been with him! Hooly stood there, the dead sparrow in his foot. He took the best part of half an hour to break it up with pluckings and pullings; first one wing was swallowed, then another, and last of all the skull gulped down.
    After which he flapped and walked to the chimney stack at the other end of the roof-ridge, and settled to rest. The night was silent; a few searchlights moved bleakly across the horizon; the sky was pale points of stars, and Venus shining serenely in the west. Phillip went to his room, drew the black-out curtains, lit the lamp, and heard Hooly walking about on the roof before he fell asleep.
    In the morning he told the children about the strange owl. David, the imaginative, said it might have been Hooly’s mother or father. Then why, asked Phillip, did Hooly snap his beak in sudden fear when he saw the old bird? Perhaps, suggested Rosamund , the mother owl had known all along that her nestling had been in the hot-cupboard, and had waited her chance to get it. Peter added that the old owl had probably heard Hooly chirruping to himself at night in the basket, and had bided her time to take him away.
    “Shall we catch