Free Lucifer Before Sunrise by Henry Williamson Page B

the old owl, and then we’ll have two ?” asked Phillip, to see the effect.
    “NO!” cried the children, with one voice.
    The next night Hooly was on the ridge when the big owl came again, this time with a young rat. Hooly thereupon dropped the stale rabbit pelt he was playing with and clumped and scratched his way to the chimney stack with the rat. Soon afterwards the tail of the rat was sticking out of his mouth as he huddled himself to doze among the blackened chimney pots. During the following day he was missing from his accustomed place, but at evening, as the sun was sinking and once again the sky was thundering with the passage of the great nocturnal air-fleets, they heard his chis-sicking cries. Phillip crossed the road to the tall trees behind the wooden Institute hut. Hooly saw him and flew down and sat on his shoulder. Phillip walked with him across the road and fed him as he perched on the windlass-frame above the draw-well. As soon as he was fed, Hooly flew up to the roof, flapping and clawing to his favourite ridge.
    The next evening when Phillip called his name, broad brown wings glided over the iron-sheet Institute roof and wafted air on his face as Hooly pitched on his shoulder. Two soldiers were passing at the time, walking up the village street to find something interesting, but though Phillip was standing still in the road, and they saw him, they took no notice of an owl flying to alight on a man’s shoulder. Perhaps they were townsmen and saw nothing interesting in such a sight; perhaps they were anxious to find the fish-and-chip hut. Even soldiers went hungry at that time.
    Khaki groups from the anti-aircraft practice camp used to stand outside the small one-man baker’s shop, trying to buy bread, for no cakes or buns were available in the village. It was said that the food in the camp was scanty and poor. They used to tear bread and eat it where they stood in the street. When the fish-shop opened, once a week on Friday, which was also pay-day in the farming week, the fried fish and chips were very soon sold out.
    Tall green trees of sycamore and ash, growing out of the disused marlpit under which the village Institute hut stood, became the tame owl’s day-hide and roost. Every evening Phillip went out to call Hooly. After chissicking cries to get Phillip to fly to him, he was forced to glide down to his shoulder, a brown-and-yellow feathered face set with dark orbs looming larger and larger until, with flapping and screaking of open beak, Hooly was clutching the shoulder of his Mackinaw jacket. This happened for several nights; but one evening when Phillip went to call Hooly he was not there.
    It was a Friday night. The smell of frying fat was wafted on the western breeze from the middle of the village. Hooly didn’t return the next day. Phillip wondered if the events of two nights previously had affected him, even killed him, or broken his ear-drums; for late on Thursday night—the last night Phillip had seen him—there had been a running fight between British night-fighters and a Heinkel bomber, during which the German pilot had jettisoned the two 2,000-lb. land-mines he carried. Suddenly while Phillip slept a stupendous pale blue flash had seemed to split the universe. Immediately afterwards, another flash and stupendous reverberation , but not so metallic-hard. The first land-mine had fallen on the edge of the chalk-ridge above the village; the second on the clay of the marshes. He thought his cottage (wherein he lay instantly awake, it seemed, as the first blue flash filled the night) was collapsing. Tiles showered into the road. The ceiling of the adjoining empty bedroom came down.
    So far, Hooly had lived through a few air-bumps and shakingsof odd bombs falling here and there, and he must have got used to the blue-white stars of incendiaries which sometimes broke out of the darkness on the Home Hills; but would those large and ultra-sensitive ear-drums be broken by the detonations of the