The Wattaquadock Owls

I.

The brief ceremony had concluded, and when the party ––no small percentage of our town–– had processed over to the previously anointed spot in the shade of the beloved oak tree on Wattaquadock Hill’s north slope, people were invited to share some words about the deceased. Though it was 11 degrees, and worse with windchill, the crowd showed few signs of dispersing.

“I immediately fell in love with Bernie. I was so sad when he disappeared. He was so sweet, the best of us, really. It’s been hard to watch Sophie grieving, too. But I’m overjoyed that she’s not going through this winter alone.”

“What a beautiful tribute to Bernie. Surrounded by friends like always. We will always miss him, but it’s comforting to think of him flying far above the clouds now.”

“I was always impressed by his consistent dedication to his family. Bernie was such a great mate to Sophie and a wonderful dad to Griff and Greta. He gave it his all. Thank you to Forrest and his whole team for honoring his life story.”

“Flip is such a good replacement for Bernie, but it makes me sad knowing Sophie will die long before him. Hopefully they get a few good clutches in together. With how good a mother she is, they should manage to keep the legacy of Bernie alive and well.”

“I miss Bernie so much! Is there any painting of him? I would like to get one in his memory.”

“What a character Bernie was. He always had a flair for the dramatic, and kept our little community laughing and smiling through these trying times. In the course of his brief life, he truly brought out the best in us, reminded us of our better angels and capacity for love.”

“Bernie was like something from a fairy tale, the way he graced our community. Knowing his genes live on gives me comfort.”

“I was in tears the whole service. Goodbye, Bernie! I hope Flip will take good care of Sophie and the clutch. He’s got big talons to fill!”

“There really is so much compassion we can learn from our feathered friends! We’re so fortunate that Bernie made his nest here of all places, and that he wasn’t shy like ordinary owls.”

The little eulogies slowed to a trickle as the less assured among us mustered the confidence for their turn speaking, while others already awkwardly tossed dirt (mixed with the fuzz from regurgitated pellets, though I assume rodent bones and such were taken out) onto the child’s coffin in which the bird lay. They must have thought that everyone who wanted to had already said their peace. No one had been to an owl funeral before, so everyone was slightly out of sorts and unsure of protocol–– although the parts were very much the same as a human funeral except with something of a loose, improvisational feel. Only now, it seemed, did most of the crowd begin to shuffle and stomp in collective realization of just how cold it was. Suddenly I heard the shrill wailing of an inconsolable child, although it’s possible the kid had been crying for a while now. “You’d think his dog just died,” snort-chuckled Evan Holden who owned a gas station and who had come to take in the spectacle and sneer at no one in particular. Any of the old and middle aged women close enough to hear him glared in indignation and their low chattering intensified, especially Sharon Wells, whose heavy set figure was heaving with emotion. She had been the first to offer words of remembrance. She was the one who had the Bernie t-shirts made. She lived in the second biggest house on Wilder Road, often alone since her husband flew regularly to London for work. The kid, a boy named Andrew Brennan who lived on Running Brook Way on the opposite side of the hill, was convulsing and fighting the air and frozen ground with his little fists as his mom tried to restrain him. He’d gotten very attached to Bernie, learned everything there was to know about Barn Owls after a sort of infamous birder in town showed him the online Cornell Lab of Ornithology. He had saved up to buy pet snake food, to his mother’s disgust, and when it came he brought the dead mice to the parking lot where people gathered to watch Bernie’s signature dance on the church roof, followed by his classic dive bomb move off the steeple. Despite her disgust at Andrew’s purchases, his mom encouraged his passion; and all the old ladies in town bought him books on birds that he accepted politely but which taught him nothing he didn’t already know. Only now did mom begin to question the zeal she’d supported. As the last scoops of dirt (and pellet) were added, some man who had been waffling on whether to come forward finally spoke up while half the crowd was filtering away, and in a thin nasally pitch he recited an original composition for the occasion. It went something like this:

“In Memoriam:

Bernie the Barn Owl.

Bernie the handsome.

Bernie the loving father.

Bernie the Crow and Goshawk Slayer.

Bernie the one and only legend.

We will keep you in our minds and hearts.”

Amid the freezing and the screaming and the deeply moved aunts and grandmothers and the representatives from the Audubon Society, Bernie the Barn Owl, our own minor local celebrity, returned to the earth. The burial concluded.

“Let’s take cover,” Reverend Theo smiled broadly, pulling back his ice blistered lips. “I’m gettin’ coffee at The Bean. Anyone want to join?”

He was joined at the Bolton Bean by Forrest Chenard.

“Thanks for coming all the way from Drumlin Farm,” the good reverend added after adjusting his coffee for just enough cream.

Forrest grew impatient, slurped in a bit of his macchiato and immediately winced in pain. He let the burnt end of his tongue hang out a bit and shook his head.

“Oh, happy to represent the Society here,” he rasped. “Wouldn’t miss it for anything. Bernie was a legend, and certainly an important recruitment opportunity. We could open up a chapter in your neck of the woods propelled by the Bernie buzz! Anything to raise awareness about these beautiful creatures. It’s also time to check the nest footage and reset the cameras.”

“You could show the footage publicly, at the function hall or hey, maybe at Strand Theater, make an event of it, and have signups right there.”

Forrest was eyeing his macchiato with suspicion but raised his eyes at this. “That’s not a bad idea.”

“I was in marketing before I became a pastor,” said Theo with a twinkle in his eye.

He shuddered as an arctic blast flung open the nearby door, which a second before had been motivated by the shaky hand of one of Sharon Wells’ teatime ladies, Molly who was overwhelmed organizing the Viking River Cruise couples group for a trip just around the corner in February. Six or seven ladies squeezed in and Sharon herself was among them. They couldn’t miss a chance to chat up the sparkling young ornithologist. What a mind he had! The ladies all thought he was especially cute, and latched on as soon as Bernie brought him to town. A touch of gray had popped up in Forrest’s stubble ––this combined with his penchant for turtlenecks and kombucha gave him the air of an outdoorsy Steve Jobs–– and the ladies’ brigade thought he might settle down and saw him as a ticket out of town perhaps for the teacher Katie McPherson or Laura who was back in school and commuting for a psychology program. But Forrest only had eyes for Audubon and knocking off all the 4,000 footers in New Hampshire and Maine; he was a licensed tour guide in both states.

“Oh Forrest! When will we see the latest nest footage? I so want to see Bernie happy and going about his bird business again, even for a brief moment. And I’m so eager to see how the little ones are doing. Sophie is such a good mom.”

Sharon was looming above Forrest. “Actually, Theo and I were just talking about that. Thinking Wednesday. We could have a screening at The Strand.”

“What a fantastic idea that is!” Sharon clasped her hands together. Molly and the others asserted their support in a cascade of “Oh, yes’s”.

“I’ve also been thinking, in memory of Bernie and all, we might look into starting a chapter here in Wattaquadock Hill. There’s enough undeveloped land for the charter.”

Sharon placed her hand on his shoulder gravely. “Say no more. I’ll help organize sign ups.”

II.

David Alderman emerged from the steep dip of Upton Street and began to pick his way across the corrugated moonscape of our town’s central green. Trees groaned and cackled and there were bells close by. The morning winter light, which somehow was always the most unforgiving, radiated off the ice wastes balefully. He wasn’t going anywhere, but he wanted to go anyway, especially on the day when it seemed the whole town was out of their houses; though he really wanted to avoid the spectacle. Long walks were David’s way of life ever since he came to our town, in the streets or in the woods. Sometimes, obsessively, he would pick a lamppost or a store or some smuttering of birch trees where the light fell just so and walk by them over and over again, tracking their trajectory in the corner of his eye. He was searching, hunting in a way; but whatever his interest he almost never took photos of the little vistas that held him. No one thought he was crazy, but many chattered that he was troubled and viewed him with suspicion.

Despite avoiding Bernie’s ceremony, you should know that David was an avid birder, and he hated when someone called his pastime bird watching: “Bird watching is what your grandmother does when she looks through the window at a chickadee or a cardinal at the backyard bird feeder while sipping tea. I’m a birder.” But really, deeper down, he resented that label too. For birds, lately, were the conduit for something altogether different. He didn’t care to explain it outwardly, but often he struggled to explain it to himself: “I came late in life to birds, my great love for them. How many years did they flit and speckle at the edge of sight. A strange quake or flicker in the eye. They rejoice and suffer simply, in modes beneath our understanding. Their lives lurch and hasten to oblivion. Poor little things, triumphantly alive, burning up like meteors. Little lives that we miss, just like we miss everything else, if we blink.

“First it was the cool refuge of elm and cedar, the forgetfulness in lost tangles of hornbeam and witch hazel, and the sweep of the earth with granite bubbling out through roots and moss which in its own lament helped to cauterize my wounds. I fled to that little but ever-opening world on the other side of a lost New England stone wall. It was their calls that caught me initially, that raised my furtive eyes to search for phantoms. It took so long before I learned to find their form–– other than stray sparrows and downy woodpeckers showing off. How can a human being see what’s really there, after training for a lifetime to look away? The first bird I truly loved was the nuthatch, a silly small thing but I loved it for crawling upside down on trees, like and unlike a woodpecker, and for the cartoonish laughter in its call. And it was easy to spot when your eyes learned the shape. Oh, how I romanticized all sorts of raptors! But in reality, few birds of prey are common here besides the all too common red tailed hawk. Once, though, when I found the secret pool where the osprey lived and watched him strike a fish in front of me, my soul shuddered and gave great thanks. I wanted oblivion in the trout pools and the maples and the incandescent zest of raptor’s flight. I came later still to owls, the true apparitions of the forest. I encountered him, the ghost, pale shrunk down hooded knight, with accusation and inquisition in his eyes, before these people did… These people… they have to Disney-fy and tame and neuter… He’s not a stuffed fucking animal, after all. ‘We found a coffin that fits him!’... they said that like… a teenaged girl who found a dress that fits. No, that’s not it. Well they made light of it. A child’s coffin…”

They must be at it now. Through the shrill wind he thought he heard their circus moving. He knew the procession route from hearsay. They would start at the church where Bernie made his public appearances. Some considered this a bit too much, but others thought it was a beautiful reminder that we must take care of all God’s creatures, and others still didn’t think it was worth getting worked up over one way or another. Susan, an avid Bernie fan and an ecumenical spirit who represented St. John’s parish across town, believed “Saint Francis would want it this way,” and “We all must be better stewards of the earth.”

“His probing disc face, his otherworldly flight so elegant and precise, slow, slow, never hurried, his strange moth legs, his eyes full of reproach and curiosity… I loved him too. But this is the way of nature. Entropy is the rule of life.

“They baited him into that stupid dance. They baited his public appearances. Maybe domestication killed him.”

It was from this reverie that David awoke and found himself staring at the Bolton Bean. The cold was biting through his bones, so a coffee didn’t seem too bad right now.

Immediately upon walking in he regretted it. It was more crowded than usual and the town’s chattiest contingent was present: Sharon, Molly, Patty, Tricia, Janet, Janice, Cheryl, and Celine. He tried to check his phone and half-heartedly dig into his coat so that he naturally could avert his eyes, and he checked his watch too and realized he’d overdone it. He stumbled into the man in line in front of him and grimaced in embarrassment. People generally assumed David was a taciturn man of a certain age, but Cheryl recently had learned he was much younger than he looked.

“Why wasn’t he at the service?” Cheryl added. “Evan Holden calls him the Bird Man of… um…”

“Alcatraz,” finished Tricia. “It’s an old movie my dad likes.” She shrugged.

“So why wasn’t he there? He’s a huge bird watcher, right?”

Sharon looked at Cheryl with the envy and anticipation of someone whose friend has not yet seen a favorite movie with all its delicious plot twists. She leaned in and lowered her voice. “You really haven’t heard?”

Cheryl shook her head.

“Welcome to Wattaquadock Hill! He… he moved here to escape, he had to get away from the memories and the hurt I suppose. His child died, his little boy… but it’s really how it happened. It was his fault.”

“It wasn’t his fault!” Molly whispered.

“It’s hard to say,” chimed Janet.

“Could happen to anyone.”

“He shouldn’t have been so negligent,” Sharon rejoined. “His… own… child.”

Several of the ladies glanced sideways at Sharon, who did not have children of her own; but they stayed quiet.

“They were at a mall. There was some work being done. One of the elevators was out of order. The kid fell down the elevator shaft. He must have climbed around some warning side or something. I hear the funeral was closed casket.”

“Where was David?”

“I don’t know. He never forgave himself.”

“At least his wife never forgave him.”

“He lost her, too.”

“He came here to start all over again.”

“No wonder he’s… the way he is.”

David was used to being talked about, and though he heard nothing in particular he always knew. He didn’t make it any easier on himself with his passionate distaste for small talk.

On the other side of the cranking, steaming coffee shop, the good reverend had left to speak at a Spaghetti Dinner a few towns away; but Forrest Chenard was still sitting. His macchiato had plummeted straight from scalding hot to too cold, but he was going to finish it anyway. It was then that the weeping boy from earlier, Andrew, was marched in by his mother, right up to where Forrest sat.

“I’m so sorry to bother you. He insisted you would be here, and dragged me halfway across town to ask you a question. Andrew, say hello and ask your question.”

She shoved him forward. Andrew would have launched right into conversation without his mother there, but now he was shy.

“Good to see you again, Andrew,” said Forrest.

“Call me Andy,” and he held out his hand. He looked Forrest up and down for a moment. “I want to know. What killed Bernie?”

Forrest eyed him back, hesitantly.

“I can take it,” said Andy bravely.

“Hard to say. Could have been an injury with a car or truck. Could have happened fighting another bird, protecting his nest. Maybe he was mobbed by crows one too many times.”

“I hate crows. They are so clumsy.”

“Of course, there’s always pesticides.” Forrest’s eyes dropped indignantly. Andy frowned.

“ I love owls. My favorite animals are Strigiformes,” beamed the kid suddenly.

“That’s a big word for a little dude!”

“It’s just basic taxonomy,” Andy shrugged. “I know every Order of Aves.” His mother laughed awkwardly and gestured with open palms to the boy, somehow both proud and embarrassed.

“I think we’ve taken enough of the nice man’s time,” his mother said.

“His name is Forrest, mom.”

Suddenly Andy spied a familiar face in the corner ruminating on his coffee. “Forrest, have you met my friend David?” The boy marched across to David’s table with his mother hurrying behind, and David only realized he was standing there when the boy had been there for a moment already. “He introduced me to the Cornell Online Lab of Ornithology.”

Forrest felt obliged by the boy to reach out for a handshake, though he knew too well when a man didn’t want to talk. David smiled weakly.

“What do you think killed Bernie? Forrest’s hypotheses were… inconclusive.”

David’s eyes tossed around the room as he brooded. “Random cataclysm is the way in nature… but we speed things up, the death cycles of things.”

Andy did not, yet did, understand these words. Instinctively, the tears welled back in his eyes, though he was trying now to be brave.

The mother started. “Ok Andy, we need to pick up your sister from ballet.”

“Entropy, Andy! Entropy and chaos. When you disappear into the woods it’s clear. But, sorry… I was going, too. Goodbye.”

The same sadness over Bernie came back to Andy, but he was pleased to run into erudite minds. It always made him happy that David spoke to him “like one of the men.”

III.

That Wednesday, Forrest returned to show the footage at our local theater, The Strand, which often showed classics and served full sandwiches and beer from its counter. This was just down the road from the spot on Union Street that peeled dramatically away from the reservoir before reaching the dam that closed off the ravine and ran for a short space between the water and a patch of forest, the spot where the town had placed the box that Bernie moved into and his family now dwelled in, overlooking that dramatic view.

I don’t want to give the impression that the entire town was obsessed with owls. Perhaps I already have. Certainly a not-insignificant portion of the town had caught Bernie Fever. But many others were in the Evan Holden camp. And others still were mostly neutral but flocked to see the carnival of birders and mourners and middle aged aunts with Bernie t-shirts. I definitely fell into this category. I wanted to report on nature, human and otherwise.

Forrest was uncharacteristically nervous. He wasn’t so sure if the contents of the footage would help the Audubon Society after all. Despite his anxiety, or oblivious to it, Sharon, Molly, Patty, Tricia, Janet, Janice, Cheryl, and Celine ––and some of their less frequent but equally earnest buddies–– all agreed he looked very cute indeed. Some of the husbands were lurking in the back, but not Sharon’s, who was in London on business.

Andy was there with some of his school friends, and he was exasperated trying to free them from the common and persistent errors they made when discussing birds.

The little movie began. When they saw him, everyone cheered.

Bernie sat on a post surveying his kingdom. His face was one great heart shaped disk. His great black eye orbs were quizzical, and almost seemed to blink in bemusement. All over his hood flume bobbled like cotton tufts in the wind, in cream and tawny brown. The little beak at the center of the heart peeked out at the end of a long sloping trunk line beginning high on the forehead. His head cranked suddenly way, way to the right, all the way to an impossible 90 degrees.

That was the first glimpse of him. Soon we were in the nest, and there was Sophie, oddly lying on her side. There’s a marvelous roundness to owls usually reserved for the sea, like harbor seals and manatees. Both birds perked up into a rite of courtship. With a few penguin-like hops, Bernie came round and mounted her, and soon both birds were seized by amorous flutters. The camera cut away, but not before all Andy’s friends were red and laughing uncontrollably.

Each day, Bernie brought mice and voles to satiate his mate. The eggs, we thought, must be Griff and Greta, though there were four. But when the chicks came time to hatch, the owls appeared baffled. Three of the eggs were cracked but never fully opened; three lives put out before beginning. The final egg was ruptured and an alien, naked nestling scrambled out. All the hunting went to her, and she grew quick and strong. When Bernie and Sophie conceived a new clutch, the daughter took her turns replacing mom atop the warm eggs. She brooded and raised the chicks as a second mother. The audience swooned.

But one day the happy little family took a sudden turn. The daughter, soaked from a torrent, fluttered into the nest opening. Her feathers were strange and jagged, not just with water but from some hideous hiss. She ripped a vole from her mother’s beak and began consuming it. Sophie loomed twice her size, one sphere shivering in rage. She feinted at her daughter. A talon flashed. The daughter reeled and raised her wings high. Demented by the moment’s battle or deranged by fractured instinct to eternally be gorged, we’ll never know. But at that moment she seized the largest naked chick and bit deep into its neck. The chick went limp. She fed on its flesh.

Sophie splintered, broken by maternal instinct to protect both children: predator and victim. The owl convulsed. The daughter turned to the second chick. A curdled shriek pierced the nest, and Bernie flustered through the opening hissing and clacking and gnawing. His talons dug into his daughter, something bent wrong in her wing. A moment later, the carnage was over, and the breeding pair stood sheltering their two living chicks, whom we would later name Griff and Greta.

Sophie remained a shell of herself, while Bernie awkwardly fed the fledglings. They grew large enough to poke their round heads out of the nest-hole to be beheld by birders and curious townsfolk. At some point, Bernie appeared for the last time inconspicuously. But it was hard, I thought, to stop thinking about the shocking violence, over as quickly as it began.

The lights went up, and Forrest ground his teeth a little.

“What a beautiful tribute!”

“Bernie was such a great dad!”

“Thanks for this beautiful video. I loved Barney very much and I had the honor to give him his name. Now I miss him so much and cry many tears for him. I wish Flip the best of luck with Sophie.”

Forrest couldn’t believe his ears. They simply didn’t care, or didn’t notice, at least the vocal among them. “Right on,” he muttered, and his thoughts drifted to the dream of a chapter in the hills here and a corresponding promotion, and of celebrating with a trip to REI.

Andy’s friends relished in it, pointing and re-enacting the gruesome scene and laughing uncontrollably. But in Andy himself was welling a kind of sober acceptance.

David was baffled more than Forrest. Yes, he had given into curiosity; but now he was offended that he broke his rules and didn’t even learn the cause of Bernie’s death. “Why should I care? Why should I care what they think about an owl? Plenty of people have been idiots about lions and grizzlies before. Why do I give one shit?” The old bitterness gurgled up like bile, and the grief pangs were physical jolts followed by a sense of strangulation. “Not now…” he moaned. And he rushed out into the street with his coat half on and his hat left behind. He sprinted down the way, around the corner to where the owl box stood and launched himself at the pole. A hooded figure peered out at him.

“Be free!” he screamed.

The beam was strong but didn’t run deep. David rocked back and forth with rabid, demoniacal jerking. He moaned like a felled moose, swung again, and cried out high and shrill:

“Be free! Be free! Be free! Be free! Be free!”

The pole warped, shuddered, and snapped. A puff of down and nesting miscellany, and the owls lifted off and bobbed away, leaving our town for good.

IV.

Another year passed in Wattaquadock Hill, this one without owls. The locals quickly found another way to pass the time, although a few lifelong enthusiasts were born. Anyway, it was pale January again when David found himself in the ember glow thrumming in the woods just after sunset, in the woods between the reservoir and old Thayer Mansion.

They would have driven David out of town forever had they known what he had done. It happened that another unlikely event distracted from the owls. I myself was the one to discover Sharon Wells, shortly after the screening had wrapped, in a mangled heap in the road outside the theater. The news would soon make clear what happened: that two criminals had botched a burglary at a home nearby and botched it bad; that they panicked, being young, and caromed out of control on their escape; that they slammed poor Sharon as she stood paralyzed in the street. Her husband flew back from London to throw a lavish funeral. One friend remarked that she had flown away to join Bernie.

David had returned to nature, to the hunting life, searching for purgation in the fear and hope and rapture and tedium of his hunt. And with him was the kindred spirit, little Andy. Forrest had gotten his promotion, but it took him to the Rockies, leaving Andy with scarce options for truly stimulating conversations. It took a while, but he convinced his mother to let him go on nature walks with David. David taught him the names of stars and constellations, how to find hobblebush in the Spring, how to follow faint rumors of a bird until the dazzle of revelation flits into view. The man said little except this litany of facts and truisms, but the boy was just as interested in observing his quiet work as observing the secret lives of animals.

The trees were burning with the day’s ending, a purpled smoldering. They emerged into a field. The sky crawled with sea greens and faint pinks. The twilight glittered on the frozen earth. It was Andy who saw it first, buoyant and deliberate, phantom floating on stiff yet elegantly downturned wingbeats. Andy didn’t need to speak; David saw his spirit shiver and followed his eyes to the pale gold ghost. Such eyes! Familiar alienation: earnest, baleful, sorrowing. Sub-chromatic glowing, piercing. And just as quickly as it had come, the hooded heart-faced specter disappeared, its flight lilting away as silent as falling snow.

It was still the savage icon of a world too cruel and too quick. And tomorrow, likely, the bird would die, and anything could be taken from you. But David almost caught himself believing that this did not matter when there are moments when the soul can shudder and a bird can sing in your heart, and there is someone worth accompanying through the snow to find an owl.