Pinky Pye (19 page)

"If your little owl were able to find his own food," said Papa, "what sort of food does he like to eat?"

Goodness,
thought Mama.
Edgar is awfully gay and happy tonight considering the morbidity of the subject under discussion.

"Grasshoppers," said Mr Bish. "Grasshoppers, praying mantises, crickets ... and he likes good red meat, or a juicy little mouse, a lizard. He used often to settle for good old plain chopped steak."

"Oh-h-h," said Uncle Bennie. "Grasshoppers and crickets. Tonight you might hear my crickets sing."

"Uncle Bennie," said Papa. "I doubt if your crickets will ever sing."

"They will too," said Uncle Bennie. "They ain't all ladies." His eyes strayed up to the little porthole window. So did Rachel's. Rather absentmindedly, for she was so absorbed in not missing her cue if Papa would ever give it to her, Rachel noted that Gracie was not up on the little roof where she usually sat.

Pinky was not around either. It seemed odd not to have the cats watching and playing in their usual places. But Rachel did not have time to ponder about this, for Papa was going on and, sensing a mounting excitement in his voice, Rachel became even more on the alert than ever.

Papa was saying, "I know it must be hard to talk about your dear pet owl, and it must be especially hard to recall his song, his call. But you have made your owl so real to us, almost like a pet of the Pyes' in fact, that I know I, for one, feel very close to him. It would be a great treat to all of us for you to do as you did this afternoon at the sunken forest, imitate little Owlie's special call. Please do call him as you used to do back home in Alta Vista."

Mama shuddered at what she thought was Papa's lack of tactfulness. If his foot had not been broken, she would have given it a kick the way she did when he forgot to listen to deaf Mrs. Price. This was not the man who had knocked her down on the escalator and then married her. This was a mean and cruel man.

But after one glance of surprise at his host Mr. Bish complied. He wetted his lips. Then first he gave the call of the pygmy owl, a long series of bell-like notes that he steadily and regularly repeated. Then he gave its song—a short quaver, then a pause, and then three bell-like notes.

The night air was clear, and when Mr. Bish stopped, a silence fell on the group, a sad silence because he must miss Owlie so. Rachel almost forgot that Owlie wasn't missing after all anymore, and she whisked away a tear. In that silence, as a far distant echo, faintly came the same call that they had just heard Mr. Bish give—a long series of bell-like notes, repeated often and steadily, exactly the same call. But it stopped suddenly—in the middle of a note. Mr. Bish leaped to his feet, looking bewilderedly about.

"It's your owl!" cried Rachel, not waiting for cues any longer. "It's your wonderful little owl!"

At this moment from inside the cottage there came a great crash!

"Oh! My sainted aunts! The cats!" yelled Papa. "Come on, all of you, or Owlie will be a goner after all!"

Into the cottage they all raced, the lame-footed people going faster than the surefooted ones.

The little doors of the mailbox were swaying ... swaying....

Mr. Bish was so confused he didn't know what to do, where to look.

Gracie was obviously responsible for the big crash. She had knocked over an urn of seaweed that had been on the ledge near the swinging doors of the alcove. Her anxious, startled eyes were pale and glassy green and they were fastened on Pinky. For once, the big cat was watching the little cat instead of the other way around.

Pinky was sitting on the narrow ledge outside the swinging doors. She was holding up her little white paw and looking at it and shaking it. "Woe," she said when she saw the family.

"How long have those cats been in here?" asked Papa.

"Oh-woe," was all the answer he got, and he got that from Pinky. She shook her paw as though to rid it of something.

"Oh-h-h," groaned Rachel.

Was Owlie inside of Pinky?

The great question in the minds of Rachel and Papa, the others being completely puzzled and in the dark, was—had the cats been in the eaves and hurt the owl, perhaps even eaten him, while Rachel and Papa had been lolling outside creating psychological moments?

Only a moment before, however, they had heard the little owl hoarsely answer the call of Mr. Bish. Could he possibly have been killed in the brief moment that had elapsed since then? They could not be sure. Hemmed in as he may have been by two cats, one big and the other little, who knows what may have happened? His hoarse call may have been a call for help. He had certainly stopped suddenly in the middle of a note as, oh heavens, Uncle Bennie's crickets used to stop in the middle of chirps.

Rachel was already up on the table, advancing to the eaves. "Go away," she said sternly to Pinky, giving her a push and a swat and sending her sprawling.

Oh-woe,
thought Pinky on the floor. Her tail waved angrily.
The way people come along and take the credit!
she thought.

"Come on up, Mr. Bish!" said Rachel. "Help! Your Owlie's up here." And then she prayed, "Oh, let there be a nice compact alive little Owlie and not just a pile of feathers."

Still bewildered but as quick to help now as he had been when yanking the great herring out of the water, Mr. Bish bounded onto the table, took his flashlight out of his pocket, pushed open the swinging doors, and then...

"Owlie!" he exclaimed. "Owlie!" His voice broke. And forgetting that his wife was in Washington, he said, "Myra! Owlie's here!"

He whistled pygmy owl tunes as he used to do in Alta Vista, and the little bird, covered with bits of dry seaweed, fluttered to him like a baby bird just learning to hop. Tenderly Mr. Bish picked him up. "He's wounded," he said. "His wing is wounded. But otherwise he seems fine."

Pinky was now adjusted to the fact that things had not gone as she had planned. She sat on the hearth with an approving expression and nodded her head and cleaned her ears. She was trying to deceive the family into thinking that she had meant all along to be merely a guide, divulging the secret of the eaves to them.

Gracie, banished into the night, sat on the windowsill and peered in, looking sullen. Obviously she had been foiled in her attempt to get into the little storage room. Being too big for the very narrow ledge, she had awkwardly knocked over the heavy urn in her greedy haste to beat Pinky to the prize.

"Do you want this?" asked Jerry, handing Mr. Bish his owl cage.

"You bet I do!" said Mr. Bish, and he put Owlie in it right away.

Owlie did not mind. For a while he glared wild-eyed and accusingly straight ahead of him, as though he were just barely restraining his anger and tears. Then, feathers all ruffled up, he cowered in a corner of his cage and fell to brooding and scowling.

Now they all adjourned, owl, people, cats and dog, to the green umbrella, where, under the star-studded sky, they could mull over this whole unusual series of events and piece them all together.

"Well ... well..." said Mr. Bish hesitantly.

An awful thought struck Rachel. Did Mr. Bish have the idea that the Pye children had known all along about this owl in the eaves and that they had grown so fond of him they were hiding him in case he should turn out to be, as indeed he had, Mr. Bish's own West Coast owl named Owlie?

Somehow Rachel felt guilty. Taking grasshoppers, Gracie the watcher, Pinky, and all other things into consideration, it seemed incredible now that the Pyes had not known all along about Owlie being up in the eaves. Rachel was relieved when Papa, who sensed there might be a misunderstanding of this kind, said, "Bish. Today, while you sunken-forest hikers were away, our kitten, Pinky, got into the house in a very unusual way, that is, through the mailbox, which has little swinging doors to it. Curious to see what this clever little creature was going to do next, I hobbled to the screen door and watched.

"She then, by a roundabout and challenging route along the ledges, arrived at the eaves, which have swinging doors too. Assuming that she was after Uncle Bennie's grasshoppers, I gave the matter little more thought other than to marvel at the cleverness and ingenuity of this kitten."

"M-m-m?" said Mr. Bish.

"It was Rachel," Papa went on, "who, practically at the same moment as Pinky, made the discovery of the presence of your little owl. Rachel had wondered what our other brilliant cat, Gracie, always watched as she sat watching on the little roof over the porch, eyes glued to the little porthole window. At first she had assumed as I had ... grasshoppers. But Rachel, a true scientist, taking nothing for granted, ferreted out what it was that Gracie watched. So today, from her place on the hot little roof, with foot throbbing..."

"Oh, Papa," remonstrated Rachel, pleased nevertheless with the glory.

"She has the making of an ornithologist," said Mr. Bish with solemn conviction.

"She is one, she already is one," agreed Papa.

"Oh, I just wondered why Gracie watched and watched," said Rachel modestly. "Anybody would have done the same."

"But, Pye, why in Sam Hill didn't you tell us about Owlie the minute we came home this afternoon?" asked Mr. Bish with a shade of quite understandable annoyance in his voice.

Papa looked a little sheepish. After all, he had almost waited too long. But Mr. Bish accepted his apologies amiably and his explanation, which was that he had wanted to lead up to the climax, Mr. Bish's call, hoping Owlie would answer and stun Mr. Bish with joy and surprise. And this Owlie had done.

"He sure stopped in a hurry at the approach of cats," said Mr. Bish. "But what I wonder, too, is how Owlie got up there in the first place?"

"I know! I know!" said Rachel, speaking tensely. "I have it figured out. He was blown in through the little round porthole window the night of the big blow. Because when we moved here, that little window was open and Mrs. A. A. Pulie said to be sure to close it; but we forgot to close it until the night of the big storm. By the time we closed it Owlie had already been blown in. Mama was afraid bats might blow in!"

"Ugh!" said Mama, glad it was an owl and not a bat. "Why didn't that owl ever sing so we could hear him? Oh ... those rustlings ... That was Owlie all along!"

"Uh-huh," said Mr. Bish. "As for singing, he would be too terrified. Or he may have injured his throat the famous night he got blown in. Imagine Owlie being blown into the very best place that he could have been blown into on the whole East Coast! Blown from one bird man to another. All wrong the saying, 'East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.'"

Mr. Bish was fond of serious remarks of this sort, and the children puzzled the meaning of the sayings silently and politely.

"The odyssey of an owl," murmured Mr. Bish, still dazed over his good fortune. He then softly sang more owl songs to Owlie while mulling over the facts of the case. "But what did he eat all that time?" he asked, interrupting himself in the middle of a song. "Aside from his wing, which is broken, he seems in good shape. And what did he drink? After all he has to have food and water."

"That's the most wonderful thing of all," said Rachel ecstatically. "Don't you see? He ate crickets and grasshoppers. All Uncle Bennie's pets that are named Sam. That's what he ate. We'd put them in the eaves every night and every morning they'd be gone. We kept wondering and wondering what was happening to them."

When all this about Uncle Bennie's pets and the red-threaded one and the blue-threaded one was explained to Mr. Bish, he nearly fell over backward.

"Owlie is the exception that proves the rule," he said. And he slapped his knee again.

It'll get black and blue,
thought Uncle Bennie.

"What exception? What rule?" asked Rachel. She thought the owl was famous enough already without further distinctions.

"Well..." said Mr. Bish. "I have never heard of a little owl that was captured in infancy and hand-fed ever since being able to stay alive if he were suddenly set free. Even with crickets placed as temptingly close as Uncle Bennie's were, I would have thought it impossible for a hand-fed owl to have the sense to tear open cricket boxes, however flimsy..."

"Weren't flimsy," interrupted Uncle Bennie. "Were strong cricket houses."

"M-m-m," said Mr. Bish. "Strong cricket houses is what I meant. To get the crickets out of the strong cricket houses and then to eat them up! Extraordinary. More and more extraordinary."

Papa and Mr. Bish then exchanged a few remarks concerning birds, in difficult language. Owlie blinked sternly and proudly at Uncle Bennie, who frowned back at him whether he was an exception to an owl rule or not.

Mr. Bish continued to marvel at the unique string of circumstances that had blown his owl off the SS
Pennsylvania,
over part of the ocean, and through a porthole window of the renowned Edgar Pye's cottage named The Eyrie. And to think that then, unbeknownst to any of the Pyes, Owlie had been fed a very special and fine diet of pet crickets and grasshoppers belonging to the youngest, though an uncle, member of the family; and that at last he had been discovered by a smart little girl of the age of nine and the name of Rachel.