Martin Hocke
Novel
A relentless system regulates the coexistence of Barn owls, Tawny owls and Little owls. In the land of the owls, violations of these ancient rules are punished with death. But a new era has begun: former enemies inevitably become allies in the fight against a common, old enemy.
With poetic wit and captivating powers of observation, Martin Hocke has woven this fantastic trilogy of novels, which revolves around owls and other nocturnal birds, into a parable that stands in the tradition of Watership Down and Wind in the Willows.
The Ancient Solitary Reign
978-3-95751-305-2
The young owl Hunter has received a sound basic education in history, geography, natural history, mankind and religion from his parents. His siblings also taught him what is important for survival in the forest. Full of anticipation, Hunter sets out to spend a four-year apprenticeship with one of the experienced specialist owls. But the way to his teacher is long and dangerous. When Hunter arrives, the wise old owl is dead. Now the young Hunter is completely on his own, far faster than he would like to be.
The Lost Domain
978-3-95751-306-9
Since time immemorial, the Tawny owls have formed the privileged aristocratic class among the nocturnal birds, far superior to the Barn owls and Little owls. Yoller, the son of the leader of a Tawny owl dynasty, also grew up with this belief. However, when the impetuous young Tawny owl is attacked by buzzards during a messenger mission to remote forest areas, his aristocratic origins do not help him one bit. Yoller is saved from certain death by the owl May Blossom at the last minute. Yoller and his lifesaving heroine fall in love, but conflicting life plans separate them again. Thus Yoller follows his intended purpose as a Tawny owl and returns to his homeland, where he finds himself confronted with the eternal struggle for supremacy in the forests. But the experience with May makes him doubt the old rules ...
Am an Owl
978-3-95751-308-3
The rule of law for Tawny owl forbids crossing the borders to no man's land. The young Tawny owl Olmo decides to resist this ancient rule, too much fascinated by the dark secrets of ancient times. Unafraid, he leaves his desolate homeland and embarks on a life-threatening journey. But his decision has serious consequences that will dramatically change the lives of the owl population.
‘A moving story that can hardly be thought more exemplary as a fable of the entanglement of people of our time. I hope this book is widely read.’ (Hans Bemmann, author of The Stone and the Flute)
‘Only imagination can capture the incomprehensible truths of human experience and make them comprehensible’, writes Martin Hocke about his decision to write fantasy novels. Since the publication of his first Owls novel, Martin Hocke, born in Cologne in 1938 and shortly thereafter settled in England, has been recognised as a leading author in the area of fantasy literature.Originally an actor with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, he realised that only by writing, not acting, could he find his true voice.
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Martin Hocke: The Ancient Solitary Reign. Novel
Copyright © 2019 by Nicole Hocke
Represented by AVA international GmbH, Munich
Cover design: Joachim Luetke (www.luetke.com) using themes from Angela Waye/shutterstock.com und begemot_30/shutterstock.com
First edition © 2019 by hockebooks gmbh
All rights reserved. The work (or parts of it) must not be (re-)published without the publisher’s consent.
The original edition was published in 1989 by Grafton Books, London.
ISBN: 978-3-95751-308-3
In the reign
of the chicken owl comes like
a god.
Flown wind in the skin. Fine
rain in the bones. Owl breaks
like the day. Am an owl, am an owl.
George MacBeth
Owl
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
St Matthew Chapter V
Verse 5
‘Yes, I remember your father well,’ said Beak Poke, after Olmo had introduced himself and as they hovered outside the abandoned farmhouse from which the old sage had emerged to meet his unexpected guest. ‘Pietro! When he used to visit me he couldn’t have been much older than you are now. A fine young bird, he was, with a keen intelligence.’
‘You say he used to come?’ asked Olmo. ‘That must mean more than once?’
‘Oh yes. As I remember it he came quite frequently. This of course was before he mated and settled down to create a family. It is a sad but essential fact of life that mating and breeding limit travel, adventure and education for any kind of owl. Shall we go in?’ the old bird added as his lean frame and dowdy, thinning feathers trembled slightly even in the warm spring breeze.
Olmo followed him through a gaping hole in the wall, a hole which had once been an upstairs window long since torn from its hinges by the perennial ravages of the wind and weather from the west. This aperture led into what had once been the main bedroom and although the objects in the room were unfamiliar, Olmo felt neither frightened nor out of place in this strange abode which had once upon a time been inhabited by humans.
‘Make yourself at home!’ Beak Poke said, waving one emaciated wing towards a dilapidated chest of drawers where Olmo dutifully settled down to face his host, who had perched on the wooden headboard of an old crumbling double bed. Looking around him, Olmo also observed an armchair with bent springs pushing up through the torn upholstery, a small table, a chair with one broken leg and an enormous wardrobe which stood up against the wall and towered above his perch on the chest of drawers.
‘I’m pleased to see that you don’t find this human environment too disturbing,’ said the older owl, who had been observing Olmo keenly as he settled in.
‘No, I don’t know what these things are for, but somehow they seem familiar,’ Olmo said. ‘Perhaps that’s because I grew up in a man made environment myself.’
‘That is unusual for an owl of your species,’ said Beak Poke, after Olmo had told him about his home in the abandoned railway carriage and also mentioned his one abortive visit to Bardic’s residence in the disused railway station beside the iron tracks. ‘Yes, your experiences are highly unusual for a Little Owl,’ Beak Poke repeated. Normally we white owls are the only race who live in man made buildings.’
‘I know. That’s why they call you Barn Owls, or so my father told me.’
‘Quite right, though in your old language our species was known as ‘Tyto Alba’ and in the prehistoric days we can’t have lived in man made buildings because there weren’t any. No buildings and no men. In fact, as you must already know, the humans are an upstart species who did not begin to clear the Tawny forests and start their agricultural revolution until quite recently — recently in our terms, I mean, but I suppose it must count as a long time ago according to their young concepts of history.’
‘But this isn’t a barn, is it?’ asked Olmo, after glancing round him once again, ‘but the home where they nested, fed and bred.’
‘And slept, of course,’ said Beak Poke, nodding down at the ancient bed which stretched out below his perch. ‘That is one of the things they lie down on, for as you may already know, they sleep in a horizontal position, either on their flanks, their bellies or their backs.’
‘And what did they use that for?’ asked Olmo, nodding at the huge wardrobe that towered above his perch on the chest of drawers.
‘For storing their feathers in at night.’
‘You mean that they remove their feathers before sleeping?’
‘So the Man Owl tells me,’ Beak Poke replied. ‘He and his predecessors have studied man for centuries, so when I first chose this place as my new seat of learning I asked the Man Owl on our local council to come here and identify these objects.’
‘And what about this thing I’m perching on?’ asked Olmo, glancing down below him at the chest of drawers.
‘According to our expert that served a similar purpose. He told me that before men go to sleep they not only remove their feathers, but also an outer layer of skin which they store overnight in things like the one upon which you are now sitting, whilst storing their feathers or their outer raiment in those bigger containers like the one that stands up against the wall.’
‘I would like to know more about men and their habits, but my main concern lies elsewhere,’ said Olmo, anxious to put his burning question to this ancient expert on Owlology before time’s scythe took him in the harvest of old age. ‘My main preoccupation lies within your own specific field of knowledge and concerns the interrelationship of the various owl species, but above all with the rights and with the origin of my own race.’
‘You may be wrong in setting that priority,’ said Beak Poke. ‘As wrong as I was when I first set out to study other owls.’
‘But you can’t have been wrong!’ Olmo protested. ‘My father says that you are the greatest expert on owl behaviour for a thousand meadows round.’
‘Pietro is very kind,’ said Beak Poke, acknowledging the compliment with a little forward nod of his frail and ancient head. ‘I have given my life to Owlology and can only hope that I have succeeded not only in passing down the knowledge that came to me through our great oral tradition, but also to have added to past memories and received wisdom by my own research. But if I had my time again, I would study man, for it is my considered opinion that he now controls the whole environment and at this point in time presents the greatest threat to the survival of your species, mine and to those of all other creatures that fly the skies by day or night.’
‘I, too, would like to know more about man and about other living creatures,’ Olmo said. ‘But until I have found an answer to my burning question I cannot feel certain of my own identity or the way in which I should live my future life.’
‘Ask your question, then,’ said Beak Poke, smiling kindly at Olmo with eyes which though now watery and blurred still glowed with keen intelligence.
‘I want to know the truth about the origin of our species,’ Olmo said. ‘I want to know whether we are the oldest inhabitants of this place, driven later into no man’s land, first by the Tawnies and then by yourselves, or whether we are newcomers — immigrants imported and brought here by man fewer than a hundred springs ago. And if this second hypothesis is true, then I want to know more about the place from which we came and whether it would be possible some day, somehow, to return to the abundance of our own ancestral woods and meadows — whether some day we could resettle in our own fertile territory and no longer be condemned to live in no man’s land.’
‘That was the first question your father asked me,’ Beak Poke said. ‘Tell me, what does he think now?’
‘He thinks it more likely that we were brought here by man. He says that the old country lies beyond the great, salty waters and beyond a range of snow capped mountains which are too high and too vast to fly across. But he confesses that there is some evidence in favour of the second hypothesis — the theory that we were the first owls to inhabit this island and that we have as much right to the rich meadows and the rolling woodlands as you and the Tawnies do.’
‘And what is this evidence?’
‘The old language, or to be more precise, the old languages. As you may remember, my father is obsessed by them. He says that you and the Tawnies have a smattering of both, but that generally you know more about the older of the two languages. In the more recent version you are known as Barbagianni.’
‘This is true, and there are many other such examples,’ said Beak Poke, nodding gravely as he spoke. ‘The original names of all the owls we know derive from the older of your two languages.’
‘But my father says that a hundred springs ago hardly any of the Little Owls either spoke or understood the older of the two languages, so if this is true, how could you and the Tawnies have learned these ancient words from us?’
‘But Pietro believes that you were brought here by man a hundred springs ago?’
‘Yes, or at any rate, he says he does.’
‘Yet your father still studies the old language and even speaks it.’
‘He is an exception.’
‘Perhaps. But exceptions prove the rule. Perhaps there were others like him who imported the vestiges of your old language and passed it on to us.’
‘But according to my father — who has spent all his spare time studying these questions — more than a third of the words used in the lingua franca now spoken by all the owls on this island derive from the older of our two languages. To me, this in itself seems to prove that we lived here before your species was created and even before the ancient Tawnies themselves came into being.’
‘What you say about our common language is quite right. More than a third of it appears to be derived from yours. I have discussed this matter many times with a succession of language experts on our Barn Owl Council. I have also spoken of this enigma with the few intelligent and tolerant Tawnies that I have been privileged to meet. On occasions I have presented my findings at the highest level, but always without success.’
‘And what were your findings?’ asked Olmo, eagerly. ‘What were the conclusions that you and the language experts came to?’
‘That the common tongue now used here was derived from yours and from other foreign owls who have since become extinct.’
‘Then you agree that we must have lived here before you!’ exclaimed Olmo enthusiastically.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Beak Poke said. ‘The older tongue you speak might have been the original language of the Tawnies, or of an even older owl species who lived here before them. After so many million years of owl history, the true origins of our language are impossible to unravel. In any case, your common place or average owl of any species is not particularly concerned with the origins of the language that he uses. In fact very few of us are conscious of what we say or even of why we are saying it. I am one of the few experts who has always joined with the language specialists to promote more research into other tongues and into the very origins of language itself, but our efforts have so far fallen on deaf ears. Your normal owl simply can’t see the point of it. He cares not a tiny sparrow’s turd for the true meaning or the origin of words but merely uses them to identify and symbolise the basic needs that fill his day. And when he attempts to express ideas about politics or religion, for example — his use of words is so random, inaccurate and rhetorical that he might as well be a new born fledging either burping or breaking wind.’
‘But one of the two theories must be true,’ insisted Olmo. ‘Either we were here before you and our old language was the first or else we emigrated from the old country and arrived here about a hundred springs ago. Personally I cannot agree with my father’s theory. I do not believe that we were brought here by man. So if we came here from the old country, it must be possible to fly back.’
‘You have heard the story, I suppose,’ said Beak Poke, smiling with kindly tolerance on the young owl who perched before him full of a passionate desire for knowledge and for learning.
‘The story that the Tawnies tell?’ asked Olmo. ‘The one that my father wanted me to hear?’
‘No, I will tell you the Tawny story later, if you wish, though I must warn you that the narrative is long. The Tawnies still use such rambling and elliptical stories to educate their young, whereas we Barn Owls have moved on to more progressive methods of education — methods in which we involve the pupil more. However, both our succinct Barn Owl tale and the longer Tawny equivalent will serve at least to show how your species is commonly regarded by the brown and white owls who divide the woods and the farmlands so uneasily between them. Our Barn Owl story is a kind of joke, though I doubt whether you will find it funny.’
‘Please tell me anyway,’ Olmo said. ‘It will be instructive to hear how your common white owl perceives of my species.’
Beak Poke winced a little at Olmo’s rather pretentious comment, but being accustomed to the arrogance of youth he merely brushed his forehead and his watery eyes with one emaciated wing and then told the story in exactly the same way that he had heard it as a fledgling so many springs before.
‘Once upon a time,’ he began in the most traditional of manners — ‘Once upon a time there was a brave young Little Owl who wanted to return to what he had been told was the old country from whence he came and the place where his species had originated. He told his father and mother about this bold plan and they were both against it. ‘No man’s land is the place where we Little Owls must live,’ his father said. ‘Be contented with the beauty and the fragrance of humble plants like white campion or rose bay willow herb. Eat the simple food which is available here in no man’s land — plain fare is always the healthiest and the best.’
‘Spend more time in studying and practising the religion of your ancestors,’ his mother said. ‘Be more devout, like myself and your sister. Forget the old country from which we were expelled never to return.’
‘In any case, it’s too far,’ his father said. ‘To get there you have to cross the wide salty waters and then climb high to clear the snow capped Alps. On the long journey between the far shore and the distant mountains you would in any case be killed by the native Tawnies or else by the great Monster Owl who is extinct here but still lives beyond the sea.’ But the courageous Little Owl could not bear the thought of living in no man’s land for the rest of his natural days and nights. His spirit yearned for freedom and adventure and so one twilight he took off and headed west aiming to fly beyond the western sunset and the stars until he reached the Promised Land.
Our young hero flew for many nights, following the iron tracks through no man’s land until he came to a vast expanse of water which he believed to be the sea, or what his parents had described as the great, salty waters. For a time he rested on the banks of this wide stretch of water, eating and sleeping to build up the strength he needed to fly across to the other side.
Eventually he took off, in great trepidation, knowing that he would find neither food nor rest until he had completed the marathon flight that no other Little Owl would dare to undertake. Our hero set off at twilight and to his great surprise and delight reached the far shore as dawn broke on the following day. Here he landed in a willow tree and gave thanks to the Great God Bird for having survived this, the first and most gruelling stage of his journey.
Of course, what he did not realise was that the stretch of water he had crossed was in fact an inland lake, still many meadows’ distance from the sea. Ahead of him, beyond the shores of this lake and far into the distance stretched an expanse of flatland beyond which rose a sweeping crest of hills, higher than any he had ever seen. These he took to be the snow capped mountains he must cross before he reached the Promised Land. Though afraid of the Tawnies and of the Monster Owl that might eat him on the way, the Little Owl took off at dusk, crossed the flatland in a single night and reached the foothills above him at sunrise on the second day. Here he fed and rested, convinced that if he could complete this last lap of the journey he would reach the woodland and the pastures of his ancestral home and thereby enter into a state of grace.
At dusk he took off and flew across the mountains, surprised to find that no snow covered the peaks above which he soared sublimely on his way to the other side.
‘Oh well, this spring has melted early into summer and for once vanquished the eternal snows, ‘ he thought.
He was wrong, of course, but he didn’t know it at the time. As he descended from the high hills in the early dawn, he really believed that he had reached the Promised Land, although in actual fact he had arrived in another stretch of no man’s land not dissimilar to the squatter’s home that he had left behind him.
However, happy in the belief that he had attained his objective — and with it a state of grace, our hero lived on there to a great old age whilst all his family that he had left behind him either starved to death, were murdered by the Tawnies or else blackmailed and exploited by the infamous Little Owl organisation known as ‘The Society’.’
Beak Poke paused at this point and looked at his young visitor across the man made room.
‘Is that all?’ asked Olmo, after a long pause during which he had expected Beak Poke to take up the story again. ‘Does your fable finish there?’
‘It does,’ said Beak Poke, nodding gravely. ‘And the moral must surely be quite clear. A dream is sufficient unto itself. He who believes in the dream and ignores reality will end up happy in the end.’
‘What is this so called Little Owl Society?’ asked Olmo, who had never heard of it before.
‘Pietro will tell you,’ Beak Poke said. ‘If he has not already done so it is probably because he does not wish you to be intimidated by the very fact that it exists. Basically it is an organisation formed by renegade and unscrupulous Little Owls to protect your species from every kind of enemy — from us, from the Tawnies and — so the Society claims — from the arch threat from man himself. But in exchange for this protection these renegades demand free hunting and free food to be taken from your land. If this protection bounty is denied, they kill more quickly and more surely than Tawny, the buzzard, the Monster Owl or even man.’
‘So this is how you Barn Owls think of us? As immigrants condemned to live in no man’s land, preyed on by our own kind and with only a forlorn dream — an illusion to help us to survive until the end of our miserable lives?’
‘That is one of our Barn Owl stories, but not the Tawny version that your father wanted you to hear.’
‘Please tell me the Tawny version now,’ said Olmo, who knew that he must leave with the coming sunrise and that the aged Beak Poke might not live long enough to tell him the story at some future time.
‘If you insist, I will tell you the Tawny story because Pietro sent you here to get it from the source, though in that case you should have had it from one of the brown owl narrators and not from me.’
‘My father told me that you were the greatest living expert of all owls,’ Olmo said. ‘That is quite enough for me, apart from the fact that no Tawny would deign to converse with an alien like me.’
‘Very well, I shall begin,’ said Beak Poke with another faded smile — a smile inspired by kindness but muted by fatigue and by the ravages of age. ‘I will tell you,’ he repeated. ‘But I must stress again that the story is very long. To remember everything I must use all of my waning energies. To recall every detail and every song, I must be allowed to recount the whole thing from the beginning to the end without any kind of interruption. You may be tempted to ask me questions as the story unfolds, but if you do I fear that I may lose the thread. Will you bear with me and hear the whole thing from the beginning to the end?’
‘I will!’ Olmo solemnly declared.
‘Then if you will sit and listen patiently, I shall now begin.’
‘Once upon a time there was a Little Owl who lived in no man’s land. His home was a broken down railway carriage beside the rusty iron tracks and the only flowers that he could see or smell were poor, humble ones like meadowsweet and rose bay willow herb. Flowers that the Barn Owl, the Tawny or the fox would have looked upon as little more than weeds.
Beside and around the iron tracks there was very little to eat. Only moths, small mice and the bitter tasting shrew. So not unnaturally the Little Owl, called Olmo like you, was unhappy with his lot.
‘I wish I were an eagle!’ he thought to himself one cold early dawn, as he scavenged along the iron tracks in search of food. ‘If I were an eagle, I would be lord and master of the skies. Not only would other birds bow down to me, but all other creatures, too, would wonder at my long talons, my huge wingspan and my mighty power.’
So in the chilly light of that early dawn, the hungry little immigrant flew into the branches of a humble elder tree that had grown up in its stunted way beside the iron tracks. He flew into this unlovely elder tree, perched on one of the top branches and prayed to the Great God Bird in the sky. He had never prayed to the Great God Bird before, because with all the misery and suffering in his tiny world, the Little Owl did not believe that a God Bird could exist. And even if he did exist, he could not be the good and gracious God Bird his mother had always believed in. He could not be either good or merciful if he allowed the starvation, the carnage and the cruelty, the killings which took place every night and every day under the celestial paradise in which he had his being.
But it was very cold on that early, pre dawn morning and the Little Owl had found nothing to eat all night. So he thought he might as well say a prayer and give the God Bird a chance to grant his request and thus prove that he existed, in spite of the fact that more and more modern age birds had ceased to believe in him.
‘Please let me be an eagle,’ the Little Owl implored. ‘Please let me sleep in this humble elder tree for half an hour and then when the sun has risen, let me wake up to be an eagle, lord and master of the daytime sky.’
After saying his prayer, the cold and exhausted Little Owl snuggled close to the trunk of the elder tree and went to sleep.
When he awoke he blinked first at the early morning sun and then found to his amazement that he was much closer to the ground. It seemed to him as if some giant weight must have bent the feeble elder tree until it almost touched the earth beside the iron tracks.
Then, to his further astonishment, the Little Owl realised that the weight was him! Not only had he grown a huge head, beak and body, but the length and breadth of his wings when he spread them were terrifying to behold.
When he realised what had happened, the Little Owl was overjoyed. ‘The Great God Bird does exist,’ he thought. ‘And in the short space of time it takes for the sun to rise, he has transmogrified me into an eagle, the lord and monarch of the skies!’
Having carefully extricated himself and his wings from the groaning elder tree, the newly fledged eagle took off and flew up high into the sky.
‘What shall I do first?’ he wondered, as he soared high above the Barn Owl farmland and the Tawny forest which in his former life he had been forbidden to enter, on pain of death. ‘First I will fly down to these woods, flush out a few sleeping Tawnies and frighten them to death,’ he decided, and promptly dropped from the early morning sky and fell upon the unsuspecting Tawnies who were sleeping or dozing in their ancestral woods.
But the first Tawny he flushed out was a brave owl warrior, full of ancient pride and instead of flying away in terror or dying of a heart attack, he turned on the giant bird and attacked it. Therefore, in self defence, Olmo was obliged to kill the courageous old Tawny, which was not at all what he had intended.
Feeling vaguely ashamed of himself, Olmo rose up high into the sky, left the Tawny woods behind him and began to soar high above the flat, neighbouring farmland, which of course was Barn Owl territory. As the sun rose higher in the sky he soon found that being so enormous gave him a great appetite — a hunger that could not be satisfied by mouse, shrew or even by the once much sought after mole. So he dropped down from the sky into a meadow, where he killed and ate a lamb. He devoured it all and found that the meat tasted far better than anything he had eaten in his former life as a Little Owl. But while he was killing and eating the lamb, all the sheep in the field began to bleat and this attracted the attention of the farmer, who arrived at once with his firestick to find out what was happening. When he saw Olmo, dozing in the field after his great feast, the farmer exploded his firestick and bits of metal penetrated the feathers of the newly fledged eagle and stung him into instant take off and escape.
He flew high up into the sky and soared there, feeling sorry for himself. Some of the metal pellets from the firestick had shot through the feathers and perforated his thick eagle skin. From some of these minor wounds he could feel the blood trickling out and clogging the fine plumage on his belly and his massive chest.
‘This isn’t going to be as easy as I thought!’ Olmo realised, as morning turned to noon and the sun rose high above him in the south. ‘When I prayed to the God Bird, I forgot that there were no other eagles living in this district. If I want to find a mate I shall have to fly to the far distant north, to the great mountains which rise up high above the sea. In my former life I heard that this was the only place where eagles lived, and now that I have become one, my instinct tells me the same thing.’
So Olmo, the newly fledged eagle, set off on his long journey north. Both while he flew and when he fell from the sky to feed, all other creatures fled from him in terror, except for men who pointed up at the sky with their firesticks attempting to kill him.
On the third twilight of his long journey north, Olmo found himself flying above a great, man made conurbation. Though he flew and flew, the sprawling city far below him seemed to have no northern limits and he began to despair of ever seeing the countryside again. Below there stretched man made lights twinkling from a million houses and the thunder and fumes from their vehicles rose high into the sky to blind him and choke him half to death.
At last, at midnight, he reached the northern limits of the city and landed in the first stretch of woodland he could find. It was only a poor, sparse copse close to a great house, and the few trees were hardly sufficient to hide his great wingspan and his massive body, but by this time Olmo the eagle was too exhausted to care so he landed in a clearing in the centre of the copse and fell asleep at once.
When he woke the sun was already high. He immediately had the feeling that he was being watched and preparing to fight he stared around the clearing trying to spot who or what was spying on him. For a time he could see nothing but eventually his eye lighted on a tiny young wren who was observing him from her perch on an elm branch across the clearing. As soon as she realised that Olmo was awake the wren began to warble and to his astonishment Olmo realised that her song was dedicated to him:
‘Oh eagle,
Why are you so rare
And how do you dare
And how do you dare
To fly so bold and high
Lord and monarch of the sky?
And is it hard to be a king?
If you were a skylark
You could soar and sing
Or don’t you care
If with your talons
You can kill and tear
Is this more satisfying
Than to soar and sing
Is this why you are so rare?
Say on land or in the sky
Is it more fulfilling
To be a king, to kill and die
Or to be a more common thing
Who can gently soar and sing
Tell me, great monarch of the sky
Should I grow up to be a king
Or should I learn to soar and sing?
Or should I learn to soar and sing?’
‘I don’t think I want to be an eagle any more,’ Olmo thought when the wren had finished her song and flown away. ‘In fact, I don’t think I want to be a bird at all. This freedom of the skies is not all it’s cracked up to be. On the basis of the old adage ‘if you can’t beat them, join them,’ I think I’d rather be a man. They seem to dominate everything, so what point is there in being lord and monarch of the skies when all the real power seems to be down here on earth?’
Though the sun was high, Olmo, the giant eagle, was still tired. Now that the wren had gone away there was no one else in the clearing to spy on him, so he decided to have another little doze.
Before he went to sleep he prayed to the God Bird once again and begged to be transmogrified into a man. He didn’t really expect his prayers to be answered — he hadn’t expected it the first time — therefore you can imagine his astonishment when he woke up in the clearing to discover that he had indeed been transformed into a human being. At least, his body was that of a human being, but his heart and soul of course had remained the same. His heart and soul were still those of a Little Owl, but his appetite, his stomach and his digestive system had become those of a human and in the copse on the edge of the countryside there was nothing he could find to eat.
So Olmo set off for the city. He walked down from the copse, through the fields and on to the main road, making his way back to the great conurbation that he had flown across as an eagle on the previous night. Though he was frightened by the metal, man made or man bred vehicles which flashed past him constantly — there were thousands of them on this great road — he went on walking towards the haze and smog above the million buildings he could see below him, obliterating all the nature and the countryside beneath layer upon layer of brick, chimney, asphalt, cement and smoke.
Walking down the wide road, terrified in his naked human form, Olmo noticed that some of the man made or man bred vehicles that sped past him, slowed down temporarily to stare at him. At first he thought it was because he was the only person walking on that wide expanse of asphalt, but he soon realised that there was another reason for their curiosity. Soon, and long before he had reached the outskirts of the city, a vehicle with a flashing blue light appeared and screamed to a stop on the hard shoulder of the road. Three blue men jumped out, seized Olmo and threw him into the back of their man made vehicle and then made off at once towards the centre of the city.
They asked Olmo many questions, but he could not understand the tongue they spoke. He could speak, for the God Bird had of course given him the gift of human language, but apparently it was not the one the local natives spoke.
Olmo also noticed that these blue men were not really blue, but white. Their skins were white, whereas the man made plumage they wore was blue. He also realised, to his great consternation, that though he had the same human form as the men who had captured him, his skin was not the same colour. His skin was black, and he was naked! The Great God Bird had answered his prayer and indeed transmogrified him into a human being, but he had forgotten to equip him with the right language or the right coloured skin and — perhaps a more decisive error — had omitted to provide him with any clothes. But after all, he was the God Bird, not the man God, and so Olmo assumed that he had not done this on purpose but merely made the mistake in good faith, being uncertain of the facts.
After what seemed a long time in the horrendous traffic, the machine arrived at a building in the city and Olmo was thrown into a room which contained four walls and something to sleep on. Nothing more! He was hungry, but he got no food. After what seemed an eternity one of the blue men came to the room and gave him a cup of hot brown water, which he drank, but this brown water tasted even worse than the stagnant liquid that as a Little Owl he had seen beside the railway tracks. At least, he imagined that it tasted even worse, for of course in his former life he had never dreamed of drinking anything like that before.
When the man had gone away and Olmo had drunk this disgusting brown water, he got down on his knees — as a man — and prayed to the Great God Bird in the sky again.
‘Please turn me into a fox!’ he prayed. ‘I want to be as far away from man and his so called civilisation as I can.’
Weary and worn out then, he went to sleep on the thing provided for him in his cell, and when he woke again in the late afternoon he found himself in the middle of the Lost Domain, not far from the stretch of no man’s land that he had lived in as a Little Owl.
‘This is wonderful!’ he thought. ‘I have heard about this place. It is full of game. Pheasant in the parkland and on the edges of the woods, ducks and ducklings by the lake and hare and rabbit everywhere! All my life I have been underprivileged and hungry — even as an eagle, king of the birds, I was hungry — but now I shall go out and glut myself.’
So Olmo the fox waited until early twilight and then trotted down to the lakeside and began to stalk the ducks, about a dozen of whom were still strutting up and down beside the water’s edge. With the cunning sense of strategy and tactics which he had naturally acquired as a fox, he slunk between the lakeside and the strutting ducks, thus cutting off their escape route to the water. Feeling a strange blood lust come upon him — a lust to kill that he had never felt as a Little Owl, or even as an eagle, except when he’d been hungry — Olmo proceeded to assassinate the ducks one by one. He killed eleven of the twelve. To his extreme disappointment, one made it down to the water’s edge and paddled to safety in the centre of the lake.
The hungry Olmo immediately devoured one of the creatures he had killed and then started on another. But by the time he was half way through the second duck a certain queasiness came upon him, and by the time he’d forced himself to finish, he felt sick.
Sated, he lay there in the grassland by the lake and surveyed the nine duck carcasses strewn around upon the grass. Some of the bodies were still oozing blood, even after death. Although Olmo was now a fox, in mind and body, he still had the heart and soul of a Little Owl.
‘It seems a shame to leave these corpses to the maggot and the worm,’ he thought. ‘Yet if I swallow one more mouthful I shall burst.’
As if in answer to his thoughts a wren dropped from the darkening sky and perched her tiny body on top of the carcass of a murdered duck. Olmo and the wren stared at each other for a few moments and then the little bird began to sing:
‘Oh fox
Why do you kill
When you don’t eat?
Why do you kill
And leave the meat?
Does it give you
A thrill, to kill, to kill
To spill the blood
And then not eat?
No other creatures do
They kill to eat
Not for the thrill
Except for one, of course
Called man
Who kills, too
And he kills you
When he can, when he can
But not to eat.
Oh fox, why do you kill
When not to eat
And why do men kill you?
They kill you
To save the lamb
To save the lamb from you
Then they kill the lamb
To eat, instead of you
Instead of you.
Oh fox, why do you kill
And leave the meat
And why do men kill, too
If not to eat, if not to eat?
And why do men kill too?’
Though he had been physically transmogrified into a fox, this song touched the remnants of Olmo’s owl conscience. It moved him, upset him and clashed with the new physical instincts that possessed him as a fox. In fact, the fox instincts spurred him on to kill the wren for her impertinence, and also to further sate his never ending blood lust. Militating against this new instinct, the remnants of his owl conscience told him that it was pointless to kill a pretty little bird, when he was already surrounded by so much freshly slaughtered meat.
After a brief struggle between fox instinct and owl conscience, the former prevailed and Olmo flexed his lithe, powerful haunches and launched himself across the brief space of earth that separated him from the titillating little wren, but before he could graunch her to bits with one bite of his wicked jaws she had taken off and vanished above him into the darkening twilight sky.
As an owl, even with a belly full of duck, he could have taken off, overhauled and killed the impertinent little wren within a matter of seconds, but as a fox he knew that there was no way he could ever fly.
‘I mustn’t think this way,’ he decided as he lay there in the grass on his full belly, peering up with nostalgia into the night sky. ‘I begged the Great God Bird to transform me into a fox, which he did, and now that I am here in the Lost Domain — this earthly paradise — I must not miss the sky.’
So with his belly full and his blood lust partially appeased, Olmo sloped back up the hill across the open parkland and went to sleep on the edge of the ancient forest, little realising how prophetic the song of the little wren had been.
During the night Olmo digested his bellyful of duck and felt much better when he woke up in the morning. Soon, however, his fox instinct was alerted by a sound he had never heard before: a kind of braying, or baying, the sort of noise made by hunting dogs. This frightful cacophony was accompanied by another kind of baying or braying, emanating as he guessed it, from a man blown horn.
Presently, in the parkland below him, he perceived a great number of hounds racing towards him up the hill. These hounds were followed by a pack of red men on horses. To Olmo, these red men seemed almost more menacing than the blue ones who had incarcerated him when he was a man.
‘I’d better get out of here,’ he thought, and swiftly made off through the woods, with the cacophony of horn and hound following closer and closer behind him.
‘This is no good,’ he thought. ‘I can’t outrun them. Not hounds and men on horses. I must use my native cunning as a fox and find some devious way of outwitting them.’
He therefore ran down through the forest, gained the open spaces and raced across the fields and meadows until he came to the slow running brackish stream which wound its way across the flat, Barn Owl country. He plunged into the water, swam across the stream and then went to ground in a hole below an ancient weeping willow which rose high above the banks of the sluggish brook. His heart was pounding and every muscle in his fox body ached with fatigue, but he felt safe. He knew instinctively that the hounds would lose his scent in the slow running water, turn round and follow his old tracks back up into the Lost Domain. This is exactly what happened, though he had a bad moment when he heard the beasts braying and howling on the far banks of the stream.
After the hounds and the red men on horses had gone away, Olmo slept for most of the day, woke at twilight and reconsidered his position. He remembered the wren’s song and regretted the frightful blood lust that had come upon him as a fox.
‘All this senseless killing is a shame,’ he thought, emerging from his safe hole under the willow and watching the red ball of sun sink low above the forest of the Lost Domain. ‘It is a pity to kill and then not eat the meat, but I am a fox now and in the long run, it’s all about survival, after all. And up in the forest, in the parkland and down there by the lake, there’s so much more to kill and eat than I would ever find as a Little Owl in no man’s land, beside the iron tracks, as an eagle, who is also threatened by man, or as man himself — or at any rate a man to whom the Great God Bird has given the wrong language and the wrong coloured skin, by mistake!’
So Olmo the fox waited till the sun had fallen in a ball of burning fire below the crest of the lost forest, and then swam back across the stream and trotted up the hill, back through the woodland and then down again to the lake. When he got there, the first thing he noticed was that the dead ducks had gone.
‘I’ve never known the worms and maggots work so quickly,’ he thought to himself. ‘But then, perhaps it’s all different when you are a fox.’
As the moon rose high, hunger came upon him, accompanied by a fresh and overwhelming sense of blood lust. After glutting himself upon duck the previous evening, Olmo fancied a change, so he trotted around the lake towards the great house. As he made his cautious approach, his nostrils were assailed by the delicious and tempting aroma of fresh chicken.
Ignoring the dim light which still burned from two lower windows of the great house, Olmo followed his hypersensitive nose across the huge vegetable garden until he came to a coop in which the unfortunate hens and their chicks had been locked up for the night.
Sensing his presence, the hens set up a great animated clucking, a cacophony of sound which rivalled the noise which the red men and the hounds had made. Undeterred, Olmo sniffed his way patiently around the perimeter of the coop until he came across a hole under the fence — a weak point under which, if he burrowed, he could soon get through.
He therefore set to work and, sooner than expected, he found himself among the cackling fowl, inside the compound of the coop. With exquisite, sadistic enjoyment he massacred half of the hens imprisoned in their coop, or cage, and then paused to devour a couple of delicious young chickens. When he had finished and was about to start assassinating the rest of the birds his fox instinct suddenly sensed the presence of a man approaching the chicken coop from the direction of the great house. Olmo immediately flung himself across the coop, as fast as his full belly would allow him, and wriggled his way out through the burrow by which he had entered.
But it was too late! The man with the firestick was too close. The dreadful thing exploded, splitting the stillness of the night and temporarily drowning the frantic cackle of the hens. Olmo felt the impact of the pellets, which burst through fur and skin, penetrating deep into the vulnerable parts of his fox body. In spite of the blast and the grievous wounds that had been inflicted on him, Olmo’s reflexes remained unimpaired. Reacting to the threat of certain death from another blast, he dragged his bleeding fox body across the parkland and up the hill to the safety of the ancient forest.
On the edge of the woodland he rested, panting, bleeding and knowing instinctively that the wounds he bore would bring him a slow and painful death — a slow, green death from the rotting gangrene of the wounds the firestick had inflicted.
For one final time Olmo prayed to the Great God Bird in the sky. ‘Please let me be a Little Owl again,’ he begged. ‘Let me be an ordinary, unimportant immigrant. Give me back the kind of freedom which I once enjoyed but was too young and arrogant to appreciate. I will be satisfied with daisies, with the green and white of wild parsley, with purple clover and with the odd patch in no man’s land of early purple vetch.’
Bleeding and exhausted, Olmo soon slept. He awoke to find that the Great God Bird had answered his prayers and transmuted him once more into a Little Owl. He found himself unharmed, with all wounds healed, perched in safety inside a hollow elm, beside the iron tracks. From the safety of this stunted tree in what was known as no man’s land he could see an expanse of rose bay willow herb and meadowsweet, and to him, then, these poor weeds seemed to be more beautiful by far than honeysuckle, rose or hyacinth, or any of the trees and flowers he had so fleetingly lived among as an eagle, as a man and as a fox.’
Olmo had listened to Beak Poke’s long story without fidgeting or stirring on his perch. Though he identified with many of the happenings there were others that he did not understand, about the blue men, for example and about some of the other events that had taken place in the city.
However, one thing came across quite clearly both from the long Tawny narrative and from the shorter Barn Owl story. Both these species considered themselves superior. They despised Little Owls and held them in contempt as aliens who should be contented with their lot and who would be tolerated only if they confined themselves to living in no man’s land and eating the scraps of food that they found there. They would avoid persecution only if they abandoned all aspirations to any higher form of life.
Against this attitude and philosophy, Olmo’s very soul rebelled, but he needed time to digest all that he had heard and time to subdue his natural indignation before returning to discuss these matters with Beak Poke, his new mentor. In any case sunrise now lurked behind the sacred darkness of the night and soon he must set off again in search of Alba and their trysting place on the five barred gate.
‘Thank you!’ he said to Beak Poke. ‘That was the longest and the best told story I have ever heard. I must leave you now, but may I come again?’