Monday 4 June 2012

Owl Is Out To Trick You - 2


“What are you doing?” The biggest pigeon cooed surprised, so that the worm he had been holding dropped all the way back to the ground.
Perched on the edge of the nest, flapping her little wings to maintain balance, baby owl hooted: “What does it look like I'm doing?”
“You're not flying out yet, are you?”
“Less then two days ago, you were still an egg!”
Baby owl had contemplated telling them the truth, but when she saw how the worms had dropped from their silly beaks when they tried to speak, she changed her mind. Instead, she decided she would come back to share her wealth with them once she'd found the treasure.
“Cooing won't help,” Baby owl said to them. “I have to go.”
“But where are you going?” asked her mother.
“You wouldn't understand,” she said. “I'm not like you.”
“Don't you dare speak to your mother like that,” said papa pigeon, and with his beak he pushed baby owl back into the nest.
This was more than the little owl could take. “Maybe you're right, maybe you would understand. I am going out to look for my wisdom. Seeing that neither of you have any, you might understand what it's like to search for it. But the difference between you and me is that you failed, horribly. And I will succeed.”
“Your wisdom?” Her mother cooed.
“What do you think you are,” papa pigeon said, “an owl or something?”
Baby owl bitterly climbed back onto the rim of the nest. She was puffing with effort and anger, and her whole body seemed to inflate, deflate, inflate, deflate at a high rate.
“Fools,” she hooted when she reached the top. Her head turned round to her foster pigeons one last time. Then she spread her little wings and stepped over the edge.

As the wind caught under her wings, all sorts of thoughts flew into her feathers. She suddenly knew she would never see her parents again. She wouldn't come back to share her wisdom with anybody. The creaky branch had been right. Owls are lonesome creatures. They don't love anybody.  

3 comments:

  1. Hah, what an arrogant owl! But I give her credit for doing no harm. I wonder when owls were first associated with wisdom. It wasn't always so, because Billy Bunter was called "the Fat Owl of the Remove".

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  2. I thought it was the Ancient Greeks that made the connection, because Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom, was often paired with an owl. Are you really that old? According to wikipedia, Billy Bunter certainly isn't (he was conceived in the 1890's).

    Another interesting nugget of wikiwisdom: "The name Bunter was in common use at the time, due to the popularity of a patent medicine known as Bunter's Nervine Tonic. It also meant a low vulgar woman."

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  3. You must have a pretty good idea of how old I am, Debs, thanks to your googling. But we won't discuss that here!

    Thanks for that classical tidbit. I'm sure you could write an interesting article titled "Owls - wise or stupid?"

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