Why he bowed to his food and to everybody and everything that presented itself before him was a riddle that I never solved.  A materialistic friend suggested that he was adjusting the focus of his wonderful eyes, and the action was certainly like that of an optician examining a lens; but I feel that there was something more ceremonial about it.  This punctiliousness cost him his dinner once.  I was curious to know what he would do with a mouse, so, having caught one alive, I slipped it quietly into his cage.  He was more surprised than ever before, raised himself erect, bowed to the earth once, twice and three times, stared, bowed again and so on until, to his evident astonishment and chagrin, the mouse found an opening and was gone.  The lesson was not lost.  A few days later I got another mouse, to which he began to do obeisance as before, but very soon and suddenly, though as softly as falling snow, he plumped upon it with both feet and, spreading his wings on the ground, looked all round him with infinite satisfaction.  The mouse squeaked, but he stopped that by cracking its skull quietly with his beak.  Then he gathered himself up and flew to the perch with his prize.

One thing I noted about Tommy most emphatically.  He never showed a sign of affection, or what is called attachment.  He maintained a strictly bowing acquaintance with me.  He was not afraid, but he would suffer no familiarity.  He would come and eat, with due ceremony, out of my hand, but if I offered to touch him he was surprised and affronted and went off at once.  When I moved to another house I found that I could not continue to keep him, so I sent him to the zoological garden, where I visited him sometimes, but he never vouchsafed a token of recognition.  His heart was locked except to his own kin.

But since that time, when I have seen an owl, even a barn owl, or a great horned owl, swiftly cross the sky in the darkness of night, I have felt that I could accompany it, in imagination, on its secret quest.  It will arrive silently, like the angel of death, in a tree overlooking a field in which a rat, whose hour has come, is furtively feeding, all alert and tremulous, but unaware of any impending danger.  The rat will go on feeding, unconscious of the mocking curtsey and the baleful eyes that follow with mute attention its every motion, until the hand of the clock has moved to the point assigned by fate, and then it will feel eight sharp talons plunged into its flesh.  I have seen the fierce dash of the sparrow hawk into a crowd of unsuspecting sparrows, I know the triumph of the falcon as it rises for the final, fatal swoop on the flying duck, and I have watched the kestrel, high in air, scanning the field for some rash mouse or lizard that has wandered too far from shelter.  The owl is also a bird of prey, but its idea is different from all these.

VII

THE BARN OWL