The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar by Martin Windrow

down so that she could stand in the tray and reach it with a raised foot. She seemed to like this toy – she sat holding it, biting it, knocking it away and grabbing it as it swung back again.
    I noticed that after any kind of exciting activity she seemed to get tired quite easily, and went off for a brief snooze to recharge her batteries. Sometimes this meant sleeping one-legged on her door top, but at other times she would seek out a favoured front corner of the shelf inside the top of the hallway wardrobe, and actually fold her legs up under her chest and lie down flat on her front.
    * * *
    Despite Mumble’s occasional over-excitable teenage outbursts, she was much more often docile, and in this mood she definitely enjoyed being ‘preened’. When she was sitting close to me I would stroke the top of her head gently with a finger. At my first touch she would twist and ‘gimbal’ her head around a bit, and after the first few strokes she went quiet and dopey, eyes slitted, crouching low and puffing out her feathers as she enjoyed the sensation.
    I was not expecting any deliberate gestures of companionship on Mumble’s part, and it came as a pleasant surprise when she started initiating such preening sessions herself. These most often happened when she saw me for the first time in the morning. If she had been in the night cage, then when I walked into the kitchen she jumped down to her newspaper floor and warbled a quiet series of long, liquid ‘
w-o-o-o … w-o-o-o
’ whoops, with her head low down in a corner of the cage. When I opened the cage door she hopped up on to the doorstep perch and sat blinking up at me sleepily; I would blink back, and when I leaned down to her she turned her face up to me, closed her eyes, and nibbled gently at my beard while I nuzzled her. After a few moments of these mutual greetings she would hop rather deliberately up on to my shoulder, and ride me around the flat until she decided which perch she fancied.
    I didn’t always shut her up at night, and when I emerged from the bedroom after nights during which I had left her loose in the flat she would be sitting in the semi-darkness on her favourite night perch – the top of thehalf-open bathroom door. When I went in and turned on the light she jumped over to the shower rail, then to the top of the wall cabinet, where she sat bobbing and weaving, and pecking absent-mindedly at my hand when I rummaged blindly for the shaving soap. When I had washed my neck and started lathering it, she hopped to my shoulder without prompting and turned to face the mirror. She never made the classic animal’s response to a mirror – trying to find the other owl behind it – which was intriguing, because she had only ever caught the briefest glimpses of other owls when she had been a hatchling and during her couple of days at Water Farm. For an animal to recognize itself in a mirror argues a degree of self-consciousness, which is generally considered to be a sign of high intelligence. Sometimes she started clicking her beak through the side of my hair and beard, making a quiet machine-gunning sound.
    When I got into the shower after completing my shave she seldom showed any interest, for which I was grateful. On the first couple of mornings she had sat on the shower rail and watched me beadily, making me wonder uneasily whether she might try to explore me more directly when I turned the water off. For some reason, it was on occasions when I had no clothes on that my eyes were most drawn to her talons.
    * * *
    She normally wandered off when I turned the shower on; but every day without fail, soon after the water noisestopped – and usually while I was sitting on the side of the bath, towelling my feet – I would hear a questioning croon, and her face appeared again, wide-eyed with interest, around the bottom of the bathroom door. For some unknown reason she had decided that this was the perfect opportunity to get her head preened.
    She advanced