The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar by Martin Windrow Page A

across the floor in two or three great leaps, with half-open wings fanning slowly, until the last jump carried her up to my knee. Then she would shuffle closer along my thigh until she was beneath my chin, arrange herself neatly, give another croon or two, and lift her face towards mine with beak half open.
    When I gave in and bent lower to nuzzle her head, she flicked the nictating membranes – the inner ‘second eyelids’ – across her eyes while she twisted and rubbed her head against the gentle pressure. Steadily, she sank further down on her undercarriage and fluffed out her body feathers, retracting her head into her ‘shawl’ until she looked rather like a single fluffy ball with a set of features on its top surface. Her feathers smelt clean, warm, woolly, and sort of …
biscuity
. If I stopped nuzzling she squeaked insistently, and she seemed to enjoy it most when I rubbed the close triangle of short feathers immediately above her beak and between her eyes. After a few moments of this she would start twisting her head again, presumably bringing new itchy areas into contact – often, the feathered flaps of the big ear-trenches hidden behind the edges of her facial disc.
    When I finally got fed up with the crick in my spineand convinced her that the session was over, Mumble would shake herself vigorously, and jump up to my shoulder to look around brightly for new amusements. This was my permission to move.
    * * *
    Mumble’s usual evening-patrol routine involved short flights from chair backs to door tops, to her tray-perch, then down to the living-room floor to walk along the foot of the window-wall, then up to a bookshelf, then out into the darkened hallway to fly to the telephone table, then back to my chair. She occasionally took a short stroll on a glass-topped bookshelf, clicking along with a gingerly gait as if walking on ice. Infrequently, a hollow echo of this same ‘gunfighter with spurs’ sound betrayed the fact that she had flown down into the empty bath and was stomping up and down there – perhaps in search of anything intriguing that might have crawled up through the plughole.
    When I wasn’t watching her, there might be a sudden crash as she leapt from some perch straight down on to the plastic sheet covering the sofa. She would give it three or four quick, killing kicks, then move around on the unstable surface of the cushions with wings nearly spread and ‘mantled’ downwards and forwards, in the pose that raptors adopt to cover and defend a kill. Then, satisfied with her victory, she would fly up to one of her perches and fluff her feathers, flick her wings back neatly like coat-tails, and give a final little shuffle before settling down and tucking one foot ‘in her pocket’.
    I never tired of watching her floor-walking, largely because she found it so interesting herself. Before she jumped down there from a perch she considered the drop zone carefully, head on one side, as if making calculations before she committed herself to a plan. Once down, she would stroll across to sit at the foot of the window-wall in her ‘cottage loaf’ pose – bum planted squarely on the carpet, legs retracted so that only the tips of her talons showed under her skirts – and gaze around alertly with wide eyes. Often she seemed to spot some invisible real or imaginary prey a few inches in front of her toes – which was odd, because I knew that her short-range vision was bad. Nevertheless, she would stare fixedly at one spot on the carpet before jumping up to full leg stretch, pouncing with murderous violence and ‘killing’ it. She might repeat this game for a full minute at a time.
    If something outside the window-wall caught her attention she sprang into movement, extending her legs like a chicken standing up and making a bobbing run along beside the dark glass, balancing herself with wings billowing half open like a pantomime villain’s cloak. This ‘sinister stalking’ effect – reminiscent