The Owl

We were getting closer to the village. We could see it in the distance, the sun setting on the rooftops and gleaming in the melting snow. It was a warm day for winter, the kind of day that makes you sweat in your jacket and shiver when you take it off.

We had been out hunting rabbits. Sitting in the white fields and waiting for them to hop up and leave tracks across the snow. That's how we had spent the morning. Guns across laps, watching nature happen around us. Not another soul to be seen, save for ourselves and the occasional animal.

Earlier in the season we had a discussion about souls. It was in the morning, over coffee, before we had gone out to chase birds from the bush for an evening mouthful. You told me that everything we shot had a soul. You laughed after you told me we didn't really see it leave because we shot everything from a distance and were decent enough that we got them with one bullet. You then got real serious after that.

You said that you could see a soul leave a body if you watched real closely. You said you had seen a soul leave a mouse when you were a little boy. You said you saw your grandmother's soul leave its old shell the day she died. “That's how I know they all got souls. That's why I always take a moment and be silent when I pick them up.”

I had always noticed you do this, but never felt I needed to say anything to you or anyone else about it. I figured it had something to do with respecting the dead, but I never really thought about the souls of the animals we picked up from the ground. If that was what you thought, that was your way. Everyone has their own way, I don't think we always have to know everything about everyone else. Too many people ask too many questions.

We didn't chat much after our conversation. This was normal. After we finished coffee and put something in our stomachs, silence was almost expected. Once the hunt begins, too many words will scare off the game. The only sound accompaniment to a hunt is the sound of trudging boots, snow falling from the trees as it slowly melts in the afternoon sun, and the occasional late goose, honking as it hurries to find its peers.

We were nearing the bend in the road. Three trees had grown there for as long as most people in the town could remember. The largest one was far bigger than the other two and shaded the road that it bordered. When we were younger, we had sat in the arbor of the trinity, their leaves rustling a background sound to you noisily eating an apple. You had speculated that the smaller trees were actually just a part of the larger tree I was leaning on. “I think the roots reach down into the ground and then come back up again, like it couldn't get deep enough so it had to spread out.”

I didn't know much about trees, so I didn't have much of a response. You were always wondering about things, always telling me about what you were thinking about. Sometimes I felt jealous that all those ideas were always swirling around in your head. My thoughts were always bleak like the landscape around us. Hardened like the soil in our nearly constant winter.

We had shot three rabbits. They were slung over your shoulder and I stared at them as you gently swayed back and forth with the rhythm of your gait. I thought about their souls and what you had said. You had told me that souls left. I wondered—where did they go?

The preacher in town had always told us that animals didn't have souls. He was also a man we had seen beat his dog numerous times. He told us it wasn't the dogs that we needed to worry about but instead our damned selves. Then he told us to mind our own business before he whooped the two of us as well.

If we didn't kill them, if they died in the wild, either naturally or as something to fill a predator's belly, they'd decay. Their bodies would sink into the soil to be eaten by the plants. Would their souls become green and grow to again see the sun, this time finding nourishment in the light? Or would they float away, to some unknown like the preacher had told us about? Were there rabbits that were damned? The thought was comical, but it also created an uncertain foreboding. I wanted to ask you the last question to ease my mind, but I didn't want you to think I took what you had said as some kind of joke.

I remember the first time you took me hunting. We didn't do that much hunting that day, as you said I needed to spend the time to learn to shoot before I could learn to hunt. It was important, you explained somberly, that a hunter only shot once, one shot to down the animal, alleviating any suffering that might occur otherwise. I nodded my head in a response you weren't able to see, as you were several strides ahead of me, your gun slung over your shoulder and your eyes on the path ahead.

We spent most of the day shooting at chunks of bark you had gathered from the three trees on the way out of town. You propped them up in front of a hillside so that my stray bullets would find themselves buried in the earth and not traversing the landscape like drunken fools looking for a fight.

I wasn't a very good shot and each time I pulled the trigger and the sound rang out it startled me. After I fired and then settled myself, you would give me pointers to better my aim. You said I needed to hit ten targets in a row before we could fire on the moving kind. By the end of the morning, bits of bark littered the hillside. Splotches of snow flecked with wood chips stood as a makeshift monument to what I assumed to be my newly earned manhood. We then made way to one of your favorite hunting spots.

My training had taken longer than expected, and we arrived a good while after you had intended. You told me this was no problem, because the whole point of the day had already been accomplished. The purpose was to prepare me to hunt, and that was a success, anything else, you told me, was just an added blessing. You reminded me that time was only valuable in how you spend it.

We sat in the tall brush. You had a lean that you often occupied when you came out this way to hunt, and we hunkered down and bundled our coats close to keep warm. I tried my best to remain as still as you but after a while my muscles started to ache and I found myself swaying or shaking my legs. I feel as though you didn't move one time. The sole movement I could detect were your eyes, gently scanning the hillside for life, occasionally drifting to the sky in what I can only assume was an act of enjoying your contentedness.

I did not have your patience then. It would be many hunts before I would be able to sit even close to as still as you and allow time to pass in peaceful solitude. Looking back, I think that was why I so eagerly pulled the trigger. I was eager to make something happen. I was eager to make you proud.

I saw the movement before you, and drew my gun and fired without thinking. This was my moment and I did not want to let it get away. I was already imagining your praise as the gunshot sounded in the cold. I hit my target. It flipped vengefully into the air, kicking up snow before landing on the earth and ceasing all movement. It was dead. You were silent.

I felt proud until I looked at your face. Everything in your expression told me something was wrong. The feeling I had felt quickly turned to knots in my stomach. I felt as though I was going to be sick. You didn't look at me, but instead walked toward the body of what I had shot.

You were kneeling next to the animal when I walked up behind you and peered over your shoulder. I knew then that I had not shot what I had thought. Laying in the snow, a single hole in its feathered chest, was a large barn owl. It was sprawled there, its wings at half span, and it was most certainly dead. Everything was silent all around us. I became aware that you were crying.

I was afraid of you when you finally stood up after you had wept for some time on your knees. You towered over me and wrath and condemnation flashed in your eyes. You balled your fists and I thought you were going to hit me. Again and again and again I thought you were going to hit me. You had never hit me before, never hurt me once, but in that moment I felt fear.

You rested the bottoms of your fists on where my shoulders met my chest and fell into me, crying uncontrollably. I held you up and pulled you closer to me. I hugged you while you cried and cried.

The bird looked so big when you held it. We were both so young then. Perhaps imagination has enlarged it, but I remember it as being the biggest barn owl I have ever seen. You carried it like a baby cradled in your arms as we walked. I carried both of our guns, the two slung over my shoulder.

We placed the corpse in the trio of trees on the way into town. There was an opening where the dirt had fallen away from a large root that we buried the body in. When we were younger we used to hide things we prized as treasures in that nook so that no one else in world would ever find them.

That seemed such a long time before the day that you walked ahead of me with the three rabbits slung over your shoulder, but in reality it was only a handful of years. We had struggled with silence for a time after that day. I think you had a hard time forgiving me for killing that owl. I didn't mean to do it, and oh, how I thought pulling that trigger would have lead to an opposite effect.

After that day, whenever you praised me for a good kill the sentiment stung me in the most hidden part of my heart. It was pride that had made me shoot without hesitation. It was my pride, my desire for you to be proud, that lead to the death of that owl, that lead to you crying in the snow on your knees. When you said you were proud of me after that day, it made me feel guilty.

We sat down in the shadow of the three trees. You had propped the stick you had tied the rabbits to between two heavy branches on the largest tree. We were both relaxing after the long walk from the hunting ground to our usual haunt. I reclined, leaning against the second smallest tree. You threw me an apple you had dug from your pack. We both bit into the fruit and stared into the distance. It was dusk and the sun was just beginning to set. The colors on the horizon were a beautiful blend of orange and pink and purple.

I only faintly heard the gunshot in the distance. Sometimes I wonder if I only imagined hearing the sound after I realized what had happened. I didn't notice your face, your eyes, until I looked at you. I was laughing and wiping off apple juice that was rolling down my chin. I thought you were going to laugh. We stared into each other's eyes.

It was the look of somebody going somewhere. You didn't look scared. There was a certainty on your face, like everything was alright. You also looked so incredibly sad. I don't know why, but I have always felt that that incredible sadness was for me. You knew what was coming. For both of us, you knew what was ahead.

I have never felt so pitied as when you looked me in the eyes. “It's going to be alright,” you said. You wanted me to stay with you. I leaned you against the largest of the three trees. You sat and bled where we had buried the owl. I could not contain my panic. I thought if only I got to town, if only I could find someone else, they could save you. You wanted me to stay with you.

I ran into the night. The sun had now nearly set and darkness quickly swallowed me. I could see the blurred lights in front of me, so very far away. I ran until my legs ached. I ran until my tired feet caught a rock and sent me violently to the ground. I lay there in the cold, reeling. From my stomach I rolled onto my back and looked at the stars appearing in the night sky, blurred spots far above me.

When I got to my knees I could see it in the distance. An owl lifting off from the trinity of trees. The bird headed in the direction of the disappeared sun as I sat and wept. The wetness of the ground soaked my pants but I couldn't feel the harsh cold on my knees. I couldn't feel my tears turning from hot to cold on my face. I couldn't feel anything.

It was then I knew you now, too, couldn't feel anything.

I had left you alone.

It was then I truly felt alone.