The Rescue

“It’s more than hot air, Twilight.”

“But you aren’t, Otulissa,” retorted the Great Grey.

“Now, young’uns, stop your bickering,” Mrs P said. “Soren here has had a frightfully bad dream. And I for one feel that it is not a good idea to push bad dreams away. If you feel like talking about your bad dream, Soren, please go right ahead.”

But Soren really didn’t feel like talking about it that much. And he had decided definitely not to tell Digger of his feelings about Octavia. His head was in too much of a muddle to be able to explain anything.

There was a tense silence. But then Digger spoke up. “Soren, why ‘flecks’? What made you scream out, ‘flecks’?” Soren felt Gylfie give a shudder. And even Otulissa remained silent. When Soren and Gylfie had been captives at St Aggie’s they had been forced to work in the pelletorium picking apart owl pellets. Owls have a unique system for digesting their food and ridding themselves of the waste materials. All of the fur and bone and feathers of their prey are separated into small packets called pellets in their second stomach, that amazingly sensitive organ of owls, the gizzard. When all the materials are packed up, owls yarp the pellets through their beaks. In the pelletorium at St Aggie’s, they had been required to pick out the various materials like bone and feather and some mysterious element that was referred to as flecks. They never knew what flecks were exactly but they were highly prized by the brutal leaders of St Aggie’s.

“I’m not sure why. I think those sparks that come off the comet’s tail somehow glinted like the flecks that we picked out of the pellets.”

“Hmm,” was all Digger said.

“Now look, it’s almost breaklight time. Why don’t you sit at my table, Soren? It’ll be comfy, and I’m going to ask Matron for a nice bit of roasted vole for you.”

“No can do, Mrs P,” Otulissa said in a chipper voice.

If Mrs P had had eyes she would have rolled them, but instead she swung her head in an exaggerated arc and coiled up a little tighter. “What is this ‘no-can-do’ talk? For a supposedly educated and refined owl” – she emphasised the word refined – “I consider it a sloppy and somewhat coarse manner of speaking, Otulissa.”

“There’s a tropical depression that’s swimming our way with the last bits of a late hurricane. The weather chaw is going out. We have to eat at the weather chaw table and …”

“Eat meat raw,” Soren said dejectedly.

Good Glaux, raw vole on top of a bad dream and eating it literally on top of Octavia! For such were the customs of the weather and colliering chaws.

The nest-maid snakes served as tables for all the owls. They slithered into the dining halls bearing tiny Ga’Hoole-nut cups of milkberry tea and whatever meat or bugs were being served up. The chaws always ate together on the evenings of important missions. And if you were in the weather or colliering chaw, it was required that you eat your meat raw with the fur on it. Of course Soren, like most owls until they had come to the Great Tree, had always eaten his meat raw. He still liked raw meat, but on a nippy evening like this, something warm in the gut was of great comfort. Well, he would at least try to avoid sitting next to Otulissa. Eating raw vole with that Spotted Owl yakking in his ear was enough to give any bird indigestion – or maybe even gas, and not of the random variety. He would aim to sit between Martin and Ruby, his two best friends in the chaw. Martin was a little Northern Saw-whet, not much bigger than Gylfie, and Ruby was a Short-eared Owl.

“Glaux almighty!” Soren muttered as he approached the table of Octavia. The place between Martin and Ruby was taken by one of the new owlets who had been rescued in the Great Downing. He was a little Lesser Sooty called Silver. The name fitted him for he was, like all the Sooty Owls, black, but his underparts were silvery white. Sooties were all part of the same family of Barn Owls as Soren, the Tyto species, but a different group within that species – Soren being a Tyto alba and Silver a Tyto multipunctata. Still, in the whole scheme of things, they were considered ‘cousins’. And they shared the heart-shaped face common to all Barn Owls. Silver, much smaller than Soren, now swivelled and tipped his head back.

“You shouldn’t take the name of Glaux in vain, Soren.” Silver spoke in a voice that was somewhere between a squeak and a shriek.

Soren blinked. “Why ever not?” Everyone said ‘Glaux’ all the time.

“Glaux was the first Tyto. It’s disrespectful to our species, to our maker.”

The first Tyto, Soren thought. What’s he talking about?

Glaux was the most ancient order of owls from which all other owls descended. Glaux was the first owl and no one knew if it was a Tyto, let alone male or female or whatever. It didn’t really matter. Apparently, Soren was not the only one confused.

“Glaux is Glaux no matter what you call him, her, whatever,” said Poot. Poot was the first mate of the weather chaw but now, in the absence of Ezylryb, served as captain.

Silver blinked. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” said Otulissa. “The first owl from whom we are all descended.”

“I thought just Barn Owls – owls like Soren and me.”

“No, all of us,” Otulissa repeated. “No matter what kind of feather pattern, no matter what colour eyes we have – yellow, amber, black like yours – all of us are descended from Great Glaux.” Otulissa could be surprising. For Otulissa to say the words ‘all of us’ was somewhat remarkable for an owl who could be impossibly snooty and stuck-up.

It was a bit peculiar that all of the owls who had been rescued in the Great Downing had been some kind of Barn Owl. They were either Greater or Lesser Sooties like Silver, or Grass Owls, or Masked Owls. But despite the different names and slightly different colouration, they all had the distinctive heart-shaped faces that marked them as belonging to the family of Tytos, or Barn Owls. Like Silver, they had all arrived with some very strange notions and behaviours. Even the most seriously wounded owls when they were rescued had babbled nearly unintelligible fragments, but they were entranced with music. As soon as they heard Madame Plonk and the harp guild, their strange babbling had stopped.

The young owlets were getting better every day as they spent more and more time with normal owls. Of course, the owls of Ga’Hoole were not quite normal. When Soren was very young, his parents would tell him and Kludd and Eglantine stories. They were once-upon-a-time stories. The kind that you might wish were true but somehow don’t quite believe could be. One of his and Eglantine’s favourites began, “Once upon a very long time ago, in the time of Glaux, there was an order of knightly owls, from a kingdom called Ga’Hoole, who would rise each night into the blackness and perform noble deeds. They spoke no words but true ones. Their purpose was to right all wrongs, to make strong the weak, mend the broken, vanquish the proud and make powerless those who abused the frail. With hearts sublime they would take flight …”

But it was true! And when he and Twilight and Gylfie and Digger had finally found the Great Ga’Hoole Tree on an island in the middle of the Sea of Hoolemere, Soren found that in order to fulfil this noble purpose, he needed to learn all sorts of things that many owls never learn. They learned how to read and do mathematics and, with their entry into a chaw, they learned the special skills of navigation, weather interpretation, the science of metals. This kind of learning was called the ‘deep knowledge’ and they were taught by the ‘rybs’. The word ‘ryb’ itself meant deep knowledge.

Tonight, the weather chaw would fly and, for Silver and another young Masked Owl named Nut Beam, it would be their first flight with the chaw. They had not been assigned yet, or ‘tapped’ as it was called, to the weather chaw. They were not even junior members yet. They were only going on a very minor training flight to see if possibly they might be suitable. Before his disappearance, Ezylryb seemed to be able to tell with one glance if an owl might work in the chaw. But now with him gone, Boron and Barran felt it was best for the young new owlets to be tried out for this particular chaw, which required highly refined skills.

“Are we really going to fly into a hurricane tonight?” Silver asked.

“Just a mild tropical storm,” Poot answered. “Nice little depression due south of here kicking up some slop in the bight and beyond.”

“When do we get to fly into a tornado?” Silver asked.

Poot blinked in disbelief. “You yoicks, young’un? You don’t want to fly into a tornado. You want your wings torn off? Only owl I ever seen who got through a tornado alive with his wings came out plumb naked.”

Now it was Soren’s turn to blink. “Plumb naked? What do you mean?”

“Not a feather left on him. Not even a tuft of down.”

Octavia gave a shiver, and their cups of milkberry tea shook. “Don’t scare the young’uns, Poot.”

“Look, Octavia, if they ask me I tell them.”

Ruby, a deep, ruddy-coloured Short-eared Owl, who was the best flier in the chaw, blinked. “How’d he fly with no feathers?”

“Not well, dearie. Not well, not well at all,” Poot replied.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_3a8ac094-bd30-5bdb-8a16-ecd6ecf5948a)

What a Blow! (#ulink_3a8ac094-bd30-5bdb-8a16-ecd6ecf5948a)

“Meatballs! Good and juicy.” Poot swivelled his head and flung off a glob of weed, dead minnows and assorted slop from the Sea of Hoolemere that had landed between his ear tufts.

“Storm residue. He has a very coarse way of speaking,” Otulissa murmured primly to Nut Beam and Silver. She was flying between the two young owlets, and Soren was in their wake making sure that they didn’t go into a bounce spiral caused by sudden updrafts, which could be dangerous.

“See? That’s what you get,” Poot was saying. “You don’t have to go swimming to feel the water below getting warmer do you? You can feel it now, can’t you?”

Soren could feel warm wet gusts coming off the waves that crashed below. It was odd, for although they were on the brink of winter, the Sea of Hoolemere in this region of the bight and beyond held the summer heat longer than any other. “That’s what causes a hurricane, young’uns, when the cooler air meets up with warm water. Now, I’ve sent Ruby out to the edges of this mess to reconnoitre wind speeds and such.”

Poot paused and looked back at his chaw members. “All right now – a little in-flight quiz.”

“Oh, goody,” Otulissa said. “I just love quizzes.” Soren gave her a withering look despite the remnants of a meatball that were splattered around the rims of his eyes.

Poot continued, “Now, Martin. Which way does the wind spiral in a hurricane?”

“Oh, I know! I know!” Otulissa started waving her wings excitedly.

“Shut your beak, Otulissa,” Poot snapped. “I asked Martin.”