The Owl by E.V. Lucas — Read

To return to the kingfisher and the epoch in one's life made by the rare appearance of that glancing jewel, although this house is in owlish country, and we hear owls from dusk to dawn, yet the sight of one is hardly less rare and memorable. The effect is, of course, totally different. A kingfisher entrances, thrills; one sees it and glows. But the owl cuts deeper; one feels that one is in the presence of a thing not necessarily of evil but of mystery and darkness. That is to say, an owl at night. In broad day there can be nothing sinister about him, as I happen to know as well as any one.

On this matter I have a true story to tell, which, however, I shall quarrel with no one for disbelieving. One Sunday morning in the early summer a few years ago I was walking in a little pine-wood on a Kentish common. Suddenly, at half-past eleven, I was conscious that I was not alone, and lifting my eyes I saw on a bush close by a young owl. He was looking directly at me with such a stare in his deep orange orbs as only an owl can compass -- steady, incurious, implacable. I stopped and stared at him, and thought first of the strangeness of the encounter and then of a humorous poem by an American publisher (Why don't English publishers write humorous poems? ) which I had learnt at school, beginning "Who stuffed that white owl? " This owl, it is true, was not white, but a beautiful arrangement in soft browns; yet he remained as motionless as that other, save that every now and then a shutter, timed to about three seconds exposure, covered his 'wildered lenses and retired again into the machinery of his head.