s
punctiliousness cost him his dinner once. I was curious to know what he
would do with a mouse, so, having caught one alive, I slipped it quietly
into his cage. He was more surprised than ever before, raised himself
erect, bowed to the earth once, twice and three times, stared, bowed
again and so on until, to his evident astonishment and chagrin, the
mouse found an opening and was gone. The lesson was not lost. A few days
later I got another mouse, to which he began to do obeisance as before,
but very soon and suddenly, though as softly as falling snow, he plumped
upon it with both feet and, spreading his wings on the ground, looked
all round him with infinite satisfaction. The mouse squeaked, but he
stopped that by cracking its skull quietly with his beak. Then he
gathered himself up and flew to the perch with his prize.

One thing I noted about Tommy most emphatically. He never showed a sign
of affection, or what is called attachment. He maintained a strictly
bowing acquaintance with me. He was not afraid, but he would suffer no
familiarity. He would come and eat, with due ceremony, out of my hand,
but if I offered to touch him he was surprised and affronted and went
off at once. When I moved to another house I found that I could not
continue to keep him, so I sent him to the zoological garden, where I
visited him sometimes, but he never vouchsafed a token of recognition.
His heart was locked except to his own kin.

But since that time, when I have seen an owl, even a barn owl, or a
great horned owl, swiftly cross the sky in the darkness of night, I have
felt that I could accompany it, in imagination, on its secret quest. It
will arrive silently, like the angel of death, in a tree overlooking a
field in which a rat, whose hour has come, is furtively feeding, all
alert and tremulous, but unaware of any impending danger. The rat will
go on feeding, unconscious of the mocking curtsey and the baleful eyes
that follow with mute attention its every motion, until the hand of the
clock has moved to the point assigned by fate, and then it will feel
eight sharp talons plunged into its flesh. I have seen the fierce dash
of the sparrow hawk into a crowd of unsuspecting sparrows, I know the
triumph of the falcon as it rises for the final, fatal swoop on the
flying duck, and I have watched the kestrel, high in air, scanning the
field for some rash mouse or lizard that has wandered too far from
shelter. The owl is also a bird of p