Birds and Man

by W. H. Hudson

No, that cannot be; for the wood owl's music is doubtless older than any instrument made by hands to be blown by human lips. Listening by night to their concert, the many notes that come from far and near, human-like, yet airy, delicate, mysterious, one could imagine that the sounds had a meaning and a message to us; that, like the fairy-folk in Mr Yeats's Celtic lyric, the singers were singing—

We who are old, old and gay,
O, so old;
Thousands of years, thousands of years,
If all were told!

The fairies certainly have a more understandable way of putting it than the geologists and the anthropologists when we ask them to tell us how long it is since Palæolithic man listened to the hooting of the wood owl. Has this sound the same meaning for us that it had for him—the human being that did not walk erect, and smile, and look on heaven, but went with a stoop, looking on the earth? No, and Yes. Standing alone under the great trees in the dark still nights, the sound seems to increase the feeling of loneliness, to make the gloom deeper, the silence more profound. Turning our visions inward on such occasions, we are startled with a glimpse of the night-side of nature in the soul: we have with us strange unexpected guests, fantastic beings that are in no way related to our lives; dead and buried since childhood, they have miraculously been restored to life. When we are back in the candlelight and firelight, and when the morrow dawns, these children of night and the unsubstantial appearance of things

fade away
Into the light of common day.

The villagers of Saintbury are, however, still in a somewhat primitive mental condition; the light of common day does not deliver them from the presence of phantoms, as the following instance will show.

Near Willersey there is a group of very large old elm-trees which is a favourite meeting-place of the owls, and one very dark starless night, about ten o'clock, I had been listening to them, and after they ceased hooting I remained for half an hour standing motionless in the same place. At length, in the direction of Saintbury, I heard the dull sound of heavy stumbling footsteps coming towards me over the rough, ridgy field. Nearer and nearer the man came, until, arriving at the hedge close to which I stood, he scrambled through, muttering maledictions on the thorns that scratched and tore him; then, catching sight of me at a distance of two or three yards, he started back and stood still very much astonished at seeing a motionless human figure at that spot. I greeted him, and, to explain my presence, remarked that I had been listening to the owls.

"Owls!—listening to the owls!" he exclaimed, staring at me. After a while he added, "We have been having too much of the owls over at Saintbury." Had I heard, he asked, about the young woman who had dropped down dead a week or two ago, after hearing an owl hooting near her cottage in the daytime? Well, the owl had been hooting again in the same tree, and no one knew who it was for and what to expect next. The village was in an excited state about it, and all the children had gathered near the tree and thrown stones into it, but the owl had stubbornly refused to come out.

That about the young woman he had spoken of is a queer little story to read in this enlightened land. She was apparently in very good health, a wife, and the mother of a small child; but a few weeks before her sudden death a strange thing occurred to trouble her mind. One afternoon, when sitting alone in her cottage taking tea, she saw a cricket come in at the open door, and run straight into the middle of the room. There it remained motionless, and without stirring from her seat she took a few moist tea-leaves and threw them down near the welcome guest. The cricket moved up to the leaves, and when it touched them and appeared just about to begin sucking their moisture, to her dismay it turned aside, ran away out at the door, and disappeared. She informed all her neighbours of this startling occurrence, and sadly spoke of an aunt who was living at another village and was known to be in bad health. "It must be for her," she said; "we'll soon be hearing bad news of her, I'm thinking." But no bad news came, and when she was beginning to believe that the strange cricket that had refused to remain in the house had proved a false prophet, the warning of the owl came to startle her afresh. At noonday she heard it hooting in the great horse-chestnut overgrown with ivy that stands at the roadside, close to her cottage. The incident was discussed by the villagers with their usual solemnity and head-shakings, and now the young woman gave up all hopes of her sick aunt's recovery; for that one of her people was going to die was certain, and it could be no other than that ailing one. And, after all, the message and warning was for her and not the aunt. Not many days after the owl had hooted in broad daylight, she dropped down dead in her cottage while engaged in some domestic work.

On the following morning I went with the friend I was visiting at Willersey to Saintbury, and the story heard overnight was confirmed. The owl had been hooting in the daytime in the same old horse-chestnut tree from which it had a short time ago foretold the young woman's death. One of the villagers, who was engaged in repairing the thatch of a cottage close to the tree, informed us that the owl's hooting had not troubled him in the least. Owls, he truly said, often hoot in the daytime during the autumn months, and he did not believe that it meant death for some one.

This sceptical fellow, it is hardly necessary to say, was a young man who had spent a good deal of his time away from the village.