Owling 2

Owling: It’s cold, clear. Quiet now the birds have settled. She’s not here. I watched from the brambles on the side of the hill as she left to go hunting a minute ago. Bright streak of owl seared into my senses and the only light in this darkest of places. The floor is brittle with tiny bones and the earthen walls are surely laden with the last lacerated dreams of vole, wood mouse, shrew. It’s not a barn at all, it’s an ossuary, a mossy temple raised from the fields to the life of this place, these woods, these hills. Its beating heart is somewhere else but her presence is everywhere: in the opaque dark; in the acrid splashes of careless droppings; in the snap of the fragile dead beneath my feet. I have thought of hers as a brief life, but here in the bone black cradle of her lair I think perhaps I am all wrong, that she is far older than me, older than the barn, older than the massive beech or the twisted hawthorn in the ancient hedge. That this is just a page in the story of this white winged sorcerer. This beautiful devourer. This luminous, liminal spark of earth and air, roots and stars.

But I am a trespasser, stealing even this dank air that I breathe. I claim the prize of the pellet and leave, to crouch once again by the brambles on the side of the hill, where perhaps if I’m lucky I will see her return.

For more information about Owl: a script of sorts and the Society of Wildlife Artists Natural Eye Bursaries 2021 see

swla.co.uk/news/the-natural-eye-bursary-award-exhibition-2021