The White Owl's Grave
She lay – I say 'she,' for she looked like a 'she,' sort of feminine and pretty, though obviously neither of us knew the least thing about sexing birds – on the grass just beside the path. We must have looked a funny group, if anyone had gone past or the neighbours had looked out: me, in my dressing gown over my pyjamas, Mike in nothing but his pyjamas, crouched in our front garden over a still, white body. For one awful moment, when I had first looked down the path while putting the milk bottles out, I had thought it was a child, lying arms outstretched. But she was an owl.
A great, white owl. "Snowy owl," Mike said as he bent down. "Hardly native."
Why a snowy owl, belonging to Arctic tundra and vast wastes of ice, should be lying dead in our front garden, green and lush with July sunshine, neither of us could tell. There was a hub cap rolled just into the drive and several other bits of motor vehicle littered the road, suggesting there had been a bump of some kind last night – but that is common living on a busy main road. No-one who has ever seen the spray of feathers when a car hits a pheasant or such could have even suggested this owl had been a road-kill. She was simply – dead. Her eyes were shut, her beak closed and her outstretched wings stiff as I touched her, hoping against hope that maybe, maybe...
Mike stroked her too. Then our fingers touched and we just held hands, in a hard clasp of physical comfort over those cold, soft feathers. We both cried. Mike won't mind me saying that. She was just an owl, a perfectly strange owl we'd never known or seen before; but somehow she seemed a friend. Not our friend, but as if she'd been somebody's friend. Maybe just her mate's – I think owls, like most big birds, mate for life? Or maybe some person. She had a belonging look about her; not the leanness of a wild animal or the scruffy thinness of a stray.
"We should bury her," I said, after a long time. If she was a friend, she deserved burial.
Mike nodded. "There's nothing to return her by. She's not ringed or anything."
Maybe she had been, then, wild and free. But still we buried her. Mike dug the hole under the big apple tree in the back garden. I did send him in to put on something more suitable for digging than pyjamas, but man-like he just donned wellingtons and his garden mac and came straight back, insisting he was 'suitable.' Under the tree seemed a good spot for a bird. Perhaps the owl had come there at night, swooping on silent wings to be our visitor though we did not know it.
I fetched a towel to carry her, an old bright red one I'd had before we were married; because it was old, and also because the colour seemed to suit her. And we laid her in gently, and put the earth back and the turves back over the mound, and then quite suddenly Mike walked away.
I was cross, that he should abandon her like that – but I shouldn't have been, for after a minute he came back. His hands were full, with a cluster of the white pebbles that turn up in our flower beds, and with a sprig of the white climbing rose that isn't actually ours but spreads all over the garage roof from next door. "For marking the grave. Because – because she was white," Mike mumbled, and then stopped and looked awkward the way he always does whenever he feels matters are getting too sentimental.
The roses have faded now, for it is October, but I can see the little pile of white stones as I sit here, writing this, at our kitchen table. Why am I writing? Partly to make myself believe that it was true. Partly to make sure I can never try and make myself believe that it was not true. And partly because it seems, impossibly so but it does, that if I write it down, whoever she belonged to will know. Will know that wherever her spirit may have soared to, the body of their friend is safe, safe in the White Owl's Grave.