Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat Read Free Book Online Page A

himself.
    It was two weeks before we could use the dining room again, and when Mother sent the rug and drapes to the cleaners, the man who owned the shop phoned her right back and wanted to know if she was trying to ruin him.
    Wol didn’t smell so sweet either, but he couldn’t understand why he was so unpopular all of a sudden. His feelings must have been hurt by the way everybody kept trying to avoid him. After two or three days, when even I wouldn’t go near him, or let him come near me, he became very unhappy. Then an idea must have come into his funny head. He must have decided we were mad at him because he hadn’t shared his skunk with us! So one day he went down to the riverbank and caught a second skunk, and brought it home for us.
    By this time he was so soaked in skunk oil that you could smell him a block away. Some of our neighbors complained about it, and so finally my father had to give Wol a bath in about a gallon of tomato juice. Tomato juice is the only thing that will wash away the smell of skunk.
    Poor Wol! By the time Dad was through with him he looked like a rag mop that had been dipped in ketchup. But he got the idea, and he never again brought his skunks home to us.

 
    chapter 8
    The banks of the Saskatchewan River were very steep where the river ran through the prairie to the south of Saskatoon; and about two miles downstream from the city was a perfect place for digging caves. Bruce and Murray and I had our summer headquarters down there, in an old cave some hobos had dug a long time ago. They had fixed it up with logs and pieces of wood so it wouldn’t collapse. You have to be careful of caves, because if they don’t have good strong logs to hold up the roof, the whole thing can fall down and kill you. This was a good cave we had, though; my Dad had even come there and looked it over to make sure it was safe for us.
    It had a door made of a piece of tin-roofing, and there was a smokestack going up through the ceiling. Inside was a sort of bench where you could lie down, and we had two old butter-crates for chairs. We put dry hay down on the floor for a carpet, and under the hay there was a secret hole where we could hide anything that was specially valuable.
    The river ran only a hop-skip-and-a-jump from the door of the cave. There was a big sand bar close by which made a backwater where the current was slow enough for swimming. Standing right beside the swimming hole was the biggest cottonwood tree in the whole of Saskatchewan. One of its branches stuck straight out over the water, and there were old marks on it where a rope had cut into the bark. An Indian who was being chased by the Mounties, a long, long time ago, was supposed to have hanged himself on that branch so the Mounties wouldn’t catch him alive.
    We used to go to our cave a couple of times a week during the summer holidays, and usually we took the owls along. Wol had learned how to ride on the handle bars of my bicycle; but Weeps couldn’t keep his balance there, so we built a kind of box for him and tied it to the carrier behind the seat. Mutt and Rex used to come too, chasing cows whenever they got a chance, or racing away across the prairie after jack rabbits.
    We would bike out to the end of Third Avenue and then along an old Indian trail that ran along the top of the riverbank. When we got close to the cave we would hide our bikes in the willows and then climb down the bank and follow a secret path. There were some pretty tough kids in Saskatoon, and we didn’t want them to find our cave if we could help it.

    Wol loved those trips. All the way out he would bounce up and down on the handle bars, hooting to himself with excitement, or hooting out insults at any passing dog. When we came to the place where we hid the bikes, he would fly up into the poplars and follow us through the tops of the trees. He usually stayed pretty close, though; because, if hedidn’t, some crows would be sure to spot him and then they would call