Around 2am, it’s a regular habit of mine to wake and go downstairs to read before sleeping until morning. Currently it’s The Crossing, the middle volume in Cormac McCarthy’s Border trilogy. It sounds inconvenient, but the hour has the beauty of being purged of all distraction, so that one is briefly alert and mindful of important things.
On this occasion, I was captured by the extraordinary starlit night and the sounds of tawny owl, so I sat outside on the bench. The bird, a male, was calling from the woods that are visible as a deeper darkness on the northern horizon from our front door.
Often the owls perform a double act. The female, vocalising among trees opposite, inserts her higher, hard kee-wick call among her mate’s longer notes. Shakespeare established a standard transliteration of the duet with his lines in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “Then nightly sings the staring owl, / Tu-whit; / Tu-who.”
Tonight, it was just his song – Shakespeare’s tu-whoos – which the Bard was correct to split into two. The first was a single drawn-out oboe note of remarkably purity. It somehow seemed bowed in shape, like the curvature to the horizon or the darkness itself receding into the dome of night. The long pause leads one to imagine that the owl intentionally incorporates the enfolded silence into its full effects.
It is partly because the sound tails away into darkness that it feels edged with questions and more wow than whoo, perhaps as if the bird were amazed also that the Milky Way is just one of 100 billion galaxies tenanted in all that space. Then comes the song’s climax, the second prolonged note trailing back to Earth and closing with that wavy-edged tremulous owl’s vibrato.
Thirty minutes later I went inside. I read that magnificent passage where the character Billy Parham, against all reason, having spent weeks trying to kill the wolf that’s killing his father’s cattle, decides at the moment of capture, staring for the first time into the mystery of those yellow eyes, to ride to Mexico to set it free. Because what would our universe be without the songs of wolves and owls?
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