I wrote in
my January 17th blog post about MWC’s 24-hour Iron Pen contest and how I’d won a
first place, and a nice medal, for my non-fiction entry in 2010. I said, “It
was a nice little tale about winter walking in Bishop Hill.”
Well, Alma
Gaul’s recent Quad-City Times articles about owls reminded me how a great
horned owl was very important to that story. According to the non-fiction judge
my entry’s life-and-death theme between the owl and a rabbit set it apart from
all the other entries.
The
following is an excerpt from “Danger in the Snow”:
“But what brought me to a standstill was the cold winter morning I
discovered the signature of death in the snow. As I walked near my front field,
I casually followed a set of rabbit tracks that meandered through it. I’d already walked well past by the time it
dawned on me that something was awry. The oddness tugged at me, made me stop,
go back, and look again. Rabbit tracks shouldn’t end suddenly. A closer
inspection revealed the scraping claw marks of talons and the indentations of
wing tips as something large came down and grabbed that rabbit right off its
feet.
I imagined it was an owl, probably a Great Horned Owl. When you spot
them up in a tree your first thought is, “Why is that cat sitting up there?”
They are big and they use the largest old trees for their nests. That year they
had chosen a tree close to my field. I had the chance to watch well into the
spring as the parents raised two owlets.
Thinking about those babies growing from fuzz to feathers made me
reconsider what I saw in the snow, the dichotomy of the drama: death for a
rabbit, life for an owl. I’m standing there in the cold, the one who’d never
broken a bone, staring at what remained. The last sign of the rabbit that
wasn’t so lucky.”
Reprinted
from Winter Worlds: Three Stories
Copyright © 2017 by Mary R. Davidsaver
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