Read Online Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat - Free Book Online

bacon rinds left over from breakfast, while I sneaked out the front door and rode away. It worked fine, but it was a little hard on Mother because the owls got so fond of the kitchen she usually couldn’t get them out of it again. Once I heard her telling a friend that, until a woman had tried to bake a cake, with two horned owls looking over her shoulders, she hadn’t really lived at all!

 
    chapter 10
    Thirty miles south of Saskatoon was a little village called Dundurn. It consisted of a garage, a couple of houses, and two red wooden grain elevators. Between Dundurn and the Saskatchewan River was a huge expanse of virgin prairie, and right in the middle of it was a slough so big it was almost a real lake, even though the water wasn’t very deep.
    This lake was about the best place for ducks and geese and other water birds in the whole of Saskatchewan. The reed beds along its shores were full of yellow-headed black-birds, bitterns, coots and grebes. Out on the open water you could sometimes see two or three hundred families of ducks—mallards, pintails, shovelers and lots of other kinds. Sometimes there were flocks of whistling swans; and in the autumn so many geese stopped to rest that they almost hid the water.
    Every summer we used to camp for a couple of weeks near Dundurn in a four-wheeled caravan my father hadbuilt, which we used to tow behind our Model A Ford. The caravan was fixed up like a little ship. It had ship’s bunks, a ship’s galley (which is what sailors call a kitchen), ship’s lamps, and a ship’s clock. On deck (the roof), there was even a little mast with a flag flying from it. People in Saskatoon used to call it Mowat’s Prairie Schooner. On a stormy night when the wind made the caravan rock back and forth you could lie snug in your bunk and find it hard to believe you weren’t on a real schooner, after all.
    Of course, whenever we took the caravan on a trip, Mutt and the owls had to come along. Our Ford was a convertible with a rumble-seat. (A rumble-seat, something cars don’t have any more, was a sort of folding seat placed where the trunk is on a modern car.) This was where Mutt, the owls, my friends and I used to ride. Mutt always rode with his head and front feet stuck away out over the side of the car, while Bruce or I held onto his tail so he wouldn’t fall out on his nose. The owls used to perch on the back of the rumble-seat, and they had to hang on for dear life.
    Because his eyes used to get sore from the dust of the prairie roads, Mutt had to wear goggles—the same kind that motorcycle riders wear. The sight of a goggled dog, two horned owls, and our prairie schooner used to make people in other cars take a long look at us as they went by. Sometimes they didn’t believe their eyes, and then they would turn their cars around and follow us to make sure they hadn’t been seeing things.
    During the second summer that the owls lived with us, we went to Dundurn for a camping trip. There was lots of water in the lake that year and my father brought along his canoe, tied to the deck of the caravan. He paddled Bruce and me all around the lake looking at birds. We must have found a hundred ducks’-nests; and we even found the huge nest of a sandhill crane.
    The first few times we went out in the canoe, Wol came down to the shore to see us off, but he wouldn’t come canoeing with us. I think he still remembered the trouble he’d had with the Saskatchewan River, at the cave, and he didn’t trust water any more. All the same, he hated to be left out of things. But when Weeps made up his mind to join us in the canoe one day, Wol got up his nerve and decided he’d come too.
    It wasn’t a very big canoe, and by the time two boys, one man, two owls and a dog had climbed in it was pretty crowded and pretty low in the water. We had to sit as still as mummies.
    For a while Dad paddled in the open lake, and then we began to explore the reed beds. Soon we came to a muskrat’s house with