At three o’clock in the morning a great horned owl hooted outside my bedroom window. Moonlight laughed in the forest. The rain had stopped and the weather had cleared up and I had to get up to pee but I didn’t want to leave my warm bed. I felt like that owl who had probably just had a good midnight snack and was crafting a pellet of fur and bones to cough up but I couldn’t cough up what was pestering my bladder so I finally rolled out of bed and wandered off to the toilet and listened the those soft owl hoots.
I wasn’t really interested that early in the morning still half asleep in what the owl had for its dinner but for some reason I started to make a list of possibilities. There is something in economics called the possibilities curve which shows the maximum combinations of things you can make at full efficiency utilizing all available resources. I wanted to visualize the owl’s possibility curve. My relentless mind kept doing various calculations after I was back in bed and would not let me go back to sleep.
5 mice or 2 mice and one rat or 2 fat rats or 3 voles or a rabbit or a skunk. Maybe the old coot has babies to feed. I shouldn’t have called it a coot since there’s nothing in common except they’re both birds. When the GHO has babies to feed, it steps up the pace and the possibilities curve shifts up.
12 mice or 7 mice and 2 rats or 5 fat rats or 9 voles or a fat rabbit or a fat skunk. Maybe the GHO has a partner, (an illegal immigrant?) to help, and then the numbers become astronomical owlishly speaking.
I got lost in the calculations, and forgot to go back to sleep, and the next thing the sun came up and it was time to get out of bed. The owl outside my window had long since gone quiet. His gut was full and he didn’t bother with calculations since his possibility curve was instinctual and opportunistic.
Before morning remembers its name, the stars thin out like an old crowd. The owl flies one last loop, checks his routes the way a poet checks a line break, and returns to the redwood. He coughs up the night, fur and bone wrapped neatly like a small, honest package, and tucks his head under a wing.
He settles in a redwood crotch, wide as an old armchair, in a redwood tree that’s been standing there longer than most ideas, and folds himself into a comma. His talons ease their grip like a quill bereft of ink. His pupils shrink against the pale wash of morning. The warmth of his last kill still hums in his throat. He swallows once, blinks twice and lets the day take him.
Tomorrow night will be the same. Around dusk, the light slips into the Pacific like a lost coin, and the temperature follows it. The owl shakes himself once, as if shrugging off a dream, and the day falls away in flakes. His ears open wide. The world turns into a radio station and he tunes in.
He leaves the tree and the air holds him. Flight is a soft mathematics, angle, lift, patience. He perches on a fence post at the edge of a meadow, then drops like a thought, precise and final. Later, along a creek where redwood roots drink the dark, he takes a rat. Later still, a skunk crosses his path and he attacks. Fog thickens; moonlight comes and goes like a rumor. He works the margins, field to forest, creek to bluff, where life is careless.
Between kills he rests on a snag, feathers puffed, listening to the ocean speak in paragraphs. Far out, a ship’s horn drags a note across the water. Closer, a frog dares the cold. He eats, pellets forming patiently inside him, and waits.
When daylight arrives, he is already a piece of wood holding the forest together while the rest of the world awakens.