3. Owls

The morning that Button dragged the spotted owl in from the woods was the morning that Ranger Cooper stopped by Foxglove for lunch. Royella had introduced Cooper as one of Dad’s colleagues, and I had recognized him as the bearded ranger who had come looking for Royella earlier that summer, mumbling something about assessing timber. Dad was out completing a work project, and his absence turned lunch into yet another awkward affair.

We passed around a platter of sandwiches, and Royella broke the silence by revealing that back in the day she had gone to prom with Ranger Cooper. Collin snorted, Aunt Taylor shifted her chair away from Cooper, and Button chose that moment to proudly prance in.

“Button,” Aunt Taylor cooed before registering the dead bird in his teeth. “Button, oh my God! What did you do?” Collin sprang up and wrestled the carcass from Button’s proud jaw.

“Miss Taylor, looks like your little pooch is a mighty hunter,” Cooper said, unable to control his throaty laughter. “He’s become a real mountain dog. That bird is almost as big as he is!”

Collin locked Button outside and placed the feathery carcass on the floor beside the table. He and Cooper examined it.

“Don’t get blood on the finish,” Royella cautioned. I could hear Button whimpering outside.

“There isn’t much,” Collin said. “Just a wounded leg.”

“Guess little Butt isn’t a hunter after all,” Cooper began laughing all over again. I crouched down and looked at the bird: its frozen dark eyes, its lifeless wings, its brown feathers flecked with white, and its mangled left leg, chewed by Button up to the joint.

“What kind of owl is it?” I asked Cooper.

“I’m not exactly sure,” he said.

Royella brought a bird book from Dad’s shelf while Aunt Taylor fetched Button from outside, complaining that Collin shouldn’t have punished her dog if the bird was already dead when Button found it. I expected that Button would lunge for the corpse again once inside. Instead, he lay peacefully still, grunting softly as Taylor cradled him in her arms.

“Yessir, it’s a spotted owl,” Cooper concluded after looking through the pages of the bird book. “That’s what I suspected!” He plucked a tail feather and held it up in the daylight. “I just had no idea they nested in this particular area,” he said after studying the shimmering object. “Gotta notify the wildlife service.”

“Why?” Royella crouched quickly, pulling her dress over her knees and looking from the bird book to the carcass.

“You know, ’cause they’re protected, bein’ borderline endangered,” he said. “Protecting their habitat’s part of being a ranger.” His visible pride annoyed me.

Taylor stood up suddenly, placing Button on the bench beside her. “Come again?”

Cooper explained that one spotted owl meant there might be others. He said that the wildlife center would likely conduct a survey to see if this owl belonged to a larger community whose forest habitat they should protect from developers, loggers, farmers, and certainly hunters.

Taylor and Royella began to bicker with Cooper over whether or not one dead owl meant there would be others. No one but Collin and I seemed to notice or care that Button was lying motionless on the bench, his pink tongue stuck out between little white teeth, his breathing shallow.

*

Later, while Aunt Taylor and Royella drove Button to the vet, Ranger Cooper drove Collin and me down a series of nausea-inducing logging roads to meet up with Dad.  I spotted his pickup by a grove of cedars. He was out working, busily marking the smaller trees, which would be cut for fire safety, with red spray paint. When he noticed us, he put down the paint canister.  He rested against the trunk of a marked tree and wiped his forehead with a sap-covered bandana.

The three of us tramped down from the road to meet him, feeling the whip of the low brush that we pushed aside as we descended. We greeted him with lunch leftovers and Collin told him about the spotted owl, dragged in but apparently not killed by Button, and about Button’s sudden sickness.

“Seems like the owl was poisoned or something,” Cooper offered.

“Geez,” Dad said.

The rangers talked on as Collin and I wandered off into the grove. Sunlight filtered through the shade of the cedars, and my sandals quickly filled with painful brush and razory dry stickers. Collin groused about how, thanks to Dad, the grove would be significantly thinned, turned hot and dusty. We paused by a thick-trunked cedar that bent towards the adjacent stream, and whose bark was marked with Dad’s red paint.

“Isn’t this tree a bit large for the chain saw?” Collin wondered aloud.