hunter of fur-ball puke. Pretty esoteric stuff.”
“These balls can tell us what the owl has been eating the previous twelve hours. Everything is packed in there. All we have to do is pick it apart and take a close look under a microscope.”
“And what do they eat?”
“Small mammals about ninety percent of the time — squirrels and wood rats and deer mice mostly. They can take a jay or nuthatch or grosbeak or bat on the fly. They’ll take a moth, too, and if crickets get too annoying they’ll scarf up a few of them. But they don’t scavenge on the highway. Do you know how to wring a chicken’s neck?”
I had grown up on a farm. Of course I did. I grabbed an imaginary chicken neck with my right hand and whipped it round and round in a short, hard snap.
“A blow from a tire doesn’t twist a bird’s neck like a corkscrew. Lois and I saw right off that this owl wasn’t killed by an automobile or truck. Owing to the owl’s unusual anatomy, it takes a determined effort to wring one’s neck. An owl’s eyes are both on the front of its face like humans’, and like us it has binocular vision — which gives it good depth perception. If you have an eye on either side of a beak or snout, you can effectively see two ways at once; we humans have to turn our necks or shoulders to look from side to side. An owl can turn its neck one hundred and eighty degrees, which means it can face you and swivel its neck directly to its rear.”
“You’re saying a neck like that has some give to begin with.”
“It sure does. Somebody wanted to make sure that owl was dead. As far as we’re concerned it was murder, nothing less.”
“Did it have a fur ball in its stomach? What was in the fur ball?”
Jenny bit her lower lip. “We didn’t get to find out. When we got back to Portland, we found we had picked up the wrong carcass. The workers had collected two flattened owls, one great horned and one spotted, and we were laughing and having a good time, and we apparently grabbed one and pitched the other in the man’s garbage can. I don’t know how we did it. It truly was an accident, a screw-up. What more can I say?”
“What happened to the great horned owl?”
“Somebody had nearly eliminated its torso with a shotgun. It was worthless for examination. We called the maintenance workers right back, but it was too late; the spotted was gone. Lois was distraught about what happened and made the mistake of telling a reporter about it, and she used the word murder. Of course, the newspaper and television people just loved the story about the spotted owl that had been murdered near Sixkiller, and shortly afterwards, we even got a letter from some nut saying he was going to twist our necks just like that owl’s.”
“What happened then?”
“The police took the note for analysis and asked our cooperation to keep the threat out of the papers, and so far it has been.”
“Did the letter writer admit to killing the owl—”
“Murdering.”
“Murdering the owl, or was he just going to copy the killer’s MO using your necks?”
“He didn’t say either way, but if we’d been FBI agents, you can believe the woods would be swarming with G-men. The same if we’d been Washington State patrolmen. But owl counters from the Fish and Wildlife Service?” She said nothing for a few moments, looking out at the blackness.
As we came around a curve to the right, the lights of The Dalles Dam shone up ahead. In a few minutes I’d have to give her up and head back up the river.
Jenny said, “That owl was murdered. Spotted owls are just about the friendliest of all owls and make wonderful pets. Who would want to murder one?”
“Some asshole. When does your recount begin?”
“Sunday night. With Bosley Ellin’s people trailing after us and staring over our shoulders — that and screwballs sending us threatening letters. We’ll work Sunday night through Thursday and take Friday and Saturday off.”
“Are you ready, do you think?”
“Our count was accurate the first time, and it’ll be accurate now. If there are spotted owls out there, we’ll find ’em.”
“Atta girl”
Chapter Four — Antidote for Existential Angst
We drove in silence for a few minutes; finally, I said, “By the way, there are a couple of motels and gas stations