Flight of Death - Richard Hoyt Page 0,15
put the flashlight right beside your ear.”
“Doesn’t the flashlight spook ’em?” Jenny had told him that I had an Indian partner. How much else had she told him? Oh, by the way, Adonis, I jumped in the sack with the guy when we got to The Dalles. And what was the occasion of her telling him about me? A casual, oh-by-the-way sharing, or an all-cards-on-the-table fight?
“The owls appear not to associate the light with danger. At least not at first. They usually give us a few minutes of shining a flashlight in their eyes before they take off.”
“Where do you go to find them? I mean, where is it they hang out?” Jenny hadn’t hesitated to jump in the sack with me, yet she hadn’t struck me as promiscuous.
“They’re called spectral owls in early texts, because they’re very timid and people just saw ghostlike flashes of them in the deepest, darkest forests. In fact, we believe they need a crown closure of up to eighty percent in order to survive.”
“Crown closure?” All that going on about how wonderful and perfect Northlake was. Guilt. That’s what it was, pure guilt. Jenny had once loved him dearly, but something had changed.
“That’s when the limbs of the treetops take up eighty percent of the space — we’re talking gloomy, Little-Red-Riding-Hood kind of woods. They’re also thirsty little fellows and take frequent baths, so they like a dependable stream nearby. Give them a steep and remote canyon, and they’ll take it. In Oregon they ordinarily nest from sixty-five to a hundred and fifty feet high on a Douglas fir that’s lost its top to wind or lightning — trees from two hundred to six hundred years old.”
“How much of this kind of territory do they need to survive?”
“We think somewhere between three hundred to six hundred acres for each pair of owls; both sides finally settled on five hundred and sixty acres, but the quarreling hasn’t stopped. Six hundred acres is one square mile, remember. The big timber outfits harvest their private stands every sixty to seventy-five years. The government stands hit the ax every seventy-five to eighty years. When the old trees are gone, they’re gone, that’s it, no more. Nationally, we only have ten percent of the forest we did in the eighteenth century. Ultimately, that systematic destruction of the forest is what the environmentalists are all worked up about.”
Six hundred acres for one pair of owls? I had to get my mind off Jenny MacIvar and on the owls. “I take it the remaining spotteds mostly live in parks and national forests.”
“That’s right. The domain of the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, which periodically auctions off tracts of the timber to lumbermen like Bosley Ellin.”
“The evil bearer of the chain saw.”
“Bastards,” said Northlake.
Angleton tightened her mouth. “Not only does the spotted owl have to dodge chain saws, it also has to keep an eye out for the great homed owl.”
“What does the great horned owl do?”
“It eats spotted owls.” She paused. “Among other prey.”
“So, tell me, Dr. Angleton, what does a spotted owl sound like?”
“Well, that depends on what kind of mood it’s in. The main spotted owl call has four hoots, or syllables. A short hoot and a pause, two more short hoots, a longer pause, then a longer hoot. The bird books usually transcribe this as Whoo … HoWhoo … Whooo. One of their other calls sounds like the yelping of a dog or coyote except that it comes in four notes always and doesn’t rise in pitch. If a spotted owl is spooked or a female thinks her young are in danger, she’ll make a whee-e-e sound that rises in the middle like a siren.”
I’d long since finished my chiliburger, and I knew everything there was about counting owls. I checked my wristwatch. I rose and said, “Well, it’s getting late. When you’re Boogie Dewlapp’s main man in Calamity, you’ve got responsibilities.”
They were ready to go too. We all rose and said our goodbyes. “Well, say hello to Jenny for me,” I said to Northlake. I wanted to say more but dared not.
As I sat on the cold plastic seat letting the bus’s engine warm, I thought about Jenny MacIvar and the marvelous Adonis Northlake. Jenny had only two bad things to say about him: he turned the heat up too high when he cooked eggs, and he spent too much time yo-yoing back and forth to the East on fund-raising trips.
If Jenny had been