The Tale of Oat Cake Crag - By Susan Wittig Albert Page 0,70

move, maneuvering clumsily amongst the crowded moorings and out to the choppy open water of the lake, where the wind was blowing hard—too hard, the owl thought, to make a takeoff possible. But this did not deter the pilot. After a moment, he turned the aeroplane into the wind and speeded up his engine. The propeller turned faster and faster until it was nothing but a blur, and the Water Bird began to bounce and skip across the white-capped waves, its wings tipping first to one side and then the other. The Professor thought it looked for all the world like an ugly, ungainly duckling who wanted to fly but wasn’t exactly sure how to get off the water and into the air.

And then, as the owl watched, Water Bird took to the sky, rising just a few feet at first, then higher and higher, until it was twenty, then fifty, then a hundred feet in the air. From the crowd on the shore came a great shout, whether of triumph or disappointment the owl couldn’t say. He knew enough about the human temperament to suspect that half of the spectators longed to see the aeroplane fly successfully whilst half longed to see it crash.

But if the owl wanted to find out more about Water Bird’s strengths and vulnerabilities in flight, he would have to get closer. He pocketed his pad and pencil, flew out of his tree, and stroking with his powerful wings, easily caught up to the aeroplane, which seemed to be having a bit of a hard go, struggling to gain speed and altitude against the powerful headwind. The owl himself, a much more accomplished flier, did not like flying into such a blustery breeze, but he was on a serious spy mission and now was not the time to worry about a few gusts.

So for a few minutes, the Professor (not wanting to call attention to himself) cruised just behind and below the lower wingtip, out of sight of the pilot and the passenger. He noted that the engine was very, very loud (imagine a motor boat’s outboard motor running at top speed not ten feet from your head) and that its violent operation seemed to make the struts hum and vibrate. He saw that the flimsy wings flexed in the air currents, and that the rudder swung from side to side as the pilot steered the machine. He also saw there were clumsy-looking hinged flaps on the trailing edges of the wings, apparently used to maintain or restore the flying balance, and that the pilot operated these by bamboo poles.

“Poles!” the Professor thought scornfully. “How very primitive.” He flexed his own sturdy wing feathers, which were perfectly configured to do exactly the same thing without a single conscious thought on his part—and certainly required no bamboo poles. None of his other observations struck him as very significant, though. The machine did not appear to be at all sturdy, and the pilot had to manipulate a great many moving parts, and of course, the engine had to operate continuously to keep it from falling out of the sky. But Water Bird was flying. In fact, it was flying very well.

And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. The motor, which had been running more or less smoothly, gave a series of abrupt hiccups, coughed, sputtered, and stopped. In the dead silence, the owl could hear the panicked passenger cry out, “What’s happened? Why has it stopped?”

The pilot was working furiously to get the engine started again, but he was unsuccessful, and the aeroplane—which was really very rickety—put its nose down, hesitated for a heartbeat, and then began a perilously steep dive toward the water, some hundred or so feet below. The passenger gave an earsplitting shriek. The Professor, amazed, held his breath. He had never seen such a thing before. Would Water Bird fall into the lake and sink like a stone? Or would it plunge like a loon beneath the waves and come up a little farther on with a fish in the pilot’s lap?

It didn’t do either. The pilot, still wrestling the controls and with the passenger screaming hysterically in his ear, managed to pull the machine up at the last minute so that it landed on its center pontoon. It hit the water hard, bounced ten feet into the air, then bounced again, and again, one wing up, one wing down. Then one wing-tip airbag caught the surface of the water and spun the machine around.