When we got out of the car, Trudy want into the house, and I went around the side to drop some bottles into the recycling bin.
There was a hooting somewhere in the back. I mean a real hoo-hoo-hoo hooting. The kind of clichéd owl sound you might hear on a cartoon. I stood silently, listening in the dark.
“Hoo hoo.”
It was coming from one of the trees in our backyard.
Just then, the fair and industrious Trudy came rushing around the corner of the house.
“Come into the back,” she said, “there are owls!”
We walked thru the house and out the back patio door. She was holding a flashlight.
“There’s one in the pine tree and another one up there,” she said, pointing the flashlight at a telephone pole behind the back fence.
“Hoo hoo hoo!” from the top of the telephone pole.
“Hoo hoo,” came a reply from somewhere in the limbs of the Pecan tree next door.
I took the flashlight and shined it at the top of the telephone pole. There in the beam was the largest owl we have ever seen. No Eastern Screech Owl, this. It had a body at least two feet high and was perching on the top of the pole with eyes that blazed yellow in the light of the flashlight. And it hard “horns” on the top of its head.
This was a Great Horned Owl, and it was looking down at us.
No, that’s not right. When we got home, all the dogs in the neighborhood were making a racket, and Izzy and Guinness were in the backyard barking along. No, the owl wasn’t looking at the two of us at all. It was watching The Little One.
“Trudy,” I whispered. “Pick up Izzy.”
And we went back inside and shut the doggy door.