I had so much fun doing my advent calendar story a couple years ago that I thought I’d do one again this year. My Christmas theme this year is Enchanted Forest, and the advent calendar in my collection that fits the theme best is a beautiful one my friend Steph gave me several years ago called “Owl in Winter” by Angela Harding, a woodblock artist and illustrator from the UK. As a quick primer (or reminder, if you read my last series), these stories are off the cuff: I don’t peek at what’s coming, and I don’t draft ahead. So, they’ll be short and rough, and I can’t promise that everything will wrap up neatly in a Christmas bow at the end. Let’s just see where the advent-ure takes us!
At first Elsie thought it was just another eddy in the endless current of dreaming that swept her along from the start of hibernation to her bleary emergence in the wet and cold of spring. A shudder: the wind? Another: A storm? Elbert shaking her awake, perhaps…. But he was gone, long gone. And the sadness of that thought woke her enough that the next shudder registered in her skin. Thwack. In her bones. Thunk. An axe! There was a fearful creaking; she felt herself slipping sideways in her cozy nest lined with rabbit fur and thistle down. The tree was screaming, shrieking. Branches slapped and broke. The world was sideways. Elsie didn’t even think–she launched by instinct, out the mouth of the nest, flailing for safety. She saw a trunk against the snow, blessedly straight up-and-down. But her stiff, sleepy body didn’t make it that far; she fell into the branches, scrambling to catch pawsful of needles to stop her fall, wrapping her tail wherever it would hold. And stop she did, coming to dangle not even a leap’s-breadth above the tweed cap of a man on horseback who was pointing and shouting to the men who had just cut her tree down to its death. Elsie scrambled away from all of them, away as far as she could to the edge of the copse. When she ran out of trees, she sat shivering on a branch, still not sure what had happened exactly, unable to put it all together.
“Elsie. Are you all right?” The voice was so quiet and deep she almost thought she was dreaming it against the whacks of axes and grunts of men. But it came again, more urgently. “Elsie?” Dazed, she looked toward the sound and found a large barn owl watching her from the branch above.
“Armand,” she squeaked. “I think so. I don’t know. I think so.” She sat up on her back legs and scanned down her white belly, still plump this time of winter. Ordinarily she would never have shown her belly to a predator, but Armand and his mate Abigail only hunted in the fields where they could glide like ghosts for a mile and visit death on voles that dared to ruffle the snow too close to the surface. “I think so,” she puffed. “What’s happening?”
Armand turned his head slowly back around, in that eery way that owls can, back toward the men and their horses and sledges and axes. He blinked once, backward, in the way that owls do. “I don’t know. I will go out tonight and see what I can see.”
“Okay.” Elsie tried to keep her teeth from chattering together; her blood wasn’t warm yet. Without turning to her, Armand said:
“Our nest is in this tree. We’re not using it now. Go up and warm yourself. Sleep.”
Elsie was shivering too much to answer at that point. She scrambled up the trunk until she found the hollow in it. She tumbled inside and rolled herself into the smallest ball she could, trying not to decide whether the white sticks she saw around her were sticks or bones. She tucked her tail in and closed her eyes tight. Within a few minutes, she wasn’t shivering anymore. But she wasn’t sleeping, either.
The Rookery 