When Armand and Abigail made it back to their tree at dawn, Armand poked his head into their nest. Elsie’s little red head popped up from the circle of her tail, her tassled ears bobbing comically. Armand chuckled in spite of his exhaustion and the night’s tensions.
“What happened?” Elsie chirped. “What did you find out?”
“Couldn’t sleep, little sister?”
“Could you, if the last time you did you woke up to find your world falling over?” Armand shook his head in the small opening to the hollow.
“We have learned the men are cutting the trees to make something called a ‘train,'” he told her. “They are digging the ground as well and piling stones. Several of our neighbors in the next wood have been thrown out of their homes as you were. That is all we know. We will hope to learn more this evening from our friends with ears in the village.”
“Will they cut this tree down today?” Elsie flicked her tail in a nervous ripple. Armand’s feathery brows lowered in thought.
“I think not, sister. We are at the far edge of the wood from the village, and there is a great swath of timber between where they were cutting and here. And they seem for the moment to be taking smaller trees than this ancient spruce to make this ‘train’ of theirs. I think you are safe. I think you can sleep, if you can.”
“Good,” Elsie yawned, showing her sharp nut-cracking teeth. And without another word she turned from the owl and rolled herself into a ball tight as a spring fern.
For his part, Armand slept fitfully all that day. The men weren’t in the forest cutting after all, but every snapping branch, every voice in the distance pulled him back up to the watery surface of consciousness. Whether Abigail slept or not he couldn’t tell, but she remained as still as a pale stone caught in a tree root, her eyes resolutely closed.
As soon as the sun was down, Armand flew across the field to the sheep fold. Gustav saw him alight on the gate and waddled over: “Come with me,” he bleated, and the owl blinked to see how easily the ram unlatched the gate and swung it open beneath him. He hopped down to Gustav’s shoulders; his long, curved talons didn’t even reach halfway through the matted fleece.
The sheep and the owl crossed the dim paddock toward a small cluster of cattle just settling in for the night. Armand recognized the bull, a great Highland cow.
“Hamish!” Gustav hailed him. “I have brought the owl. Tell him what you told me.”
It was impossible to make out the expression in the bull’s eyes under his long forelock. For a moment he just stood and chewed his cud, the polished brass ring in his nose flashing with each rotation of his jaw. And then he spoke. His voice was like a boulder rolling at the bottom of a deep glen; Armand felt his feathers stand up on his head.
“There was a train that ran past the place in Scotland where I was born. It is made of many wagons hitched end to end and rides on a track that looks like a fence lying on the ground. It is pushed by a fire smoking in its belly rather than being pulled by a team. Unlike the wagons you are used to, it can only go where track is laid first, so that is why the men are tilling the earth and cutting stone and timber–to make the track that will bring the train to this village.”
“How can we stop it?” asked Armand. Hamish stopped chewing.
“Stop it?”
“The men are destroying our homes in the woods and the fields to make this track.”
Hamish started chewing again. He rolled his great shoulders in a shrug. “And so they did years ago when they made the roads. And so they will again when they think of the next thing they want. This is ever the way with men. For my part, I will not miss pulling their wagons.”
There were times when it became very clear to Armand the differences between the animals in the woods and the animals who lived with people. This was one of those times. He could feel the gap like the chill of black ice on a pond. Still, he bowed his head. “Thank you, brother,” he said, “for sharing your wisdom.”
Armand wondered if there were nothing to be done about the train except to move to a wood farther from the village. He liked the village, he realized. He didn’t know why–there was just something about it. Something interesting and different about the men and women and children and the things they did and the animals they kept.
He realized at some point that he was back in the sheep fold where Gustav had carried them both, still standing on the ram’s shoulders. “My apologies, old friend; I got a bit lost. And thank you for your help.”
“Do not give up,” Gustav nickered, and Armand wondered if the ram could read his thoughts as well as he could understand the speech of men. “You do not know everything there is to know here; neither does the bull; neither do the men. We all go into new things together, don’t we?”
“We do,” Armand said. “Sleep well, brother.” And he lifted from the ram’s shoulders with a great swoop and flew off across the field toward the wood to find Abigail and tell her what he had learned.
The Rookery 