The Orphan Read Online Free Page A

across and under him while he swivels his head around and asks again, “Oooooeet?” I leap.
    “Gotcha!” I bite into him so fast he doesn’t have time to blink. I do not notice the porch door opening a crack. The owl tastes of mouse, and I drop to the ground to rub my muzzle in the grass. Thunder crashes from the back porch, and the tree splatters bark just over my head.
    Shotgun!
    Running low and fast, sober as a weasel in a henhouse, I zip along the fence and over the creek embankment. Damn! Whenever I eat a bird that farmer sneaks up on me. Raising my head slightly in the weeds I feel about for the man with the gun. Still behind the back door, he is shielded by the screen. I can barely detect him. The door slides open, and Martin edges out mto the shadow by the rain barrel. He walks into the faint moonlight as far as the garden gate calling Biff and Josie, neither of whom appear. He disappears back onto the porch, and I hear the click of the hook on the screen. He fades from my perception.
    What has he seen? I mentally lay out his line of sight from the back door to where I stood to eat the owl. He couldn’t have seen much in this light, a shadow standing on its hind legs against a tree, running along a grassy fence row. But I am forgetting Robert. Martin might easily check his room before returning to bed. I take a step up the bank when another sound comes from the porch. Crafty hunter! He is still there, invisible and undetectable behind the screen. I freeze, turning up my hearing to the limit, seeking through the metal screen with my spatial sense. There he is, lowering the gun, walking back into the kitchen. Gone. No lamps are lighted. Maybe that means he will not check Robert’s room, but I do not take the chance.
    I slip out of the weeds, follow every shadow over to the peach tree beneath Robert’s window, carefully inch my way up through the thick branches until I can reach up and grab his windowsill. With one claw I flip the sash up hard so it jams sideways near the top. In the next instant I hear Martin’s footsteps coming along the hallway, I swing up through the window and drop to the floor of the room. The instant I hit the floor, I shift, so that Little Robert seemed to have just turned from the open window as Martin’s stocky shadow appeared in his doorway.
    “What was it, Daddy?” I congratulate Robert on the “Daddy.” Every distraction helps, for I do not know yet what the farmer has seen.
    “Sorry to wake you up, Robert,” the farmer said, walking softly to the naked boy who stood by the open window. “My goodness, you always take your nightshirt off. You’ll catch your death. Must have been a stray dog out there rummaging around. I had to take a shot at him. They’re a bad lot, you know.” He carried Robert back to bed.
    “Now you stay under the covers. I’ll shut your window.”
    From the bed, Robert could dimly see Martin’s heavy shadow struggling with the window. It was jammed tight.
    “How’d you get your window in this kind of fix?”
    He grunted and strained and finally with a heave pulled the sash out of the frame altogether with a ripping, splintering sound that brought Aunt Cat striding into the room, a tall, flat shadow, angry and holding her robe tightly around her.
    “I swear, Martin. What are you doing? First it’s shoot ’em up at midnight, and now what’ve you done? Look at that. My Lord! Ripped his window right out. What in the world?”
    The ensuing explanations and arguments were more than enough to take Martin’s mind off of what he might have seen, and Robert dropped into sleep as suddenly and softly as an owl would take a mouse.
    Now that Robert is no longer locked in at night, it is no trouble for me to slip away for a good rabbit chase in the open fields or some sneaking around creek and hedge rows for more sporting game like foxes, mink, or even wild dogs. One moonless night near the end of May when the seedlings are just beginning to give the fields