The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar Read Online Free Page B

the while keeping him sheltered from heavy weather by the overhang of the balcony above. This would put him within a couple of feet of the bedroom window of the flat next door, but luckily my neighbour Lynne was a good friend, who had no more love for the caretaker than I did. I assured her that owls of the species
Athene noctua
are not known for their loud singing at night. This claim was more hopeful than confident, but it turned out to be true. Since Wellington was so far from – and so far above – his natural farmland habitat, he had no real reason to issue his yelping territorial challenges, and there were no others within earshot to answer him.
    * * *
    I covered sheets of graph paper with scribbles before a satisfactory blueprint emerged. Since the balcony was small, and the door led out to it end-on, the planned creation could not be more than 2 feet wide if it was to leave space for me to squeeze out there past the nearside end of it, but there was room for it to be 6 feet long by 6 feet high. I planned a complete plywood section at the far end, about the size of a telephone kiosk, incorporating a hutch into which Wellington could retreat when he was feeling unsociable (which seemed to be his default setting), with a perch just outside his ‘doorstep’ and a shelf for him to eat on. The rest of the structure was to be of wire meshon a timber frame, with a couple more perches, made from branches, slanting across the corners at different heights.
    I am emphatically not a handyman, but I thought that the door I devised was a stroke of genius almost worthy of an approach to the Patent Office. The Windrow Mark 1 Double-Reciprocating Owl Valve was made of mesh on wooden frames matching the inner dimensions of the cage, and was mounted towards the nearer end of its long ‘front’ side. It was in fact a two-layer door with the layers set back to back and hinged together, one layer opening inwards and one outwards. All I had to do was make sure that Wellington was down at the far end of the cage before pulling a wire to close the inner layer of the door across its width, shutting him down there. I could then pull open the outer layer, enter, and close it behind me, thus shutting myself inside an ‘owl lock’. There was just enough room in there for me to swing the inner door back past me again, leaving me and Wellington in the same space, without his ever having had less than one door between him and the open air. I would then get him into a basket, and reverse the process to carry him indoors with me.
    Flushed with triumph, I set out on the Saturday morning to the local do-it-yourself store. This had everything that I needed, but there were one or two aspects that I had not thought through – principally, the difficulty of manoeuvring eight 6-foot lengths of 1-inch by 2-inch timber, three enormous sheets of marine-quality plywood (nothing but the best for Wellington), and sundry rolls of wire mesh through a narrow checkout exit, all balanced ona flimsy supermarket trolley. Act Two of this comedy of cruelty took place in the car park, where I faced getting it all into or secured on top of my car. (‘Mummy, why does the funny red-faced man with the bleeding hands keep breaking bits of string and saying rude words?’)
    At noon, calmed by cool beer and the lack of a human audience, I laid everything out on the living-room floor and set to work. My plan was to make each side, each end and the top separately, before juggling them out on to the balcony for final assembly. The scheme was sound enough, but the next thirty-six hours cruelly exposed my limitations as an entirely self-taught carpenter. Every measurement I had taken turned out to be that vital half-inch too short or too long. Every snipped end of wire mesh managed to stab my palm. Every staple bent uselessly as I tried to hammer it into the cheap, knotty wood. The hinge-screws split the timber, and at about 1am on the Sunday morning I discovered that I was