Admiring the Owl

by Xenocrates, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The lime had to be made in the autumn, when the mistletoe berries were white, and Kerdon had made it as his father made it: the berries pounded, soaked in water until they rotted soft, pounded again, washed, and worked between the palms until the skins and the seeds came away and what was left would draw out in a thread from finger to finger and not break. He kept it in a pot with a lid of oiled leather. In the month of weddings, when the thrushes were down from the north and the cooks of the city wanted them by the sixty, he took the pot out to the Academy every morning before it was light.

He went in by the gate on the Kolonos side, where the wall had fallen and no one had built it up. He carried the pot, a bundle of reeds, a wicker cage on his back, and the owl.

The owl sat on a cross-bar fixed to a short stake, with a cord on her leg. She was a little owl, no bigger than a man's two fists, grey-brown and flecked with white, and she had been his for six winters. He did not call her anything. When he set the stake in the ground she would turn her head all the way round and look at him with her yellow eyes, and then turn it back, and then shut them, and that was the whole of what passed between them.

The Academy was a gymnasium before it was a school, and it still had the look of one: the long running-track, the plane trees and the olives in their rows, the water channel, the wrestling-floor raked smooth by a slave every evening and roughened again by the young men every day. The philosophers had the far end, where there was a garden and a little shrine to the Muses and a few benches in the sun. Kerdon kept to the middle, among the olives, where the ground was rough and nobody ran.

He chose a young olive with a clear space in front of it, set the stake in the clear space, and began on the reeds.

There is a way of doing it. Each reed is split at the top into three, the three splits are spread with a little wedge of wood, and the lime is laid along each split with the thumb, thin, the whole length of a finger. Too thick and the bird sees it shine; too thin and it slides free. The reeds go into the olive at the angles a bird would choose to perch, close round the owl but not so close that she can reach them, for an owl that gets herself limed is a morning lost. He set thirty. He counted them twice. Then he went back twenty paces to a heap of prunings and sat down behind it in his cloak with his knees under his chin, and waited.

It was cold, and it was bright. There was frost in the shadows of the track. At the far end of the grove a man was sweeping the porch of the Muses' shrine, and the sound of the broom came very clear across the grass.

The first birds came at sunrise, as they always did. A pair of tits, then a robin, then more tits. They saw the owl, and their voices changed. They came down from the plane trees to the olive in short drops, scolding, each one a little lower and a little closer than the last, until they were all round her in the branches, flicking their wings and their tails at her, darting in at her back and away again. The owl sat with her eyes shut and let them. Men who sell birds call it admiring the owl. Kerdon had never seen anything that looked less like admiration, but that was what it was called.

A tit landed on a reed and stuck. It hung by its feet and beat its wings, and the noise brought more. A robin stuck. Then two thrushes came over from the olives on the far side, heavy and speckled and loud, and dropped into the bush at once, and one of them stuck by the wing.

He let it go on a while. A man who runs out at the first bird empties the tree. When there were six held he got up and walked to the olive, and the rest went up and away into the plane trees, and he took them off the reeds one by one.

The thrushes he put living into the cage, because the cook wanted them living. The tits and the robins and the finches he killed with a twist of two fingers and strung through the beak on a cord at his belt, twelve to a cord. He cleaned each reed with a rag, laid on fresh lime, set them back, and went behind his heap again.

The cook was a man called Sibyrtios, who cooked for weddings in the Kerameikos and the streets behind it. He had come to Kerdon's stall in the bird-market three days before and said: sixty thrushes, living, delivered the night before the wedding; and the wedding was the day after tomorrow. A wedding in a good house: the bride's father had money from the silver and wanted to be seen spending it. Seven obols the pair for the first sixty; and Sibyrtios would take any more beyond that at five, and would take finches strung for the slaves' table. It was the best order Kerdon had had in three winters. He had twenty-nine thrushes in the cage at home, in the dark, with millet and water. Thirty-one more were wanted by tomorrow night.

By the middle of the morning he had nine more.

That was when the hawk came.

He saw it first as a shape going low across the end of the track, between two plane trees, very fast, and then it was gone. A moment later every small bird in the grove had stopped talking. The tits that had been working round the owl sat still in the olive with their feathers flat. Then they went, all of them, not up into the planes but out, low, into the thick brambles along the water channel, and stayed there.

Kerdon swore.

It came back three times before noon. It was a sparrowhawk, a hen by the size of her, grey on the back and barred underneath, with the long legs and the yellow eye. Each time it came the grove went silent and emptied, and each time it took longer for the birds to come back to the owl. Once it took a finch from the open grass not ten paces from his heap, and sat on it on the ground and plucked it, looking at him over its shoulder, and he threw a stick and it flew off with the finch in its feet into the planes and sat up there out of reach, and finished it.

By noon he had four more thrushes, which made thirteen, and forty-two in all.

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The old man came out after the meal.

Kerdon had seen him often over six winters and had never spoken to him. He was very tall, and very thin, and walked slowly, as if he were measuring the ground; he wore the same grey cloak in every weather. People in the bird-market said he had been offered the city's citizenship and had refused it, and that King Philip had once bought every other envoy on an embassy and had not been able to buy this one. Kerdon did not know if this was true. He knew the old man sat in the afternoons on the stone bench at the end of the olive rows, with the sun on his back, while one of the young men read to him out of a roll; and that he did not look at Kerdon, or at the owl, or at the birds; and that he had never once told him to go.

The young man today was one Kerdon did not know: short, broad, with a wrestler's ears. He had a roll and an oil flask, as they all had, for the wrestling-floor. He sat at the old man's feet with the roll on his knees and read in a flat, careful voice, stopping when the old man lifted a finger, going on when he lowered it.

The birds came back in the afternoon. The sun had taken the frost off and they were hungry. A big mixed company of sparrows came down out of the planes, the brown town sparrows that lived in the roofs of the gymnasium and fed on what the young men dropped, and they found the owl, and the whole olive was full of them, shouting.

A cock sparrow came down onto a reed by the trunk and stuck by one foot and part of the wing. Kerdon was getting up when it tore loose. It dropped out of the bush trailing a little thread of lime, flew low and badly across the clear ground with the limed wing dragging, and the hawk came off the edge of the planes after it.

It happened very fast. The sparrow could not climb. It went along the line of the olives, a hand's breadth above the grass, with the hawk coming down behind it in a long shallow slant; it turned once, and the hawk turned with it; and at the end of the row it went straight into the old man's lap and under the fold of his cloak and was gone.

The hawk swung up at the last moment, a wing's length from the old man's face, and went over the bench and up into the nearest plane tree and sat there.

The young man had dropped the roll. The old man had not moved.

Kerdon reached the bench as the old man was putting his hand into the fold of his cloak. He drew it out with the sparrow in it, held loosely, the head between his first and second fingers, and looked at it. The bird's beak was open. Its breast was going like a pulse in a throat.

"Your oil," the old man said to the young man.

The young man gave him the flask. The old man unstoppered it with his teeth, which surprised Kerdon, and tipped a little oil into the palm of the hand that did not hold the bird, and began, with the end of his thumb, to work it into the limed feathers of the wing. He did it slowly. Oil takes lime out; any fowler knows that; it is how you clean your hands at night. But it was strange to see it done by someone else, and done to a bird.

"That's mine," Kerdon said.

The old man looked up at him, and then past him, at the olive with the owl in it and the reeds, and then up at the plane tree, where the hawk sat on a low branch and watched the three of them with its yellow eye.

"Is it," the old man said.

"It came off my lime. You can see the lime on it. I set that lime at dawn."

"Yes," the old man said. He went on working the oil in. The young man with the wrestler's ears looked from one of them to the other and said nothing.

"It's mine," Kerdon said again.

The old man finished the wing. He turned the bird over in his fingers and looked at the foot, where there was more lime, and worked that too, a toe at a time, and when the toe was clean he spread it with his thumb to see that it would open. Then he looked up again.

"Three wanted it," he said. "The hawk, to eat it. You, to sell it. And it, to keep itself. It came to none of you. It came to me."

"It came to you because it was running."

"Yes. That is what a suppliant is."

He stroked the sparrow, once, from the crown of its head down its back, with one finger. Then he opened his hand.

For a moment the bird did not move. Then it went up off his palm and away along the line of the wall, low, and very fast, and in among the roofs of the gymnasium, and the hawk in the plane tree turned its head and watched it go and did not follow.

"A suppliant is not given up," the old man said. He wiped his fingers on the hem of his cloak, gave back the flask, and lowered his finger, and the young man found his place in the roll and went on reading.

Kerdon stood there.

He stood until it was clear that nothing else was going to happen, and that the reading was not going to stop, and that the old man, whose eyes were half-closed now, was listening to it. Then he went back to his heap of prunings.

A sparrow was nothing. A sparrow strung went for a sixth of an obol in the market; six to the obol, and the cord thrown in. He sat behind his heap and pulled his cloak round his knees and found that his face was hot, and he could not have said if it was the cold or the other thing.

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The hawk came down again an hour later, for a thrush.

The thrushes had come back to the owl by then, four of them, and two had stuck, and Kerdon was watching the third come down onto the reeds when the hawk came over the wall behind it. It came in very low and very fast, under the planes and into the clear ground, and the thrush saw it and tried to go up through the olive, and the hawk went in after it.

The olive took them both. The thrush got through. The hawk did not. It hit the reeds with both wings open, and three of them went into the feathers at once, and the lime held. It hung there in the branches with its wings spread out on the reeds like a cloak hung out to dry, screaming, and the owl on her bar below it went flat and wide-eyed and hissed like a pot on the fire.

Kerdon was there before he knew he had got up.

He took his cloak off and threw it over the hawk, and held it down through the cloth, and felt for the legs, and found them, and took them both in one hand, hard, above the feet. Then he worked the reeds out of the feathers one by one through the cloak, and lifted the whole bundle down, hawk and cloak and lime and broken reeds, and held it to his chest.

It was very light. It had stopped screaming. Through the wool he could feel it panting, and the heat of it, and the hard thin legs in his fist, and the feet opening and shutting against his wrist. He could feel the place, under the cloth, where its neck would be.

He looked across the grass at the bench.

The old man had his eyes shut. The young man was reading. The broom had stopped at the far end. There was no one else in the grove.

Kerdon carried the hawk across the grass. He did not hurry. When he got to the bench he stood in front of it, and the young man stopped reading and looked up, and then the old man opened his eyes.

Kerdon turned back a corner of the cloak. The hawk's head came out. It looked at the old man with one yellow eye and opened its beak and did not make any sound.

"There," Kerdon said. "That's the one that chased it. That one's mine too. It's on my lime, the same. Is that one a suppliant?"

The old man looked at the hawk for a long time. Then he looked at Kerdon, the whole of him, from the bare head to the feet, as if he were measuring him for something.

"Did it come to me?" he said.

"No."

"Who came to me?"

Kerdon did not answer.

"Then it is not the hawk that is asking," the old man said.

He held out his hand to the young man, without looking, and the young man put the oil flask into it. He held it out to Kerdon.

Kerdon looked at it. He looked at the old man's hand, which was large and knotted and dry, and quite steady. It did not move. It did not come nearer and it was not taken back. It stayed where it was, holding out the flask, while the young man held his breath and the hawk panted in the cloak and the owl, behind them in the olive, turned her head round to see what had become of the noise.

He could not take the flask with the hawk in both hands. He knelt down on the cold ground in front of the bench and settled the bundle across his knees and held the legs with his left hand alone; then he took the flask with his right. He tipped oil into his palm, the way the old man had done, and began to work it into the first wing.

It took a long time. A hawk's feathers are stiffer than a sparrow's, and the lime had gone deep. The young man got down off the bench without being asked and held the cloak open while Kerdon worked, and when the hawk struck at Kerdon's wrist with its beak and drew blood he did not let go and did not hurry, and the old man, above them, said nothing at all.

When both wings were clean Kerdon stood up, and walked a little way out into the open grass, and opened the cloak and his hand together.

The hawk went straight up. It went up over the planes in three wingbeats, and turned once in the bright air above the grove, and then came back down in a long slant and settled on its branch in the plane tree, the same branch, over the olive, over the owl, and began to oil its feathers with its beak where the oil had been.

Kerdon looked at it. Then he looked at his wrist, where the beak had gone in, and sucked the blood off it.

When he turned round the old man had shut his eyes again and lowered his finger, and the young man was back on the bench with the roll on his knees, looking for his place.

---

He had forty-four thrushes at sundown. He would get the rest tomorrow, or he would not, and Sibyrtios would pay him seven the pair for what there was and not for what there was not. He thought he would probably get them. The thrushes were down thick that winter.

He took the reeds out of the olive one by one and cleaned them and bound them. He put the lid on the pot. He pulled up the stake, and the owl opened her eyes and turned her head round and looked at him, and turned it back.

Then he carried everything, the cage and the reeds and the pot and the owl on her stake, across the rough ground to the far side of the grove, past the water channel and the brambles, to an old olive by the fallen wall, where the bench could not be seen for the trees. He set the stake into the earth there, and pressed the earth down round it with his heel, and stood back, and looked at the place.

It would do. It was a good tree, and the light came to it early.

Above him, in the planes, the hawk turned its head and watched him go.

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A note on the sources: Xenocrates' seventy books are lost. The sparrow is in Diogenes Laertius, Lives IV.10: "When a little sparrow was pursued by a hawk and rushed into his bosom, he stroked it and let it go, declaring that a suppliant must not be betrayed" (tr. R. D. Hicks). That he spent most of his time in the Academy, that he was grave of manner, and that Philip knew he could not be bought are in the same book. Fowlers' use of the little owl as a decoy, and the name for what the small birds do round it, "admiring him", come from Aristotle, History of Animals IX.1 (tr. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson). Birdlime from mistletoe and the fowler's limed reeds are old Greek practice. Kerdon, Sibyrtios, the young man with the wrestler's ears and the hawk on the lime are invented.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ā Xenocrate per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Xenocrates, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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