Guardians of Ga'Hoole 02 - The Journey

the newly arrived owls together with some of the other young owls in the blackness of the sky so they could, as he put it, “Buddy up, tell a few jokes, yarp a few pellets, and hoot at the moon.”
    “So, Twilight,” Boron began. “I’ve got one that you’ll like. Did you hear the story of the wet pooper who was flying over Hoolemere and hit a fish?”
    Otulissa dropped back to where Soren was flying. “He’s just too much,” she muttered.
    “Who’s too much?” Soren asked.
    “Our king, Boron. He’s telling a wet poop joke. I think it’s undignified for one of his position.”
    Soren sighed. “Give it a blow, Otulissa.” This was not the most polite way for an owl to say, “A little less serious, please.”
    “Well, I sure hope he doesn’t head a chaw. I would find it most unpleasant. You know, tonight the tappings begin?”
    “They do?”
    “Yes, and I just have a feeling in my gizzard that I’m going to find ten nooties in my bedding down.”
    Each chaw had symbolic objects that the leader left in a young owl’s bedding. Find ten nooties arranged in the pattern of the Great Glaux constellation when you went to sleep at First Light, and that meant you were in the navigation chaw of Strix Struma. A pellet was for the tracking chaw, a milkberry for the Ga’Hoology chaw. A molted feather was the symbol for the search-and-rescue chaw. A dried caterpillar was naturally for Ezylryb’s weather chaw. A piece of coal and a caterpillar meant that you had been picked for colliering and were by necessity in for double duty and required to fly with the weather chaw as well.
    “Don’t you have any feelings, Soren?” Otulissa asked.
    “I prefer not to discuss my gizzardly feelings,” he replied almost primly.
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t know. I’m just not comfortable doing it. You know I don’t mean to be rude, Otulissa, but for someone so well bred you push awfully hard.”
    “Well, honestly.” Otulissa turned to Primrose, who wasflying rather noisily due to her lack of plummels, the fringes at the edge of the flight feathers that helped owls fly in silence. Neither Pygmy nor Elf owls had such fringes. “What about you, Primrose? Any little twinges in the old gizzard?”
    “Oh, I don’t know, Otulissa. One minute I think I’m a sure bet for search-and-rescue, which I’d love, and then the next, I think they’ll tap me for tracking, which I guess I wouldn’t mind. You know, I just don’t know. I mean, I think that’s part of the problem.”
    “What do you mean—what problem?”
    “My gizzard—it’s just so here, there, everywhere. I mean, when you said ‘old gizzard,’ I realized my gizzard isn’t so old, nor is yours for that matter, but you seem to know it better.”
    “Oh, I know my gizzard.” Otulissa nodded smugly.
    “Lucky you,” Primrose sighed.
    Soren had been listening and blinked in wonderment at Primrose’s words. They were exactly what the author of the book had been talking about—the immature gizzard of an immature owl.
    Soren cut behind Otulissa and came up on the windward side of Primrose. “Primrose, were you in the library reading that book about the physiology and the temper of owl gizzards?”
    “Oh, great Glaux, no. I only read joke books and romances, for the most part, and never anything with any ‘ol-ogy’ in the title. Do you know that Madame Plonk has written a memoir about her love life? She’s had a lot of mates who died. The book is called My Fabulous Life and Times: An Anecdotal History of a Life Devoted to Love and Song. There’s a lot about music in it. I love Madame Plonk.”
    “Who wants to read about that?” Twilight flew up. “Enough to make a person yarp, all that romantic stuff. I like reading about weapons, battle claws, war hammers.”
    “Well,” said Otulissa, “I don’t especially like reading about weapons but I find Madame Plonk coarse and unrefined, and they say she’s got a touch of the magpie in her. Have you ever been to her ‘apartments,’ as she calls them?”
    “Oh, yes,” Primrose made a rapturous little low hooting noise. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
    “Oh, yes, beautiful with other creatures’ things—bits of crockery and teacups made out of something she calls porcelain. Now where would she get that stuff? Well, I think under all those snowy white feathers is a magpie in disguise—that’s what I think. And frankly, I find the apartment vulgar—rather like its occupant.”
    Great Glaux,