Guardians of Ga'Hoole 03 - The Rescue

expected,” Digger said. “But I do remember where I first picked them up.”
    “Let’s start with the actual bush where you first found her, Digger.”
    With long strides, the Burrowing Owl was there in no time. The others followed.
    “Oh, my!” said Eglantine. “This is surely the place. I wouldn’t forget it. It seemed as if I spent forever here.”
    “Now, Eglantine,” Digger said, “fly along this creek bed and try to remember where you were dropped.”
    They had flown less than a minute. “Do you think it was here?” Digger asked. For this was where he had picked up her tracks.
    “No, I think it was farther. It was pretty wet.”
    They flew a few more minutes. “Here! Here!” Eglantinesuddenly said. She lighted down. There was a very small, gurgling stream of water, no more than a few inches deep. “I remember that rock!” She lifted a talon and pointed. “I remember thinking, ‘Lucky I didn’t fall on that.’”
    “Good! Good!” said Soren. “Prepare to fly! We’ll make at least three circles overhead and, Eglantine, you try and sense which direction you came from.”
    “Oh, I don’t know, Soren. That’s going to be hard. I was so scared, and there was so much commotion. I mean, it was a battle up there.”
    “Just do your best, Eglantine. That’s all you can do. If we have to, we’ll fly out in every direction from this spot—Gylfie, you’re navigator, so keep track of our position.”
    Eglantine couldn’t remember, and they did begin the slow process of flying out in all directions.
    The night is not simply black to an owl. There are layers of blackness of different densities. Sometimes the black is thick, a gooey black unleavened by starlight or the moon, and sometimes the black is thin—still black, but an almost transparent sort of blackness. It all has to do with the shine and the set of the moon above, of the constellations rising or vanishing, and the features of the earth below—whether the land is clad in forests or barrenand hard with rock. Just as Twilight was an expert at seeing through the very deceptive grays of twilight and dawn, so Soren was skillful in “reading the black” of the full night.
    “Thin-to-coarse black,” he called out as they flew over a sparsely wooded area. Then, half an hour later as they flew in another direction, “Water black turning to crunchy.”
    “No!” said Eglantine, “I know that we never flew over water.”
    The owls banked steeply and went back to their starting positions. As they settled down on the limbs of a tree, Gylfie suddenly had a brilliant thought. “If these owls just wanted Barn Owls, and mostly Tyto albas, at that, doesn’t it make sense that their castle might be located either in Tyto or very near one of its boundaries? More specifically, the boundary it shares with Ambala, which is very small.”
    So they headed in the direction of the Ambala-Tyto boundary. Soren asked Otulissa to fly out as a scout. It was not long before she came back with the report of a meadow. “Upwind and to the west, but I spotted a forest fire just a little bit north of west. I would say two points off the second head star of the Great Glaux. I don’t think we need to worry with the wind in this direction.”
    “Good work, Otulissa,” Soren said.
    Soon the walls of the castle ruins rose in the dawn mist. Only one tower had remained complete. The rest had crumbled down, so they stood only slightly higher than the castle walls. A peaceful haze rolled over the meadow below.
    “We’d better fetch up in that small grove of trees,” Soren said. “I have a feeling there might be crows around.”
    From their perches in an alder, the six owls had a good view of the castle. It must have been lovely in its time, Soren imagined, and even in its ruined state, two stained glass windows could be seen in the still-standing east wall. An embroidery of ivy and moss crept over the stone.
    “It seems different,” Eglantine said after several minutes.
    “How?” asked Soren
    “Well, it seems very still.”
    “But it’s almost full morning. They are all probably asleep.”
    “I know, but at full morning the guard usually changes. That’s why I said we had to get here just before dawn—exactly at twixt time. The tower has no view toward the east and, at twixt time, the guard changes so we are really safe. But I would be able to see the changing of the guard, for the old guard usually circles the tower one time upon leaving.”
    “I