Guardians of Ga'Hoole 03 - The Rescue

And if one was in the weather or colliering chaw, it was required that they eat their meat raw with the fur on it. Of course, Soren, like most owls until they had come to the Great Tree, had always eaten his meat raw. He still liked raw meat, but on a nippy evening like this, something warm in the gut was of great comfort. Well, he would at least try to avoid sitting next to Otulissa. Eating raw vole with that Spotted Owl yakking in his ear was enough to give any bird indigestion—or maybe even gas, and not of the random variety.He would aim to sit between Martin and Ruby, his two best friends in the chaw. Martin was a little Northern Saw-whet, not much bigger than Gylfie, and Ruby was a Short-eared Owl.
    “Glaux almighty!” Soren muttered as he approached the table of Octavia. The place between Martin and Ruby was taken by one of the new owlets who had been rescued in the Great Downing. He was a little Lesser Sooty called Silver. The name fit for he was, like all the Sooty Owls, black, but his underparts were silvery white. Sooties were all part of the same family of Barn Owls as Soren, the Tyto species, but a different group within that species—Soren being a Tyto alba and Silver a Tyto multipunctata. Still, in the whole scheme of things, they were considered “cousins.” And they shared the heart-shaped face common to all Barn Owls. Silver, much smaller than Soren, now swiveled and tipped his head back.
    “You shouldn’t take the name of Glaux in vain, Soren.” Silver spoke in a voice that was somewhere between a squeak and a shriek.
    Soren blinked. “Why ever not?” Everyone said “Glaux” all the time.
    “Glaux was the first Tyto. It’s disrespectful to our species, to our maker.”
    The first Tyto, Soren thought. What’s he talking about?
    Glaux was the most ancient order of owls from which all other owls descended. Glaux was the first owl, and no one knew if it was a Tyto, let alone male or female or whatever. It didn’t really matter. Apparently, Soren was not the only one confused.
    “Glaux is Glaux no matter what you call him, her, whatever,” said Poot. Poot was the first mate of the weather chaw but now, in the absence of Ezylryb, served as captain.
    Silver blinked. “Really?”
    “Yes, really,” said Otulissa. “The first owl from whom we are all descended.”
    “I thought just Barn Owls—owls like Soren and me.”
    “No, all of us,” Otulissa repeated. “No matter what kind of feather pattern, no matter what color eyes we have—yellow, amber, black, like yours—all of us are descended from Great Glaux.” Otulissa could be surprising. For Otulissa to say the words “all of us” was somewhat remarkable for an owl who could be impossibly snooty and stuck-up.
    It was a bit peculiar that all of the owls that had been rescued in the Great Downing had been some kind of Barn Owl. They were either Greater or Lesser Sooties like Silver, or Grass Owls, or Masked Owls. But despite the different names and slightly different coloration, they all had the distinctive heart-shaped faces that marked them as belongingto the family of Tytos, or Barn Owls. Like Silver, they had all arrived with some very strange notions and behaviors. Even the most seriously wounded owls when they were rescued had babbled nearly unintelligible fragments, but they were entranced with music. As soon as they heard Madame Plonk and the harp guild, their strange babbling had stopped.
    The young owlets were getting better every day as they spent more and more time with normal owls. Of course, the owls of Ga’Hoole were not quite normal. When Soren was very young, his parents would tell him and Kludd and Eglantine stories. They were once-upon-a-time stories. The kind that you might wish were true but somehow don’t quite believe could be. One of his and Eglantine’s favorites began, “Once upon a very long time ago, in the time of Glaux, there was an order of knightly owls, from a kingdom called Ga’Hoole, who would rise each night into the blackness and perform noble deeds. They spoke no words but true ones. Their purpose was to right all wrongs, to make strong the weak, mend the broken, vanquish the proud, and make powerless those who abused the frail. With hearts sublime they would take flight…”
    But it was true! And when he and Twilight and Gylfie and Digger had finally found the Great Ga’Hoole Tree on an island in the middle of the Sea of Hoolemere, Sorenfound that in order to fulfill this noble