Lost Tales of Ga'Hoole

help missing the great tree. The season of White Rain would be in full swing, and she was looking forward to all the activity that came with it. She couldn’t wait to get back to her nest and see all her friends. How different she’d felt about her first trip to the Great Ga’Hoole Tree, she thought. She was so young at the time that she barely remembered it. What she did remember was feeling immensely sad. She was being sent away from home, after all. She feared that she would never see her da again. And even though her da told her it was for her own good, she didn’t fully understand why he was sending her away. And here she was now, being homesick for the tree.
    Although she still didn’t know why he had done it, how right her da had been to send her there! She was thriving at the tree—she was one of the best owls in the weather and colliering chaws, earning the highest merit badge a colliering chaw owl could earn, and she just loved writing for The Evening Hoot.
    As much as she loved her da, her visits with him always reminded her that the kraal way of life was just not for her—the vanity, the disorderliness, not to mention the thuggishness. And when it came down to it, most of the kraals were just not that smart, and they didn’t feel the need to get smarter, either. Her da was different in that respect. He was always inventing this and that, working out his “hypotheses.” Even now, as Fritha watched him, Flinn was tinkering with a new formula for a dye that changed colors depending on the angle of the sun. He was much more like the owls of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree than he was his fellow kraals. The kraals realized this, too, and regularly left Flinn out of important activities. No one at the tree knew that Fritha was the daughter of a kraal, or that she would have become a kraal herself if it weren’t for her da sending her away. It wasn’t exactly that she was ashamed of where she came from…well, maybe she was, just a little bit.
    As a newly arrived young owl at the tree, Fritha didn’t dare talk about her kraal heritage. The Guardians’ infrequent encounters with the kraals had never been amicable. The kraals’ reputation, she learned, was worse than she had imagined. She had meant to tell her fellow Guardians the truth about her identity someday; she wanted to let them know where she came from and who she was. But night after night, season after season, she never found the opportunity or the courage. And now, she found herself leading this double life—sneaking away from the tree once or twice a year to see her father, inevitably telling lies in the process. With each visit, the lies and half-truths weighed more and more heavily on her gizzard.
    As Fritha watched her da fiddle with his pigments, she wondered again why he had chosen to send her away to a life so different from his own.
    “Da,” she began gently, “why did you send me to the tree? Why didn’t you keep me here and raise me as a kraal?”
    Flinn didn’t seem surprised by Fritha’s question. He put down his mortar and pestle, and paused before he began his long answer.
    “I was just a young owl myself when I first learned of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree,” he said. “I had heard of it in songs sung by passing gadfeathers, but didn’t know it was a real place with real owls until a raiding party returned one night with a certain little owl as a captive.” He seemed lost in his memories as he spoke.
    Flinn remembered clearly, he had been painting his feathers at a dye basin—red and turquoise. As he admired his own artistic creation, he spotted in his ice mirror a group of owls flying toward the lair. Ah! Finally! They’re doing it right! The four kraals were flying in the formation he invented, correctly this time. He called it the VAT, short for Vacuum-assisted Transport. It was one of his proudest inventions. He got the idea when he was flying with a group of Snowies through some rough winds the previous winter. Being a Pygmy Owl in these parts had its challenges, and the katabats were one of the biggest ones. He realized, as he flew with the four much larger owls, that if they all positioned themselves a certain way, they created a small still space in their midst where the heaviest winds were blocked. He was able to get through the katabats that way. With further experimentation, he found that he could expand upon the idea. If the owls flying around the periphery flapped their wings in a certain rhythm, they