The Capture

am in the Yonder!" Her joy whipped out through the night with a singing hiss that to Soren made the stars shimmer even brighter.

    Twilight was right. There was nothing like desert flying. The night was not really black but a deep, dark blue. The sky, moonless, tingled with stars. And although the air was chilly, from time to time heat from the desert sands below rolled up in great waves into the night, turning rough air smooth. The three owls would soar for endless minutes on the soft desert drafts, angling their tail feathers and primaries, carving great arcs in the darkness of the blue, inscribing imaginary figures with their wing tips or perhaps tracing the starry pictures of the constellations.

    Twilight did know a lot. He told them the names of the constellations -- the Great Glaux, whose one wing pointed toward a star that never moved. There was another one called the Little Raccoon, and then on summer nights, he said, the Big Raccoon rose in the sky and appeared to be dancing, so some called it the Dancing Raccoon. Still another was called the Great Crow because it spread its wings in the early autumn skies. But on this night, they flew under the bright and starry wings of the Great Glaux.

    For the first time, Soren realized that his body had really changed. He was a fully fledged owl. It was the utter quiet with which he flew that first made him aware of this change. The last of his plummels had finally sprouted. These soft, fine feathers lay over the surface of his flight feathers, silencing them as he flew.

    "I think we're getting near," Gylfie said.

    The three owls began a long glide downward. They were now skimming above the sand, just a bit higher than the prickly cactuses. "Don't worry," Gylfie said. "The needles don't hurt. We're too light."

    Gylfie had landed and so had Twilight. But just before landing, Soren heard something -- a rapid beating sound.

    It was a heartbeat. And not that of a snake. In his gizzard Soren knew what it was, a mouse, and his mouth began to water. "Hang on, Mrs. Rhiann.! Going in for mouse!"

    "Oh, goody!" she cried, and coiled herself tighter into the deep ruff of feathers between his shoulders.

    Soren quickly flapped his wings in a series of powerful upstrokes and gained some height. He cocked his head one way, then the other. The heartbeat seemed to pulse across his face. He knew where this creature was and, without even thinking, began a rapid downward spiral.

    Within a second, he had the mouse in his talons and had sunk his beak in, just as he had seen his father do when he killed a mouse at the base of their fir tree.

    "Good work." Twilight drifted down beside him. "No one can beat you Barn Owls for picking up a mouse's heartbeat." This was the first compliment that Twilight had ever given him.

    "Even for one not brought up I the orphan school of

    tough learning?"

    "Not very gracious, Soren!" Mrs. Rhiann. hissed softly in his ear. Soren immediately regretted what he had said. "Manners, child!"

    "Sorry, Twilight, that wasn't very gracious of me. Thank you for the compliment."

    "Gracious!" a voice squeaked. "You call that gracious?

    And I'll thank you to take your disgusting talons out of my home."

    Soren stepped back and pulled his talons, which were now clutching the mouse, from the sand. From a hole near the base of the cactus from which he had just stepped back, a small face emerged. It was a face not unlike Gylfie's but larger, with brownish feathers and big yellow eyes with a swag of short white feathers above them.

    "What in the name of Glaux ... ?" Soren began to whisper.

    "This is wrong. ALL wrong ..." Twilight gasped.

    "Speotyto cunicularia!" Gylfie whispered, then added, "very rare."

    "Oh, for Glaux's sake, you and your big words," rasped Twilight.

    But at that same moment, there was a terrible shriek and the owl-like thing that had emerged from the hole shrunk back. Then they heard a soft exhalation of air. Twilight stepped up to the hole and peered down. "I think it's fainted."

    "What is IT?" Soren asked, completely forgetting the succulent mouse he still clasped in his talons.

    "A Burrowing Owl," Gylfie said. "Very rare. But I remember my parents talking about it. It nests in the old burrows of ground animals."

    "Oh, Glaux!" both Twilight and Soren said at once, and made gagging noises.

    "They don't!" Twilight said, his voice drenched in disbelief "Well, learn something new every day, even me ... well, more like every other day Met