Miss Slattery the counselor awards him a donut. Bunny buys him a new Starboy DVD.
Better.
Whenever the world becomes too loud, too clamorous, too sharp at the edges, whenever he feels that the roar is creeping too close, he shuts his eyes, clamps the muffs over his ears, and dreams himself into the clearing in the woods. Five hundred Douglas firs sway; NeedleMen parachute through the air; the dead ponderosa stands bone-white beneath the stars.
There is magic in this place.
You just have to sit and breathe and wait.
Seymour makes it through the Thanksgiving Pageant, through the Christmas Music Spectacular, through the pandemonium that is Valentine’s Day. He accepts toaster strudel, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and croutons into his diet. He consents to a bribe-free shampoo every other Thursday. He is working on not flinching when Bunny’s fingernails tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat on the steering wheel.
* * *
One bright spring day Mrs. Onegin leads the first graders through puddles of snowmelt to a light-blue house with a crooked porch on the corner of Lake and Park. The other kids swarm upstairs; a librarian with freckles all over her face finds Seymour alone in Adult Nonfiction. He has to lift one of the cups of his ear defenders to hear her.
“How big did you say he is? Does he sort of look like he’s wearing a bow tie?”
She brings down a field guide from a high shelf. On the very first page she shows him, there’s Trustyfriend, hovering with a mouse clamped in his left foot. In the next photo, there he is again: standing in a snag overlooking a snowy meadow.
Seymour’s heart catapults.
“Great grey owl,” she reads. “World’s largest species of owl by length. Also called sooty owl, bearded owl, spectral owl, Phantom of the North.” She smiles at him from inside her sandstorm of freckles. “Says here that their wingspans can exceed five feet. They can hear the heartbeats of voles under six feet of snowpack. Their big facial disk helps them by collecting sounds, like cupping your hands to your ears.”
She sets her palms beside her ears. Seymour takes off his muffs and does the same.
* * *
Every day that summer, as soon as Bunny leaves for the Aspen Leaf, Seymour pours Cheerios into a baggie, heads out the sliding door, passes the egg-shaped boulder, and slips under the wire.
He makes Frisbees from plates of bark, pole-vaults over puddles, rolls rocks down slopes, befriends a pileated woodpecker. There’s a living ponderosa in those woods as big as a school bus stood on end with an osprey nest at the very top, and an aspen grove whose leaves sound like rain on water. And every second or third day, Trustyfriend is there, on his branch in his skeleton tree, blinking out at his dominion like a benevolent god, listening as hard as any creature has ever listened.
Inside the pellets the owl coughs into the needles the boy discovers squirrel mandibles and mouse vertebrae and astonishing quantities of vole skulls. A section of plastic twine. Greenish pieces of eggshell. Once: the foot of a duck. On the workbench in Pawpaw’s shed he assembles chimerical skeletons: three-headed zombie voles, eight-legged spider-chipmunks.
Bunny finds ticks on his T-shirts, mud on the carpet, burrs in his hair; she fills the tub and says, “Someone is going to have me arrested,” and Seymour pours water from one Pepsi bottle into another and Bunny sings a Woody Guthrie song before falling asleep on the bathmat in her Pig N’ Pancake shirt and big black Reeboks.
* * *
Second grade. He walks from school to the library, settles his ear defenders around his neck, and sits at the little table beside Audiobooks. Owl puzzles, owl coloring books, owl games on the computer. When the freckled librarian, whose name is Marian, has a free minute, she reads to him, explaining things along the way.
Nonfiction 598.27:
Ideal habitats for great greys are forests bordered by open areas with high vantage points and large populations of voles.
Journal of Contemporary Ornithology:
Great greys are so elusive and easily spooked that we still know very little about them. We are learning, though, that they serve as threads in a meshwork of relationships between rodents, trees, grasses, and even fungal spores that is so intricate and multidimensional that researchers are only beginning to comprehend a fraction of it.
Nonfiction 598.95:
Only about one in fifteen great grey eggs hatch and make it to adulthood. Hatchlings get eaten by ravens, martens, black bears, and great horned owls; nestlings often starve. Because they require such extensive hunting grounds, great greys are particularly vulnerable to habitat loss: cattle trample meadows, decimating prey numbers; wildfires incinerate nesting areas; the owls eat rodents that have eaten poison, die in vehicle collisions, and fly into utility wires.