Sandlands by Rosy Thornton

and the bird bore an overall countenance of calm – an air if not of benevolence, precisely, then at least of quiet, unthreatening vigilance. What nonsense, though, Rebecca chided herself, to be attributing to the creature these human feelings, these human characteristics. It was only a bird, after all.
    But she still couldn’t spend a penny with it watching.
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    After that, Rebecca found her feet often tending to that particular path on her daily constitutional. Pretty soon she admitted to herself it was a deliberate choice, in the hope of seeing the owl. On one or two mornings when she got herself up and out early for her walk, while the sun was still struggling to break above the under-canopy of brush and bracken and send its rays to slant in stripes between the trees, she was halted in her tracks by the sight of the owl at its hunt. Its chosen killing ground was a little distance from the tree where they’d had their first encounter, clear of the band of trees in an open area of scrubby gorse bushes interspersed with heather. At this in-between time of year, as March slid towards April, the new green growth fought for light and space in a landscape still dominated by last year’s contours of woody black and brown. It was hard to believe that in three short months this would all be a carpet of brilliant purple, the hard-packed soil of the pathways crumbling back to a scuff of sand. For now, whatever small scamperers and scurriers were the focus of the owl’s attention from its vantage point on a branch of gorse sought out for their protection the resinous clumps of overwintered heather, springing tough and resilient above the slowly warming earth.
    The barn owl hunched motionless: watching, watching. Then it threw out both its wings and flung forwards, not in the smooth dive of the hawk but a clumsy flurry of feather and claw – yet almost eerily noiseless in the still of the morning. And down, its bleached belly a gleam of white against the dark vegetation, its wings two intersecting arcs of gold. It must have struck its target, because it did not rise again but disappeared from sight beneath the mounded heather. Rebecca turned away and hurried on, finding she had no stomach to confront even in imagination the transaction’s natural end.
    On days when she rose late and lingered over breakfast, she’d find the owl already roosting, always on the same tree as before, on a stubby oak branch some eight or ten feet above the ground. It jutted horizontally from the tree – the lone oak among a group of rowan, ash and hazel – before ending abruptly in a splintered wound, broken off, presumably, in some long-past storm. The trunk of the tree was fractured too, riven with a deep, angry V-shaped gash, perhaps another ravage of the same storm, though to Rebecca’s mind it looked to have caught a glancing blow from the axe of some woodland giant, splitting kindling. Was the bird’s nest in there, she wondered, inside the hollow? You thought of barn owls as nesting in... well, barns: in roof spaces, and empty farm buildings. She must look it up.
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    Rebecca had always been a library person, but the nearest one was Leiston, and you could hardly expect the mobile library van that stopped in the village once a week to have a reference book on owls. However, Janet had recently persuaded her mother online. She’d set her up with a computer – it was just an old one she’d finished with but it was a decent size, with a proper screen and keyboard, not like those fiddly things Josh and Ellie had that they called their ‘notebooks’, was it? – and showed her how to look things up. Silver surfing was the current phrase for it, apparently. ‘Sounds a bit energetic for me, Jan,’ she’d told her, ‘and I’m more of a mousy grey.’ But once you got started it was rather addictive – a terrible swallower of time. People thought you had a lot