The Secret Life of Owen Skye by Alan Cumyn Page A

the Earth. He’d taken to going to bed wearing Doom Monkey’s Atrocious Hat, just in case he needed extraordinary powers.
    â€œMaybe they wanted some milk,” Leonard said.
    â€œThey probably made a mistake,” Andy said. “They were looking for an Earthling and met up with a cow instead.”
    â€œCows are Earthlings too,” Leonard said, and they talked about that for awhile, whether all you needed to do to be an Earthling was to live on the Earth. And if that was the case would birds be Earthlings, since they spent so much time in the air, and what about fish?
    â€œMaybe the aliens captured a bird and a fish and a cow and a human,” Andy said. “Maybe they’re making a zoo on their home planet.”
    The boys talked about what it might be like to be in an Earthling zoo on another planet.
    â€œWhat if they put you in the lion’s cage?” Leonard asked.
    â€œOr they might stick you in with an Earthling girl,” Andy said. “And wait around seeing if you’re going to kiss her.”
    Leonard said he wouldn’t kiss her and Andy asked what if they didn’t give you any food till you did? “You’d have to crack,” Andy said. “You can’t go without food forever!”
    Owen thought it might be all right to be stuck in an Earthling zoo on an alien planet if Sylvia were there. He wouldn’t mind the aliens watching. Maybe after awhile the aliens would start to look like trees or something in the background.
    â€œI wonder what they’d feed you?” Owen asked. Leonard said it was probably mostly ice cream, because most alien planets are quite cold.
    â€œHow do you know they’re cold?” Andy asked.
    â€œMrs. Ogilvie told us,” Leonard said. He was in grade one and was beginning to know weird facts. He knew the phases of the moon and why Holland was under water.
    â€œWhy would the aliens spend their time on cold planets when they could go to hot ones?” Owen asked.
    â€œMrs. Ogilvie said that most of the universe is expanding gas,” Leonard said. “And the dinosaurs disappeared because they couldn’t adopt.”
    â€œAdopt children?” Andy asked.
    Leonard hesitated, then said yes.
    â€œOf course they couldn’t adopt children!” Andy said. “They’re dinosaurs!”
    â€œAnd that’s why they died out!” Leonard said. “Mrs. Ogilvie said so!”
    Horace called out then that they were supposed to go to sleep, but Andy had a plan that they should go to Eliot Brinks’ barn and see where the cow had been stolen. He thought there might be some clues about the aliens. Leonard said he thought they should just leave the aliens alone.
    â€œThat’s fine,” Andy said. “You can stay here and leave the aliens alone. We’ll go ahead, and we won’t bother you with any details about what we find out.”
    â€œI’m not going at night,” Owen said, and they agreed it might be better to wait for a Saturday afternoon so Uncle Lorne wouldn’t have to come out and rescue them.
    On Saturday the boys set out for Mr. Brinks’ barn. Leonard came too because he couldn’t stand to stay home alone. There hadn’t been anymore reports on the news about flying saucers. But Andy had been picking up some very strange signals on his crystal radio — whirring rattles and odd
glop-glop
noises that he wasn’t able to decipher even using the table of weights and measures.
    Mr. Brinks’ farm was on the other side of Dead Man’s Hill, across the river and up one more set of fields. Andy figured that the aliens had flown straight over Dead Man’s Hill at the appointed time but couldn’t see them because they had been in the fort.
    â€œWhat do you think the aliens look like?” Owen asked. Andy had borrowed a book from the library, and in it were many sketches of aliens made from