RAW KINGDOM ENTERTAINMENT

                     The Owl’s Punishment

 Word of Uncle Fuzzball’s passing drifted through the forest with the first pale glimmer of dawn, carried swiftly on the wings of the ever-talkative jays. Just as he had bidden his sons and daughters before the end, Squeaky-Hazzel stepped out beneath the waking boughs and shared the night’s sorrow.
 She soon crossed paths with old Gossipjay, a matronly jay known to all the woodland for her sharp tongue and sharper hearing. To her Squeaky-Hazzel told the tale in full—of Uncle Fuzzball’s quiet death, and of the young squirrel stolen away under the cover of darkness.
 But Gossipjay could scarcely bear to hear the tale to its end. Her feathers bristled like wind-stirred brush; she gave a piercing cry that echoed among the trunks, and off she shot beneath the great limbs of the forest, eager—almost burning—to scatter the news to every nest and hollow.

 Squeaky-Hazzel heard the cry echoing out of the forest, sharp as a jay’s warning: “Shame! Shame!”
And in but a few minutes more, the whole wood seemed to murmur with the tale of that night’s mishap.
 Blacky the raven and Silver-Top—chief of the wandering crow-folk who roosted in the deep places of the forest and had suffered more than once beneath the owl’s fierce swoop—gathered their flocks in a dark whirling storm of wings and raised the alarm. The blackbirds, for their part, carried the word swiftly among the small and peaceful folk of the branches. They whispered it to the tits, tapped it out to the woodpeckers, and even passed it along to the tiny kinglets, the smallest and most flutter-light of all who dwelt beneath the green canopy.
 All through the forest they sought the owl. In a shadowed grove the crows had gathered with their dark-plumed cousins, the ravens, for a grave and murmuring council. Jays flitted to and fro in restless companies, searching every bramble and bough. Curious and bright-eyed, the tits and woodpeckers crept along the trunks, peering into hollows as though each might hold a secret. Before they set about hollowing the softer trees, the woodpeckers paused to listen, and the nutcrackers—kin to the jays—let loose their shrill, startling cries that rang through the dim paths of the wood.
 At last Gossipjay came upon the owl. Well fed and heavy with sleep, he had dozed off outside his own hollow, perched on the low branches of an old linden that rose in the thickest and most shadowed heart of the forest.
The moment she caught sight of him, Gossipjay let out a piercing cry, her feathers bristling as though at some ancient wrong.

“Murderer! Murderer! Here he is! Here he is!” she shrieked, swooping down to alight boldly above his head.

The owl stirred, opening his great yellow-red eyes with slow displeasure. He regarded her with something like scorn, then gave himself a lazy shake, as if brushing off a troublesome thought.

“Here he is! Here he is! Hold him!” screamed the jay from the branches, her voice sharp enough to rattle the hush of the grove.

 Her cry rang out so sharply that every bird of field and forest heard it. Blackbirds stirred uneasily upon the ground; nuthatches darted swiftly toward the place where the owl brooded in its shadow. Magpies chattered in fretful bursts, then one by one lifted into the air and sped over the darkening wood. Then Blacky gave his deep, and brazen call—a sound like a battle-horn—and after him, sweeping together like a single storm-wrought cloud, came the ravens and the crows.
 The ancient linden groaned under the sudden weight of jays, magpies, and ravens crowding its branches. Tiny titmouses, kinglets, and finches hid trembling in the nearby leaves, their hearts fluttering like trapped moths. Woodpeckers struck the dead limbs with fierce precision, their beaks tapping so quickly and so many times that the forest seemed to thrum with the beat of distant drums.
 With a harsh, wrathful caw, Blacky hurled himself upon the owl, and the crows wheeled in to aid him. Every bird pressed forward in haste, each eager to land its blow upon the bristling killer of the night.
 The owl reeled upon the linden, blinded by the harsh light of the day, his fiery eyes squinting against the sun’s cruelty. Wings half-unfurled, feathers bristling like brambles, he perched in menace, talons gripping the branch as if it were the last hold in all the world. A strange fire burned behind his gaze, and the soft, downy plumage of his legs seemed like socked limbs made for some ancient, secret purpose. Twice he tried to rise, to take the air, but the forest’s smaller denizens would not let him.
 Crows and magpies assailed him without pause. A cunning old crow darted, intent to peck out his eyes, while a bold magpie clambered across his back, pecking with relentless mischief. The forest echoed with their clamor, a ceaseless chorus of beaks and wings, while the owl defended himself with all the wrath of a creature unaccustomed to such insolence. Above them, the linden swayed, the sunlight breaking through the leaves in scattered, trembling beams, and in those fleeting shafts, the owl’s hellish eyes glimmered like embers in the dark. A magpie, black as a shadow in twilight, settled upon his back, pecking insistently at the crown of his head, while his startled eyes darted beneath the tangled feathers.