Olwen the Owl Who Did Not Like the Dark

Everybody knows that owls love the dark. Olwen had read it in a book, which she had read in the daytime, with the curtains open.

Olwen did not love the dark. Olwen thought the dark was overrated.

"It's just the day with the lights off," she told her mother. "I don't see what the fuss is about."

"But that's when owls work," said her mother. "That's when we fly and hunt and hoot."

"I could hoot in the morning," said Olwen. "Nobody's tried it."

Her mother sighed, which owls do by puffing out all their feathers and letting them down again, and told her to come along, the sun was setting.

Olwen came along. But she came prepared.

First she put on her spectacles. She did not need spectacles, owls have excellent eyes, but she felt they made the dark look more organised. Then she tucked a dandelion clock under one wing, because it was pale and round and a bit like a tiny moon. Then she asked a passing glow-worm whether it would mind terribly sitting on her head.

"For how long?" asked the glow-worm.

"Until morning."

"I have plans," said the glow-worm, and left.

So Olwen flew out into the dusk with her spectacles and her dandelion, and the dusk got dusker, and then it was night.

"There," said her mother. "Isn't it lovely?"

Olwen looked round. She could see perfectly well, that was the annoying thing. She could see the mouse under the hedge and the fox on the hill and every leaf on every tree. Owls can. It just all looked so dark while she was doing it.

"Hmph," said Olwen.

She hooted, a bit, to be polite. Then she sat on a branch with her dandelion and waited for the night to be over.

That was when the small person came out.

It was a child, in pyjamas, with a torch, and it was looking for something in the garden. Olwen watched it. The child looked under a bush. The child looked behind a flowerpot. Then the child looked up, and saw a round owl in spectacles holding a dandelion, and stopped.

"Hello," said the child.

"Hello," said Olwen, though it came out as "hoo".

"Have you seen a star?" said the child. "A yellow one. It fell off my ceiling. It's the kind that shines in the dark."

Olwen had not. But owls can see everything, so she looked, and there it was, caught in the grass by the gate, a flat yellow star glowing faintly all by itself.

She flew down, picked it up gently in her beak, and dropped it into the child's hand.

"You found it!" said the child. "You're really good at the dark."

Olwen opened her beak to say she was not, that she did not even like it, and then closed it again. Because she had found the star. And she had only found it because it was dark. In the daytime a small yellow star in the grass would have been nothing at all. In the dark, it had shone.

"Can I keep it?" asked Olwen.

The child looked at the star and then at the owl.

"Okay," said the child. "But look after it."

Olwen flew back to her branch with a yellow star in her beak and put it carefully next to her dandelion. She took her spectacles off. She looked at the dark properly, for the first time, without anything in front of her eyes, and found that it was full of small things shining that she had never bothered to notice.

"Hoo," said Olwen softly. It was not a polite hoot. It was a real one.

In the garden, a bedroom light went off. Olwen tucked the star under her wing, where it glowed against her feathers like a secret, and sat very still in the night she was beginning, just a little, to like.