Summer of the Spotted Owl (2 page)

Now a fresh weary sigh gusted over the flagstone deck to me. “Dinah, if you could please cut the volume down by a few decibels …”

She went back inside. I grinned smugly. I viewed all comments about my loudness, whether favorable or not, as compliments. Some people were ace hockey players, some people sewed exquisitely — I belted out. It was just what I did.

A shadow dipped
over the tall, thick privet hedge bordering the Urstads' huge garden. Another hang glider! Paddling the inflatable turtle over to the poolside, I grabbed a towel and wiped off my glasses and clip-ons. Then I sat up on the turtle, ready to welcome the glider riders with a softer “Bombs away!” that wouldn't bother Madge.

Except that there was just one rider this time. An inept rider, apparently. He had plunged his bright red hang glider lower over the Urstads' garden than any of the previous gliders I'd seen. So low that the wing-like shadow inked over the entire deck and pool.

“Whoa,” I said. The rider, furiously wrenching at the hang glider's metal bar, resembled a giant insect with his bubble-shaped helmet, goggly sunglasses and skinny, black-bodysuited legs fluttering behind. He was zooming in a steep diagonal line from hedge-top to pool …

“I've heard of dropping in on people, but this is ridiculous,” I yelled. Tipping myself off the turtle, I thrashed to the pool's edge with wild, uncoordinated strokes that Jack definitely would not have approved of.

The rider shouted angrily, “What're you doing there, you stupid kid — watch out!”

I
was stupid? He was the one crashing into the Urstads' pool.

Granted, this was no time for sarcastic comebacks on my part. I was already running for the French doors.

With a
whoosh
, the hang glider descended.
Cr-r-a-
a-ck
! The shimmering red wings struck the sides of the pool and bent back, like a flower folding its petals.

The glider rider himself smacked the pool. Tidal-wave-like splashes shot up around him.

“Madge!” I bellowed. What if the rider hadn't survived his crash landing? I hurried back over the now-sodden deck to peer under the broken glider wings.

Luckily for the rider, he'd plunged into the deep end. He lurched from the water, gasping, and climbed the ladder.

“Are you okay?” I asked before turning to yell again. “Madge!” I padded close to the glider rider to squint at him for broken bones or other injuries.

“Get away!” He flapped long, skinny hands at me. In his goggles, I saw myself reflected: a short, chubby pre-teen with chin-length red hair plastered to the sides of her head.

“Have you ever thought of taking lessons?” I inquired helpfully. “You missed the landing field by several blocks.”

The glider rider reached a skinny hand up and scratched vigorously inside the neck of his bodysuit. “Just my luck,” he complained in a high, peevish voice that was almost as raspy as the sound of his scratching. “A pint-sized busybody.”
Scratch
,
scratch
.

“That must be some itch,” I remarked, ignoring the insult to my height.

The French doors slid open. “Dinah?” Madge emerged.

Itchy gawked. Males usually did at the sight of my sister, even when, as now, she was in a rumpled smock and had a green splotch of paint on her nose.

Madge gave a shriek. “What's happened to the pool?”

“Let's just say we're not in the presence of the world's most gifted pilot,” I said.

Itchy's hand rose to scrabble through his carrot-colored hair.
Scr-r-ratch
! His thin lips, which were all we could see of his face, parted to bleat, “Listen, I try to stay out of trouble. It's not my fault.”

Shaking his head mournfully, Itchy lifted a spinach-like object off his foot.

“Hey — that's my inflatable turtle!” I objected.

Or what was left of my turtle. Itchy's foot had punctured it.

I thought he'd hand the wrecked turtle back to me. Instead, clutching it, Itchy sprinted away from us. He plunged over the edge of the Urstads' garden and down the steep canyon slope. For some moments afterward, the sound of crackling branches and painful yelps echoed back to us.

Chapter Two
Save the Spotted Owl!

W
hen Jack arrived, we were so anxious to show him the hang glider that we practically dragged him out of his ancient jeep. “Puh-leeze. Have mercy,” begged Madge's sandy-haired, freckle-faced fiancé.

We knew he was referring to the jeep, not himself. Jack was very fond of this tattered, battered vehicle. Maybe because he'd been able to coax it across the country from Toronto last summer, when he'd moved in with his sister— another neighbor of ours — and into our lives as well.

Somehow Jack kept the jeep going with frequent oil changes and yards and yards of duct tape to hold the door, windows and canvas roof in place. There was an alarming ripping sound now from the driver's door as we hauled him out by the elbows. Time for yet more duct tape.

“Three guesses what's in the Urstads' swimming pool,” Madge said.

“Water?” Jack's gray eyes twinkled at her.

“Think more along the lines of the Loch Ness monster,” Madge advised. She and I marched him into the Urstads' round, white, marble-floored foyer.

Jack whistled. “Would ya look at this place!” He gazed up the curving stairs to the blue and white stained glass dome on the roof. “Gosh, Dorothy, I have a feeling we aren't in Kansas anymore.”

“The Urstads inherited tons of money,” I informed him. I knew because I'd overheard Mrs. Urstad telling Mother about it when they put their East Van house — like ours, old and rambling, with pipes that bee-bopped — up for sale.

“It's vulgar to gossip, Dinah,” Madge reproved. We bustled Jack through the long living room, with its row of French doors that gave an imax view of Capilano Canyon.

“Vulgar but satisfying,” I shot back. Curiosity, I believed, was a healthy thing.

“Whoa.” Jack gaped at the broken hang glider. “Does nasa know about this?”

I explained at some length, complete with sound effects, about Itchy and the theft of my inflatable turtle.

Then Madge, who said she was developing a headache, asked Jack to remove me for a while. Remove me! I liked
that
. It was not I, Dinah Galloway, who'd kamikazed into the Urstads' pool.

I grumbled about the injustice of this while changing in the bedroom Mrs. Urstad had said I could use. Actually, compared to the rooms at our house in East Van, the bedroom was more like a stadium.

I said loudly, hoping my sister could hear, “Headache schmeadache. Awfully feminine, aren't we?”

“Huh? Who was that?” said a gruff voice coming from the backyard.

I peered out the window. A burly man in yellow work overalls, with
District of North Vancouver
in red on the back, was gathering up the broken hang glider. He spotted me.

“Hey, whass the idea?”

“Uh, sorry.” I gave him a bared-teeth smile. “I was —er, practicing for a show.”

The leathery folds of the man's face relaxed. “Yeah, I know you. You do the tv commercials for Sol's Salami, no?”

“No. I mean, yes,” I said, relieved that he wasn't angry anymore. I was also pleased that he liked the salami commercials. I'd been doing radio ones for several months now, and, delighted with his increased sausage sales, Sol had decided to start putting me on tv.

Cramming a crumpled hang glider wing under one arm, the man began to conduct with his free hand. I felt I had no choice but to sing along with him.

You'll eat till you burst
At Sol's on West First!

I stopped after two rounds, though the man seemed ready to continue on indefinitely. “Can I ask you something?” I demanded. “My sister hasn't even phoned in a complaint yet. She was going to sit down and do that after I left. But here you are already.”

The man shrugged. “I do like I'm told, kid. Hey — keep up the good singing, okay?” He strode off, dragging the mangled hang glider behind him.

By the time
I climbed into Jack's jeep, the District of North Vancouver van was whipping round the corner of the Urstads' street, Marisa Drive. Fragments of the Sol's Salami song, which the man was roaring out, echoed back to us.

“Maybe a neighbor reported the hang-glider crash,” Jack suggested. “I'll admit, though, that we don't get this kind of prompt service in Vancouver.”

He started the jeep. It bounced us violently for a few seconds, as it always did when it got going. Then it calmed down, its engine letting out satisfied cackles.

We ended up following the van to the District of North Vancouver's municipal hall. The van disappeared into a parking lot; we parked on the street. Protesters were marching up and down with signs:
Save The Spotted Owl
and
Ban Planless Development
.

“What does that mean, ‘Ban Planless Development'?” I asked.

Jack lifted me out of his car. He had to do this as the passenger door was inoperable. “Planless developers,” he explained, “are the ones who plow down old-growth forests without considering the wildlife that may be living there. In southwest bc, our forests are home to lots of animals besides the few remaining spotted owls: Rocky Mountain tailed frogs, cougars, white-tailed deer, hairy woodpeckers, northern goshawks. They and other species have been reduced by twenty-five percent because of thoughtless industrial logging.”

I was looking so horrified that he grinned at me. “I'm still an optimist, Di. I think it's just a matter of getting people to be more aware of what lives in the forest. Most people, including developers, are willing to listen if we're willing to talk to them.”

Jack's arrival brought cheers from the protesters, most of whom appeared to be students. Somebody thrust a megaphone into his hand.

Jack pulled a wooden crate from the back seat of the jeep. He placed the crate upside down on the sidewalk and stood on it. He winked at me. “Are we state-of-the-art, or what?”

“Anyhow,” he explained, “what we're protesting is a current district bylaw that allows logging and development into the section of canyon bordered by Marisa Drive. We've had reports of a spotted owl family living in that part of the canyon, and we want the bylaw changed. We think we've got a strong case, since the whole neighborhood is supporting us.”

“That's cool of them.”

Jack's grin became wry. “Some of them are cool. Some are just plain self-interested. See, if that section of canyon is built up, their views disappear and their property values go down.

“But, know what?” He chucked me under the chin. “You find your allies where you can.”

Jack raised the megaphone. “Hi, everyone! Thanks for coming. I'm Jack French, and I —”

Whistles and applause. Jack was the naturally popular type thanks to his honest, up-front personality—and also, in my view, because he gave short speeches.

“—and I thought I'd start off by telling you about a grouchy but lovable great-aunt of mine. Whenever something happened that she didn't like — sloppy newspaper delivery, not enough sunshine for her begonias — Great-Aunt Hilda would snap, ‘There oughtta be a law against this. There just oughtta.' ”

Appreciative laughter from the crowd about Great-Aunt Hilda.

“Well,” and Jack rubbed his chin ruefully, “in the case of the spotted owl, there
is
a law. Just not a very good one. The federal Species At Risk Act, or sara. Now, the common belief is sara protects all species at risk. Wrong-oh. sara only applies to the very limited areas of Canada under federal government control. In British Columbia, that adds up to an unimpressive one percent of our land base. Like, whoop-dee-doo.

“Meanwhile, with no endangered species law of its own, British Columbia has now logged over half the sites where small numbers of spotted owls still live.”

“That sucks big-time!”

Right on, I thought, and cheered.

Wait a minute.
I'd
shouted that. I tend to get a bit carried away when I'm feeling emotional. And emotion, for me, generally translates into
volume
.

One reason I'd been feeling kind of choked was that some of the students were holding photos of baby spotted owls, little and fluffy white before their spots grew. Jack had told me how the wee owls have a tough enough time making it to adulthood, even without being killed by logging. Up to seventy-eight percent of them are attacked and gobbled up by ravens, hawks and even great horned owls (talk about disagreeable relatives!).

There'd been reports of one male spotted owl calling for a female mate— and hearing only his echo in return from the forest. There was no mate left for him.

Jack was saying, “All we're asking for is a chance to discuss—”

“Just a minute, young Mr. French!”

A round, pink, middle-aged man with wisps of carrot-colored hair fluttering atop his head bowled through the protesters. He was waving a large white hanky. At first I thought it was a flag of surrender, but then I realized he was using it to keep mopping at his face.

Jack smiled dangerously. “We have every right to protest.”

“Of course you do,” the round man said jovially. Sticking out a flabby pink hand, he shoved Jack off the crate and clambered up on it himself.

“Hi, everyone! I'm Councillor Rock Cordes!”

Boos. Some of the other councillors had been sympathetic to the protests, but in interviews Councillor Cordes had sneered at what he called “Young Mr. French and his feathered friends.”

But now the councillor beamed. “I'm here with good news! At our next council meeting, on the nineteenth, I'm putting forward a motion to ban all future development off Marisa Drive. And trust me,” he barked out a laugh, “when Rock speaks, the other councillors don't chip away at him!”