The Barn Owl and the Late Train

The last train went through at eight minutes to midnight, and Ivy set her night by it.

She was a barn owl, and she lived in the old brick barn at the top of the field where the land came down to the railway. She had a beam near the roof, out of the draught, and from it, through the gap where a slate had gone, she could see the line: two thin silver threads running along the bottom of the valley, out of the dark at one end and into the dark at the other.

She did not need a clock. She had the train.

It came from the left, always, and you heard it before you saw it: a low hum in the rails that turned into a rush, and then the lights came round the bend by the bridge, three yellow windows and a fourth, and went along the bottom of the field, and were gone to the right, and the hum went after them, and then it was very quiet. And in that quiet, every night, Ivy went out. That was the arrangement. Train, then hunt. The mice in the long grass by the line had the same arrangement, from the other side; they lay low until the ground stopped shaking, and then came out to see what had been shaken loose, and so did she.

Tonight she sat on the beam and waited, and the train did not come.

She did not notice at first. You do not notice a thing that does not happen. She noticed the quiet going on, and herself sitting in it, and at some point she noticed that the quiet was the wrong shape, and had been for some time, and that the mice would be out by now and she was still here.

She listened to the rails. Nothing. She looked left, to the bend by the bridge. Dark.

“Well,” said Ivy.

She could have gone out anyway. The mice would be there whether the train came or not, and it was nothing to do with her. But she sat a little longer with her face turned to the left, and the train did not come, and did not come, and she found she could not settle to a night that had not properly started.

So she went to see.

She dropped from the beam and out through the slate gap and over the field without a sound, low, the way she flew, with the long grass going by grey beneath her. She crossed the hedge and came to the line and turned left along it, and flew up the valley with the two rails going away in front of her like something drawn with a ruler.

Past the bridge. Past the bend. The line ran into a cutting here, a deep one, with steep banks of bramble on either side and the rails going down the middle of it, and it was here, as she came over the lip of the bank, that she saw the train.

It was stopped.

It was standing in the cutting with all four windows lit, and its engine making a low grumbling sound to itself, the sound of a thing that has been told to wait and does not think much of it. A little way ahead of it a signal stood on its post with a red eye, and the train was looking at the red eye, and the red eye was looking back, and neither of them was going to be the first to move.

Ivy landed on the top of the signal and looked down the line.

There was a sheep on it.

She was standing between the rails a little way ahead of the train, side on, quite still, in the way that sheep stand when they have run out of ideas. She was a big pale ewe with a mark on her shoulder, and she was not eating, and she was not going anywhere, and she had the look of an animal who has been in this position for some time and would give a great deal to be somewhere else.

Ivy dropped down onto the rail beside her.

“Evening,” she said.

The sheep turned her head. It took her a moment to find the owl, and then she looked at her the way sheep look at everything, as if it might be about to explain itself.

“I’m on the line,” said the sheep.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t mean to be. There’s a gap. In the fence. I went through it after some grass, and then I was down here, and then there was all that.” She turned her head a fraction towards the train, and turned it back. “And I can’t see the gap now. It’s dark. I’ve looked.”

Her name was Peggy. Ivy knew the flock, the way you know your neighbours, and had seen her often enough from the barn, generally facing the wrong way.

“I can see it,” said Ivy.

Peggy looked at her.

“I can see the gap. It’s up there,” and she turned her head all the way round, which sheep find unsettling, and looked up the bank, “past the bramble, by the post with the lean on it. Twenty steps. I’ll go in front.”

“Twenty steps,” said Peggy, as if it were a lot.

“About.”

The owl flew. Not far: up off the rail, to the foot of the bank, and stopped there, on a stone, white in the dark, where a sheep could see her. Peggy looked at the white shape. She looked, briefly, back at the train, whose engine grumbled. Then she put one foot over the rail, and another, and came.

It was slow. Sheep do not like banks in the dark, and they like brambles less, and Peggy said so, more than once, and Ivy waited for her each time and did not say anything, and moved on when she caught up. Up the bank. Round the bramble. Along the top where the fence ran, to the post with the lean on it, and there, sure enough, hidden in the dark to anyone without an owl’s eyes, was the gap: two wires down and a third pushed up, and grass on the other side, and beyond the grass, the pale shapes of the flock, all lying down, all facing the same way, all asleep.

Peggy went through. She went through the way she had come, a little too fast, and caught her wool on the wire and left some, and stood on the other side, in the field, on grass, and looked back at Ivy on the post, and did not say thank you, because it did not occur to her, and Ivy did not mind, because it did not occur to her either.

“Night,” said Ivy.

“Night,” said Peggy, and went to lie down with the others, and did, facing the wrong way.

Below, in the cutting, the red eye of the signal went out and a green one came on.

The train did not move at once. It sat for a moment as though it did not believe it. Then the grumbling changed its note, and there was a long hiss, and the four lit windows began to go, very slowly at first and then not slowly at all, along the cutting and under the bridge and away down the valley towards the barn, and the hum went after it in the rails, and then that went too.

Ivy sat on the fence post and let the quiet come back.

It was the right shape now. She could feel it. Somewhere down the line the ground had shaken and stopped, and in the long grass by the rails the mice were putting their heads out, late, and wondering what had kept everybody.

She dropped off the post and went down the valley after the train, low and white and silent over the grass, and the night, which had been waiting for her, began.

Later, much later, with the sky going grey over the hills, she came back to the barn and in through the slate gap and up to her beam, and settled, and folded her face into her feathers. The line lay silver at the bottom of the field. The flock lay pale on the far side of it. Nothing hummed. Nothing came.

The first train was not till six. There was a long while yet. Ivy slept.