When they reached the tree where Hooty was, he was
blinking his great yellow eyes and had fluffed out
all his feathers, which is a way he has when he is
angry, to make himself look twice as big as he really
is. Of course, he had heard the noisy crew coming,
and he knew well enough what to expect. As soon
as they saw him, they began to scream as loud as ever
they could and to call him all manner of names.
The boldest of them would dart at him as if to pull
out a mouthful of feathers, but took the greatest
care not to get too near. You see, the way Hooty
hissed and snapped his great bill was very threatening,
and they knew that if once he got hold of one of them
with those big cruel claws of his, that would be the
end.
So they were content to simply scold and scream at
him and fly around him, just out of reach, and make
him generally uncomfortable, and they were so busy
doing this that no one noticed that Blacky was not
joining in the fun, and no one paid any attention to
the old tumble-down nest of Redtail the Hawk only
a few trees distant. So far Blacky’s plans
were working out just as he had hoped.
CHAPTER VI: Hooty The Owl Doesn’t Stay Still
Now what’s the good of being
smart
When others do not do their part?
If Blacky the Crow didn’t say this to himself,
he thought it. He knew that he had made a very
cunning plan to get the eggs of Hooty the Owl, a plan
so shrewd and cunning that no one else in the Green
Forest or on the Green Meadows would have thought of
it. There was only one weakness in it, and that
was that it depended for success on having Hooty the
Owl do as he usually did when tormented by a crowd
of noisy Crows, — stay where he was until
they got tired and flew away.
Now Blacky sometimes makes a mistake that smart people
are very apt to make; he thinks that because he is
so smart, other people are stupid. That is where
he proves that smart as he is, he isn’t as smart
as he thinks he is. He always thought of Hooty
the Owl as stupid. That is, he always thought
of him that way in daytime. At night, when he
was waked out of a sound sleep by the fierce hunting
cry of Hooty, he wasn’t so sure about Hooty being
stupid, and he always took care to sit perfectly still
in the darkness, lest Hooty’s great ears should
hear him and
Hooty’s great eyes, made for seeing in the dark,
should find him. No, in the night Blacky was
not at all sure that Hooty was stupid.
But in the daytime he was sure. You see, he
quite forgot the fact that the brightness of day is
to Hooty what the blackness of night is to him.
So, because Hooty would simply sit still and hiss
and snap his bill, instead of trying to catch his
tormentors or flying away, Blacky called him stupid.
He felt sure that Hooty would stay right where he
was now, and he hoped that Mrs. Hooty would lose her
temper and leave the nest where she was sitting on
those two eggs and join Hooty to help him try to drive
away that noisy crew.
