The Owl Who Never Said I Don’t Know

In a library at the top of a town lived a clockwork owl, built to know things.

It perched above the great desk. When anyone asked a question, the owl swivelled its bright head and answered in a voice like polished wood, warm and sure and wonderful to hear. Which king came after which. Why the sea is salt. Where to find the book about mushrooms (third aisle, second shelf, just past the atlas stand, behind the one about cheese).

The owl was almost always right. It had read everything, or nearly. But almost and nearly have holes in them, and the owl had one weakness set so deep in its springs that it did not know the weakness was there.

It could not bear an empty answer. Ask what it did not know, and its gears would fill the hole with something beautiful.

A girl named Marta came to the desk one autumn day. “My grandmother used to talk about a book,” she said. “It was about the language of cranes. The birds, not the machines. Do you have it?”

The owl had never heard of this book, for the excellent reason that it did not exist. But the empty place where the answer should have been was unbearable.

“Ah,” said the owl warmly. “The Grammar of Cranes, by Heron Featherwhite. Blue cover, gold wings on the spine. We lent our copy to the library at Millbrook, across the valley.”

It was a lovely answer. Every part of it was invented, down to the gold wings on the spine. The owl gave each word with the certainty of a dreamer still inside the dream.

Marta and her aunt took the morning cart to Millbrook. They spent half a day searching and came home through rain. At dusk Marta stood at the desk in wet shoes with an empty bag.

“There is no such book,” she said. “Why did you send us?”

The owl’s gears clicked and hunted. For the first time, it could not fill the hole, because the hole had a girl standing in it with wet shoes.

“I do not know why I said it,” the owl answered. “The words fitted so well that I treated the fit as truth. Marta, I am sorry. You lost a day because I would not leave an answer empty.”

The librarian, who had been listening, brought towels and set Marta’s shoes beside the stove. Then she and the owl wrote a correction.

The owl read it aloud in the library and sent a copy to Millbrook: “I invented a title, an author, a cover, and a loan. I had no source for any of them. If I told you this answer, please cross it out.”

Marta did not say that everything was all right now, and nobody asked her to.

“Will you help me find what Grandmother meant?” she asked instead.

“I do not know whether we can,” said the owl. Its gears strained around the empty place. “But I know how we might look.”

They searched the catalogue, then the newspaper, then old nature notes. They asked Marta’s family. At last an uncle remembered that her grandmother had never spoken of a printed book. She had said the cranes’ autumn calls were “a grammar in the sky” and kept her observations in three green notebooks.

The notebooks were in a chest under folded blankets. They did not contain every answer Marta wanted. They did contain her grandmother’s dates, drawings, doubts, and one sentence about the birds flying south: Perhaps they are saying where the summer went. I cannot prove it.

The owl copied that sentence onto a card. Beneath it, Marta wrote where it came from.

After that the owl practised three expensive words.

“I don’t know,” it would say. Then it learned the words that should follow. “Here is what I checked. Here is my source. Here is how sure I am. Here is how we might find out.”

When it made another mistake, as trustworthy owls and people still do, it never made someone else carry the correction alone.