Most of the folks were older men and women. Some were from his own village, and the lad was surprised by some of the ones he recognized. He decided that he wasn’t very good at guessing witches. He didn’t see any other males his age and figured that this might have been why it was so easy to infiltrate the group. They wanted young men.
He noticed movement at the edges of the clearing. People’s forms leaped and cavorted out of the circle of light, jumping high like human grasshoppers. Othersfrittered in the trees like squirrels, and some even made leaps that became brief flights in and out of the clearing. Others changed more slowly.
He’d been thinking about a girl he was sorry to see here, and when he saw her again she had cat’s ears. In another minute she bounded into the shadows like a mountain lion. Someone who had turned into a squirrel started chasing someone who’d become a bobcat. The antics ended in a wrestling match that had everyone hooting and snarling with laughter.
Too fascinated to be afraid, the youth stood and stared. At first no one seemed to wonder why he, too, didn’t transform, but soon a couple came over to him. Their horns and feathers, he thought, concealed veteran witches, and he was terrified that they would know he hadn’t tried their potion. Then he noticed a handful of others still in human form, all of them young women and girls. He thought quickly.
“I can’t turn into anything,” he said to someone next to him.
“It’s hard the first time,” said an old man with drooping hound ears.
A woman’s voice beside him said, “What would you like to be?” He turned and saw a squat pile of tusks, nostrils, eyes, and fur that he thought might have been a wild pig.
“A screech owl,” he said. They greeted this with snorting and huffing that he took to be approval.
“We’ve got just the thing,” said a man with stag antlers coming out of his long gray hair. Other mostly human folk went into the dimness and came back with a hat made out of a horned owl’s head. They handed it to him but told him to wait before wearing it.
“When you put that on,” one said, “you’ll take the owl’s form instantly. You’ll fly like a bird. But if you don’t practice a bit before you put it on, you might kill yourself and take our hat with you.”
“How do you practice being an owl?” the youth said.
“Practice acting like an owl,” said a stag with the voice of an elder he knew.
“Practice thinking like an owl,” said a girl still in her own form. “That’s what they always tell me.” The young man recognized her, an orphan being raised by a great aunt he’d seen around the fire earlier. He noticed how pretty she was.
He started making the movements of the owls he’d seen: preening beneathhis arms with his nose as if it were a beak, moving his elbows as if they were folded wings, turning his head sharply, even trying out a few screeches. There was howling around him that he took to be laughter. “He’ll be a boss witch once he gets going,” said a big dog.
“Boss owl, anyway,” said a big old man with a panther nose and teeth.
The meeting started to break up. The handful who had kept their human forms took separate trails into the woods, including the orphan girl who cast him a glance as she left hand in paw with a bear. Others went off as foxes, wolves, panthers, hawks, and owls. A handful of animals, people, and animal people still surrounded him, watching him curiously. He put on the hat. Its beak covered his nose. He looked through its eye sockets. The world changed.
Before he knew it, he was flapping wings. In a few strokes, he was aloft, straight up through the trees, and then soaring and darting on the currents. At first he was ecstatic. The speed, the wind! The moonlight silvering the treetops below! He could see in the darkness as if the moon were a sun. He saw the sudden movement of a small animal by a creek and could hardly stop himself from diving after it.
But even after practicing, he was a beginner owl. It was hard to flap and steer, and he was not used to looking with those eyes. How different the world was through them, and from above! All he saw were treetops, hills, and creeks.
In sudden terror of losing his way, he thought only to get back to his village. He flew in ever-widening circles from where he thought he’d started, hoping to spot the fires, rooftops, or fields of a settlement. He knew his village was the closest to the clearing from which he’d started, but how far had he flown?
He saw smoke in the distance and headed toward it. Soon he saw a stream and cleared fields. He heard a dog barking and knew he was near a village. He got closer and tried to hover. Surely it was his own village. He tried to perch on the peak of the roof of his family’s longhouse, but he landed too hard, and the magic headpiece toppled into the smoke hole. Immediately, he took back his own form, and plunged feet first through the opening after the hat.
He clung with his elbows to the edges of the hole in the roof, his legs dangling. The dogs went crazy, leaping for his ankles, and his cousins jumped up reaching for war clubs. Before he let go, he tried to yell out who he was,
