The First Owl in Outer Space

Erin Hogan

In 1962, they put an owl into outer space. After the dogs, before the woman. Nobody knows this; it has been kept secret. The owl didn’t want to go. No animal anyone ever sent into outer space has ever had a choice. They didn’t matter as much as humans, so into the capsule they went, to death or dementia. This particular owl was taken from the Siberian tundra. She was out hunting for her family when she was caught up in a net that lay hidden in the snow. She lay still, as her mother had taught her to do in such situations, and remained calm as big men in faded blue snowsuits with faded red collars came to collect her and put her in the back of a truck in a cage with a blanket over it. When they removed the blanket, she was in a brightly lit white room. She turned her head this way then that way. She blinked her big, yellow eyes. As a man approached her cage, she arranged her feathers and took a deep breath. He opened the door. She lay still. He reached inside with leather gloves and put both his hands around her body. She stayed still. He turned and said something to his colleagues. She couldn’t understand his words, but she could understand body language. He was happy with her compliance, and proud of himself that he could handle her in this way. Pride is easy to read. He turned his head to her and something on his face looked like flattery. A smile. A patronizing softness to the eyes. He nodded to his colleague, and back into the cage she went with a piece of raw fowl, which she poked, sniffed, and kicked to the side.

Over the next days, she was trained. Trained. Trained. At the end of these sessions, she still didn’t know what that meant. Her handlers indicated for her to do something, and she did it. This is trained. Not knowledge. Training. She did learn a few things, though. She learned, for instance, that if a human with a glove on held up a piece of flesh and she flew over, landed, and ate a little of that flesh, they would be most pleased. That this might be the accomplishment of the day. With this, she learned that humans are keen on being busy. The busyness is the accomplishment. Her instinct in these situations was to fight. To flap her gigantic wings furiously and go for the soft parts of the face. To dig into the soft heads of her captors with her claws. This was her instinct.

People forget something when dealing with creatures. They always forget. In almost all animal life, there is not only instinct, but also strategy. Every day, most vertebrate species uses both of these, more or less, depending upon the situation. Humans take it for granted that they use both. Sometimes they give credit to wolves or to orcas. Rarely to birds. Bird brain. Size of an almond. Bird brain. Bird brain. Birdbrain. This birdbrain that has survived millions of years. Her brain was not as complex (a word she heard over and over again and understood it to mean important) as a primate’s, her senses—particularly those of sight and hearing—were a kind of intelligence that the humans might translate to something like intellect. She could hear, for instance, the difference in people’s voices, what inflections showed up in their speech and how that indicated what kind of person they were, whether they would punish her for a naughty flap of the wings or laugh. She could hear pride. She could hear sorrow and jealousy and happiness and sweetness and kindness. Cruelty. Can’t we all? She could see the little muscles on the face of her captors, little muscles most humans couldn’t see. The twinge of regret in the eyebrow; the clench of disgust where the jaw hinged; the flicker of fear in the eyelash. All such tiny movements and put together with all of the other movements of the face, all of the other movements everywhere in the body, and the bodies around those bodies and the room they held her captive in with the clocks and alarms and calendars, one could easily miss them. But not the owl. This was her job. This was her life. Spotting things nobody else could spot. And in the moment of the hunt, when killing is critical to survival, that is what she does. 

Human brains and bird brains do have one thing in common. That reptilian part has never quite been lost. The eat-or-be-eaten ethos. The very basic, simplistic, elemental instinct of survival. At any cost. Why else put people or other animals or anything into a tin rocket and blast it off into the unknown? Survival and fear. Fear that this planet may one day not be enough. And of course, a conquering arrogance, but maybe one fed by fear. And she understood fear, this owl. She understood, as an apex predator, what it was to instill fear into something smaller than her. She knew what it was to take a life, to swoop down upon a mouse as it tried to scurry back to shelter. The owl knew what it was to kill it, to crush the mouse in her beak and swallow it down whole, bones and all. She knew what it was like to bring meat home for her family so that they, too, could survive. The owl knew her purpose and she knew fear, but she wasn’t ruled by it. The mouse in the field wasn’t ruled by it either. Everyone knew the rules of engagement and their role within it. 

These people lived on fear. Often the room was so thick with it she could smell it, the sickly fear-sweat. Everything they did was done with a kind of harried fear. Fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of falling. The owl didn’t understand fear without threat, and during times of overwhelming chaos she kept to the back of her cage. She did not make it easy for the gloved hand to bring her out when everything was quick and disordered and ugly. This feeling was no good, and she didn’t understand why they created so much of it. It did nothing, it facilitated nothing. If she spent her days this way, she never would have made it past the first few months of life, distracted and distracting. She tried to ignore this chaos, so cloudy and loud.

When her handlers were ready, they fitted her with a little silver suit, talons tucked up, wings tucked back, and a helmet, complete with two spots for her plumicorns and room for her beak. This pleased them and they tapped on her visor, grinning and laughing. She closed her eyes. They closed the hatch. She waited in the silence of the capsule, watching the lights on the dashboard, feeling the heat from below. She heard the numbers. And then, they blasted off. Just her in the little tin shuttle, hurtling out into space. 

The owl was grateful for the helmet. The amount of noise she was hearing with it on was almost too much. She would have died if she’d had to hear it at full volume. She was grateful for the suit, too. As the shuttle broke the sound barrier and went into orbit, things got warm. All this sound, all this fury, all of these blinding lights, and then . . . nothing. A slow dance through stars and black. She made her way over to a window, popped off her helmet with her foot, and floated there, looking outward. The radio crackled something. She turned her head to it, then back to the window. She looked out into the cosmos. She felt neither fear nor awe. She’d been up in the sky before. The radio crackled again with some kind of panicked shouting. Bedstviye. Bedstviye. This didn’t mean a thing to her. She wriggled out of the suit and spread her wings, shaking her body to loosen it of these constraints. She heard a crack and a crackle. The radio shouting got louder. It appeared the shuttle was breaking apart. She turned her head this way, then that way. She blinked her big, yellow eyes. And when the crack became large enough, she flew out of it. 

When they sent up the satellite to find the wreckage, there was a little space suit and helmet lodged in the nose. 

Erin Hogan lives in Montreal, Quebec. This is her first published short story.

Ernest Boateng is a Ghanaian visual artist and educator based in Corner Brook, Newfoundland. His work spans portraiture, documentary image-making, and scan-based experimentation, examining labour, identity, and visibility within peripheral geographies. He foregrounds emotional, social, and material traces of working bodies, and everyday spaces where they decompress and rehearse identity.