Owl tree on upper back

The tree stood on the ridge above Hollin Dyke, black as a burnt match in winter, and every spring it put out quince blossom the colour of a fishing float, far too bright for anything so old. Three owls kept it. Nobody ever named them. We only knew the big one by the way she cleared her throat before she called. Her mate sat lower on the left branch, and the youngest, a scruffy thing with one bent ear feather, perched wherever the wind allowed.

The winter the mill shut, Old Hanne Coyle climbed the ridge with a sack of salt pork and a bad hip, meaning to cut the tree for firewood. She sat under it to get her breath, and the owls came down one at a time, and not one of them flew off. She said she'd never been looked at so hard in her life. She walked home with the saw still rattling in its case.

So when the Corran men came to fell it the next year, they found the swirls on the bark had been scratched over with a fine hook of iron, every curl of it, and a dot of red paint on each blossom where the flowers had fallen. Hanne had been keeping a tally for the owls. You don't cut a tree that's keeping count, Tomas. Now bed, and mind the lamp.