I am standing on the edge of a granite cliff, staring up at the owl, who is not twenty feet away, atop the crown of a twisting dwarf pine. He stares directly back at me with eyes that shine orange despite the dying light. I have come 4,500 miles to see this bird, a surrogate for an owl I will never see. Its cat-like ears twitch, wind ruffs the feathers on the back of its neck, and as the light dies the black marks on its buff chest grow more distinct.  

You should never expect to win a staring contest with an owl. If you look at it, it will often look back. Not a glance either. A full-on stare. Owls and human beings share forward facing eyes, binocular vision, and this commonality makes a difference in how we regard them. With them we are face to face, eye to eye. True, we can’t spin our heads fully behind us, 270 degrees, but still we see ourselves in them. What I see now is what I will anthropomorphically call a judging, paternalistic look, the eyebrows slanting sternly over the blazing eyes. 

The owl turns away because he has had enough of me. He has other business. His three young are screeching down in the spruce trees below the cliff, a variety of sharp querulous sounds that are all saying the same thing: “Feed me!” He waits though; it is already close to ten here near the top of the world, but it is not quite dark enough for hunting. We both notice when the darkness takes another gulp forward, swallowing the light. 

Huuhkajat, with its hoot-like first syllable, is the onomatopoeic name for the bird in this land. In my land we call it the Eurasian eagle-owl, the largest and strongest of owls. For six months now, I have been reading up on this bird, studying words and pictures about it, maybe a little jealous when I talked to others about their encounters.  

But now it is real. Now I see it. Beautiful, but also bulky and strong. His power is obvious, power in repose. He grips the tree with talons that would not look too out of place on a grizzly bear.  

And then suddenly he drops down off the tree, and with two strong flaps of his powerful wings, showing the white of his underwings, crosses by and then below me, and down toward the valley, a dark shape slicing through the gloaming, almost a part of the encroaching darkness, moving toward something that only he sees.