I'm hiking in the San Andreas Rift with my friend Whitney. Rolling, dry-grass hills above the lake-chain along the famous fault. Up a treeless, grassy bank, we see two birds like blue jays, but with long sharp beaks. They're attacking a big owl.

One holds a metallic thing. What? Crack of a gunshot, a small-caliber one. The owl falls to the grass, wounded in the shoulder. Shot by, presumably, that jay with a bird-size handgun! Well, footgun.

The two fly off cawing wildly. Sound both scared and triumphant.

The vet materializes. But his license forbids him to treat wild animals, so he proposes we "buy" the owl for something minor, a paperback book? OK, we swap... now he can consider us pet owners and he can act on our request to help.

He examines the gunshot owl. Hoods it so it's quiet--well, puts a sock on its head. Decides the wound needs more than bandaging--proper surgery, a wingbone needing a splint. Calls a nearby animal hospital. They won't take it! They won't believe a bird shot it--they insist its foes much have pecked it, and so could have infected it. And they don't want sick creatures in their hospital!

This seems a little...

Next the vet scolds his dog for sitting in wrong spot in the pickup truck. Talks on and on, clearly confusing the dog. For a vet, this guy seems inept with animals. Human and otherwise.

He bandages the owl's wing and puts it in a tiny cage, too small. He was sloppy, and the hood slips off. If the owl weren't caged it'd try to fly, and it can't.

"All I can do in the field," says the vet. "Time will tell."

Time heals all wounds, huh? But not time plus guns plus human idiocy.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Owl:
  1. Night-vision? Night-wisdom? Dreamwork itself! Is some loud, social side of me--or of my classmates, chattering like jays--killing my quiet, dreamworking side?
  2. The socially unacceptable real me, as in Patrice Kindl's Owl in Love, a bizarre (dream-based) novel about a were-owl passing for human, hiding her taste for mice from schoolmates. So as I try to fit in at college, I'm... killing myself?
• Birds shoot owl: inner critics cripple me. Echoes Razi and the Holy Wino of Mt Shasta--and in THAT dream, the snickerpenguins who undermined the peak had more than guns--they had NUKES.
• Buy the owl: I need to "own" my true feelings & dreams? I mostly hide them, like Owl in Love.
• Veterinarian: saw a car covered in stickers saying "Proud to be a Vet". The other kind! With guns.
• ACTION: Beware! My inner critics are deadly, can shoot me down--and my support system's inept, and only works if I own my real self.

A MONTH LATER

An owl couple nests in the park atop Bernal Hill near my house, at the top of Esmeralda Steps, a place with definite echoes of the dream's setting. The only owl-pair in San Francisco!

Just a few weeks later, one is found dead. Don't know the cause yet. Disease? Did ravens attack it? They do mob some hawks.

NOTE A YEAR LATER

Both owl pioneers died, not just one. Not from corvid attacks. One was SHOT. Its surviving mate wasted away in grief.

The killer was never caught.

YEARS LATER STILL

I know I repeat this a lot, but... so much for dream symbolism. The gun meant a gun, the owl meant an owl, human idiocy meant... human idiocy.

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