Every piece tells a story, and this one’s on me. To celebrate the release of my new eBook Silent as the Wild, I’m sharing one of the stories from the collection, free to read. It’s a small taste of the quiet, wild world I’ve been writing about, where animals and people cross paths, and silence speaks louder than words.
If you enjoy it, I’d be so grateful if you’d visit my author page and download the full eBook on Amazon. Your support (and a kind review if you feel moved to leave one) helps more readers discover these little pieces of the wild. More ebook info at the end of the story. (All the stories are not this dark :-). This is just the shortest one!
Silent As Love
The night was his kingdom. The forest held its breath when he left his pine, every needle hushed under the soft gravity of his wings. The Great Horned Owl moved like a rumor, seen only by the moon and the few things that didn’t live long enough to tell of it.
But lately, he had flown beyond his borders. Beyond the dark lattice of trees, there was a field, and beyond the field stood a barn, a sagging wooden thing that smelled of hay and old rain. There, in the warm hollow of its rafters, lived her.
She was a Barn Owl, white as smoke, slight as a feather’s memory. The first time he saw her, she was returning from a hunt, the crescent moon cradled in her face. He had followed her to the barn, keeping high in the tree line, captivated by her grace. It wasn’t hunger that stirred in him then, or at least not hunger as he knew it.
He watched her fold her wings and vanish into the loft. The sound she made, that soft rasping chatter lingered in him like a taste.
He could hear her even when he couldn’t see her.
His hearing was his curse. The world was a map of sound; he could find a mouse heart beating under snow, or a shrew chewing in its burrow. But now those same ears trapped him in the details of her life.
He heard her speaking to her kin in the barn’s rafters. Soft, breathy gossip. They called him the ghost in the woods. They said he ate skunks. They said he once carried off a rabbit the size of a kit fox.
She laughed, delicate, dismissive, and said, “He’s too big for subtlety.”
He smiled inwardly, if an owl could smile. He was all subtlety. He could perch outside her barn for hours, invisible even to her sharp eyes. He listened as she talked about the open fields she loved, the chase of tiny things under moonlight. He memorized her rhythms, her calls, her dislikes. She found the forest oppressive, she said; too many shadows, too much hunger in the dark.
So he tried to change.
∞ ∞ ∞
He began hunting differently.
He abandoned the deep woods for the meadow, where he learned to glide low over stubble and frost, to skim the earth the way she did. It felt clumsy. His broad wings caught every stray current. Still, he practiced, night after night, until his feathers whispered like hers.
He even tried her call -- that long, wavering shriek that had first made his heart tighten. The sound came out wrong, guttural and trembling, echoing against the trees like pain.
Once, he caught her staring at the forest’s edge, eyes wide, wings half-open. He thought she might have noticed him at last.
But she turned away.
Later that night, he heard her telling her companions, “There’s something in the woods. Too heavy to be one of us.”
∞ ∞ ∞
He built a shrine to her without meaning to.
In the hollow of his pine, he gathered what she dropped or touched: a small gray feather, curved like a question; a vole skull cleaned by ants; a stalk of straw that smelled faintly of her loft. He arranged them carefully on the bark -- a nest of devotions.
When the moon was right, he brought her gifts. Once, a fresh mouse left on the barn’s threshold. Another time, a glimmering fish from the creek.
They were gone each morning, but she never thanked him. Maybe she never knew who brought them. Maybe the farmer swept them away.
Still, he felt her presence everywhere. Her scent -- dry grass and dust -- clung to the wind.
Some nights he imagined that she must know, that she was too graceful to speak of such things, that her silence meant consent. Other nights he wondered if she avoided the fields because she could feel his eyes.
∞ ∞ ∞
The first frost came early. The moon rose low and orange, swollen with secrets.
He was perched on the fence when she approached, gliding low, silent as breath.
He froze, awestruck, every feather locking in place.
She landed a few yards away, her pale mask gleaming.
“I know you’re there,” she said.
His talons clenched the wood. “You know me?”
Her voice was cool. “You’ve been following me. Listening. Watching.”
He wanted to say it was love, but the word didn’t exist in his kind’s language. “I only wanted …”
“You frighten me.”
He lowered his wings, making himself smaller, but she recoiled anyway.
“You don’t belong near the barn,” she said, and launched into the night, her wings cutting clean through his shadow.
He watched her go until she was a pale speck swallowed by stars.
For a long time, he stood there, the frost creeping over his feet, his breath ghosting from his beak.
When he flew home, the forest didn’t feel like his anymore.
∞ ∞ ∞
Winter deepened. The fields hardened under ice, and the mice vanished. His belly ached.
He listened for her each night, though she rarely left the barn now. When she did, her wings carried her farther each time -- away from him.
He thought of the warmth inside her nest, the way her feathers must hold heat. He thought of how close she would feel if only she stayed still in his talons.
It wasn’t love now. It was something larger, heavier.
The same pulse that drove him to strike from above.
He told himself he could love her better if she were within him, part of him. A unity of flesh and spirit.
It was a logic only hunger could write.
That night, the air was clear as glass. The moon carved everything into sharp contrast: the silver barn, the dark fringe of trees, the white figure swooping across the field.
He followed her silently.
She caught a mouse and rose toward the loft, wings flashing once, twice.
He followed the rhythm - one, two - and on the third beat, he struck.
∞ ∞ ∞
There was barely a sound.
A flurry of pale feathers spiraled in the moonlight. One drifted to his beak and clung there, trembling like a heartbeat.
He landed in the pine, chest heaving. The taste was warm and metallic, filling him with a deep, dizzy satisfaction. His body stilled, his mind hollowed.
Below, the barn was quiet. The field was quiet. Even the forest seemed to pause, as if listening.
He closed his eyes and imagined her voice in the wind: You frighten me.
Now she would never be frightened again.
He looked toward the barn. A few of her kin fluttered in confusion at the entrance, their calls small and uncertain. They would learn, as he had, that love was a dangerous noise in a silent world.
∞ ∞ ∞
By morning, the farmer found the feathers in the snow, a pale scatter near the fence, leading toward the woods. He shook his head, muttered something about nature, and went back to his chores.
In the pine, the Great Horned Owl slept heavy with fullness.
He dreamed of her still: her lightness, her smallness, the way she used to skim the fields like a sigh. But when he woke at dusk, all that remained was the taste of her.
He groomed the feathers from his talons and took flight, silent as ever.
He was what he had always been - a shape made for hunting, not for being seen.
And if it flies like a predator and watches like a predator, it is a predator.
∞ ∞ ∞
Find the eBook here: Silent as the Wild.
Five lyrical fables give voice to the wild, from owl and wolf to beaver, bison, and cougar.
In Silent as the Wild, nature remembers what humanity forgets: that every silence carries a story. Haunting and deeply human, these stories are a hymn to the living earth.
TJ Wallis is a Métis writer and citizen of Métis Nation British Columbia. For over twenty years, she worked as a magazine editor and freelance journalist before turning to fiction. Her stories draw on the rhythms of the natural world and the echoes of oral storytelling, places where instinct, memory, and spirit intertwine.
#SilentAsTheWild #EveryPieceTellsAStory #MetisAuthor #NatureFables #TJWallis #CanadianWriters