Near a log house on the bank of the Grand River was a tall pine tree. Night after night an owl hooted and screeched from this tree. At first the people who lived in the log house did not mind the owl. The Natives know the habits of the bird – it travels only at night but when it keeps going to one particular place, the people begin to get suspicious.
One night a man of German descent visited the people in the log house. They knew him well, for he lived on the opposite side of the river. He had no canoe to get across the river, but when they asked him how he crossed the river, he laughed. The grandfather of these people said he had known this man for many years. The man knew all about witchcraft, which the white society now calls a lost art.
The people were speaking in their own native language, and the man said he did not understand their language but he understood the language of the owl who visited them nightly. He told grandfather that the owl, which came so often, was really a person and it might be up to some mischief. He told grandfather what to do the next time it came.
That evening the owl was back on the trees again. They threw stones at it but it would not move: it just hooted all the louder. The lady of the house went in and got a gun. She shot at the owl, and it fell to the ground.
The next day the owl was gone, and that afternoon it was rumoured that an elderly woman had fallen out of a tree. Her leg was broken and she had gone to the hospital, where she later died.
It is an old tradition that when a witch in animal form, is shot by a treated bullet, a person dies. The owl never returned to that house.
