Reading Notes, Week 10, The Owl Gets Married, Part B.

 

The Owl Gets Married, Myths of the Cherokee by James Mooney:

• Shapeshifting animals marrying humans; this time it's an owl.
• Mother wants a good hunter for her daughter's husband, so the owl comes through.
• Owls are good hunters, but the intake of an owl is different from a human.
• The man shifts back into an owl when hunting, so what he catches in that form is not equal to what a real human man may catch.
• "He was gone all day and came home late at night, bringing only three small fish..."

Great horned owl perched on the top of a Joshua tree at
evening twilight in the Mojave Desert USA
(Wikipedia Commons)

• What matters is on the inside and not the out, meaning that the owl was doing exactly as the mother expected of him, but it was not proportionate to his human wife.
• Secrets can't be hidden forever, and some things were always destined to not work.
• The feeling of betrayal from a wife, yet she didn't take into account that what he was bringing her was with genuine intent. But he still loses.