Paul Alexander Bartlett's fiction has been commended by many authors, among them Pearl Buck, Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, James Michener, Upton Sinclair, Evelyn Eaton, and many others. He was the recipient of many grants, awards, and fellowships, from such organizations as the Leopold Schepp Foundation, the Edward MacDowell Association, the New School for Social Research, the Huntington Hartford Foundation, the Montalvo Foundation, Yaddo, and the Carnegie Foundation. His wife, Elizabeth Bartlett, a widely published and internationally commended poet, is the author of seventeen published books of poetry, numerous poems, short stories, and essays in leading literary quarterlies and anthologies, and, as the founder of Literary Olympics, Inc., is the editor of a series of multi-language volumes of international poetry that honor the work of outstanding contemporary poets. Their only child (me) inherited their writer's gene and has published a number of books and articles in the fields of philosophy and psychology. . . . See the following page for the map of the Hacienda de Petaca, where _When the Owl Cries_ takes place. [Illustration: _Plan of the Hacienda Petaca, Colima, Mexico_] When the Owl Cries 1 A tattered mass of yellow cloud hung over the great Mexican volcano. Above the broad lagoon, between the volcano and the hacienda house, a flock of herons flew lazily, carrying their white with consummate ease. Their wings took them in a low line above the water. The surface wore a yellowish cast--like weathered lichen, wrinkled along the shores. Some of this yellowish cast spattered the upper slopes of the 14,000-foot peak, where badly eroded lava sides creased to form a cone. Raul Medina noticed the odd colors as he sat in his garden. He stared at herons and lagoon and volcano and frowned. He was dressed in a gray suit, a short, well built man with a scrubby head of brown hair and eyebrows like twisted cigarette tobacco, his eyes dark brown spoked with gray, his mouth thin but kindly, his face a little meaty for a man in his middle thirties who had lived an outdoor life. As he gazed toward the Colima volcano he rubbed his strong, fibrous hands together. His mind went back in time: he remembered that the curious lagoon and mountain colors had appeared when he was nineteen or twenty; in those days, the cone had blasted open and thrown flames and lava and doused the area with cinders and ashes and shaken down walls. Raul's thoughts switched to everyday problems. Yesterday a milch cow had died, the poultry had gotten out of their pen, a mule had ripped a tendon on a stone fence, a cowboy lay seriously ill. Manuel Boaz, Raul's personal servant, had come to him after supper, as he sat on the veranda with others, and whispered that the night before an owl had hooted on the roof of the house.