The two young weasels were still in the nest when the Coyote, with a last quick scoop, uncovered them. Each was soon quieted, as their mother’s cries tore through the soft bright air. The Coyote was deliberate at his meal. When he finished, he walked off slowly across the Rock. The Weasel watched him disappear below its rim.
She continued to stare at the cleft where he had vanished until the frenzy died from her eyes. Then she came down off the log, her body but a loop of limp flesh. She growled to call her three remaining kits, who had hidden in the thicket, and led them to a pile of boulders at the end of a gully. In its crevices she saw them curl themselves for sleep. And then the Weasel too lay down, with her tail across her face.
The family did not waken until after dark. Very warily the mother slid from a chink in the rock-pile. She moved up over the stones, from one to another, stopping to trace the air for scents.
The moon had not yet risen, but the stars spread a glow on the granite and turned the canyon mists to pearly white. Above the rock-pile, needled branches of a young fir tree stretched black against the fiery blue of the sky. They were a canopy of darkness leading back to the deeper shadows of the forest.
Now that the weasels’ den had been destroyed, there was no reason for staying longer at Beetle Rock. In any case, the kits were nearly old enough to start their roaming. When the sun next rose, the Weasel would not be there to see it shine on the changeless granite. For her tomorrow’s sunlight would be only a brightening of the green shade in the world behind the fir. She barked impatiently to call the kits.
The Weasel had a general memory of her larger territory. She knew where the rivers were, the cliffs, the groves of great trees, and the meadows thick with grass that hid a swarm of mice. Towards one of the upper meadows, now, she led her young.
On every side, in the trees and the earth, the Weasel was aware of flying, creeping, scurrying, digging creatures. She ignored them, and climbed the mountain with a long and steady gait. Most of the trees were sequoias and sugar pines. Above their giant shafts the sky was lost, and the darkness on the ground was so complete that even the Weasel’s eyes were of little use. She was guided by the trickle of a brook that flowed, as she remembered, down from her marshy meadow.
Finally the weasels crossed a low ridge. Beyond, the earth dropped to a level where the great trees opened to encircle a huge nest-shaped clearing filled with moonlight. In the quiet air no blade of grass was stirring, no bluebell on its thread of stem, no pine or sequoia branch. The moon, climbing away from the trees around the meadow, seemed the only moving thing. But animal odors were as heavy as a haze.
They told the Weasel that many creatures were secretly active, that a mole was digging a new side-tunnel somewhere near, that a gopher was crouching in its burrow-entrance waiting for courage to move out half its length for a lily stem. A thick scent rose from the mice — mice eating away the grass to form new runways, divining where seeds were sprouting and scratching away the soil, mice scurrying beneath the arching stems, or sitting motionless on their haunches feeling the good seeds start to digest, while their eyes, grave with little dreams, looked down the moonlit avenues of their grassy world.
Already the Weasel had forgotten her barren days at Beetle Rock. Tonight she had come to a new phase of her year’s existence, and was entering it with all her accumulated strength. As the summer would pass and the kits grow larger, faster, and more intense, her energies would find more and more release. By the time the weasels’ fur turned white in the fall, the family would be ready to separate. The first snow would be due, and the mother’s life of solitary freedom, as keen and brilliant as the winter sunlight, would commence.
The trunk of a fallen Jeffrey pine stretched towards the center of the meadow. The Weasel sprang upon it and led the kits to the end. Around them the grasses, nearly as high as the top of the log, were a glistening sea into which the Weasel would dive as soon as a trembling showed that a mouse was moving at the roots.
The three kits jostled each other for positions and began a little play. The mother ignored them. On the end of the log she waited, with her eyes fixed on the grass. Poised for a leap, erect, she was as sharp as a small, arrested flame.
WHAT HAPPENED TO
The Sierra Grouse
While the Sierra Grouse had been going to sleep on the previous evening, she had watched a large brown bat flying past her roost. His regular route took him near the high bough of the pine where she perched. He always disappeared when he left the pine, but the Grouse found him again as he returned through the top of an oak tree. Drowsily she would wait for him to come into sight, until finally he seemed only a rippling of the dusk itself. Then night moved over the earth and she let herself lose him, and everything, completely.
The bat was one of the animals that occupied the Grouse’s neighborhood while she slept. She knew there were others, some less harmless. Daytime creatures like the Grouse possessed their world only half the time. When they rested, a new population came out to live in it, and change it. Those waking in the morning could not assume that they were safe because they had seemed safe when they went to sleep. Before any one of them stirred, he was ready with his defense — ready to leap, to run, fly, pounce, or bite.
The Grouse’s defense was stillness. After she opened her eyes on the morning of June eighteenth, she made no other sign that she was awake. A weasel might have been touring the tree on a search for roosting birds. Or an owl might even then have been focussing its eyes on the Grouse’s blunt-shaped form. She would not turn her head and help any predator to find her. Few of them could remain quiet as long as a grouse could. She would continue to seem but a dusky pocket between the bough and the trunk of the pine.
This habit of stillness allowed the Grouse to gather other impressions besides warnings. In perching patiently, perhaps she had time to hear that the wind’s grave sound was blended of different kinds of murmurs from various sorts of trees, and to see that the wind folded the clouds as smoothly as water flows. She may have sensed something of these happenings, since no tension in her eyes suggested that the dawn was too slow.
But daylight brightened. As soon as the trees were definitely green, the Grouse began to stir. She eased one foot and then the other, loosening its night-long clasp on the bough. She relieved the muscles in her skin by fluffing her feathers and contracting them again. She stretched her wings. All these motions were inconspicuous, however; nearly as smooth as the motions of the clouds.
Now the Grouse tilted her head to see what was causing the sounds below. Bark had fallen to the ground. Claws were grasping the ridges of the trunk, not far up the tree but coming higher.
Since it was a climbing, not a winged animal that approached, the Grouse might have escaped danger by flying into the sky. But it was a grouse’s way to hide until hiding had become hopeless, never to fly until discovered by an enemy. She had no proof that the invader knew of her presence in the tree.
On a fir bough that extended into the pine, the Steller Jay was perching. At the sound of the claws, his long beak opened in a rasping squawk. He flew down to investigate, and his excitement increased. As fast as he could work his beak, he screeched, partly harassing the enemy, partly warning other Beetle Rock animals to be on guard. A second jay arrived and the clamor doubled. Then three more came.
As the invader climbed, the jays flew up from branch to branch. By watching them, the Grouse knew how far the enemy had progressed. It was coming rapidly. Around the bough below appeared a large fur head. Wildcat! Now the Grouse can see its shoulders, too. Her toe and wing muscles tighten, but still she does not fly. And she was, after all, to be safe. For the cat had stood all that it could of the jays’ siege. It paused on the pine trunk, and then started to back down. The jays followed. On the ground the cat streaked away among the boulders and escaped the birds. They flew back into the pine and fluttered and called, but the urgency had gone out of their voices. One by one they left the tree.
There was a practi
cal reason for the grouse habit of freezing rather than flying when a predator was near. Grouse wings moved with a clatter that would attract attention instantly. No day could begin, however, without a flight from the roost. The bird walked to the end of the branch with the unobtrusive step that also was part of her defense. She raised the short round wings above her back and dived from the bough. She felt her body fall before the wings came down and began the flapping that checked the drop. She headed along the edge of the Rock, bound for the stream at the foot of the slope. As soon as she felt the canyon wind flowing under her breast, she rested upon it, and glided out over the Rock’s rim and the trees below as smoothly as if she were one of the great flyers, a wild goose or an eagle, or as if she were expressing her true temperament even in flight.
The wind was letting her down, but not too soon. Directly beneath was the stream. The Grouse tilted her wings so that her body was nearly vertical, and depressed her tail and spread it fanwise. Then she fluttered, not very gracefully or surely, under the streamside branches and alighted at the edge of the water.
After the exertion of the flight she slipped into hiding among the roots of a pine, draped with dry sedges along the bank. There she groomed her feathers. She came out and walked along the sand, slowly. She took several sips of water, pausing after each one as though to take the sounds of the water, also, into her. The stream spread out in a small pool here. The silken sheet that fell into it formed bubbles where it struck. The Grouse watched them float down the side of the pool, whirl around at the lower end, and scatter. Finally all the distress had gone out of her, even out of her eyes.
Something else was in her eyes — a sort of expectancy. She moved downstream, past a stretch of water tossed into foam by the rocks, and came to another pool. There she found the companion she met at the stream each morning. He was the Mule Deer Buck, with whom she had one of those attachments sometimes formed between animals of different species.
The Deer was drinking. His mossy antlers lay almost in the ripples, but his ears were back to catch any sounds from the shore. One ear swung in the Grouse’s direction. Perhaps he had heard even her light footfall. The Grouse saw the black tip of his tail flip in its white circle. She came down on the sand.
When the Deer’s thirst was quenched he raised his head and stood gathering the scents and sounds about him. The Grouse at his feet took a beetle off a wet pebble, two robber flies from the sand, and a caddis fly from the water. Then she walked up the bank, climbing under the bright leaves of a hazel bush and through a clump of blue flowering lupine. The Deer made an easy leap to a ledge at antler-height above the stream. There the grass was finer than the sedges below. He began grazing on the tender tips.
The Grouse, too, had reached the ledge, where there was a meal of insects for her. The first scrape of her beak brought up a white beetle grub, interrupted at his own meal on a root. She found a cutworm, slow in burrowing down for the day, and a hard-shelled wireworm. She picked several ants off the ground with nicely directed snaps.
The Buck let his grazing draw him near. A small murmured note arose in the Grouse’s throat. It sounded as if her quality of quietness had become, instead, gentleness. The Deer had no voice with which to answer, but his ears flicked each time that he heard her.
Now what had startled him? His head was up and his ears reached with a pointed quiver for a threat that the Grouse had not caught. She watched him closely. At all times she was aware of his ears; as long as they waved loosely she could risk a quick conspicuous dart for an insect, but when the ears turned together attentively, she made herself motionless. This time she froze, under a seedling fir. Was the Buck hearing, perhaps, the scoop of a paw in the water, a scratching for fleas, or even so slight a sound as another animal sniffing a scent? It was, in fact, no sound that had alarmed him, but the ceasing of one. Two gray squirrels had been pursuing each other over some fallen oak leaves farther up the bank. Suddenly the quick tapping of their feet had stopped. Had the squirrels fled from an enemy? The chain of caution in the forest linked together many creatures. It had reached the Deer, and through him even the Grouse.
When the Buck could not sense any reason for the squirrels’ abrupt silence, his ears swung away from the bank and his mouth went again into the grass. The Grouse took a step and pecked up an ant which had been running back and forth below her eye while she was still. The chain of caution had not extended to that small creature.
But before the Deer had nipped off more than a mouthful, his nose was flung again into the air. Now his whole body was alert, for he had caught a dangerous scent. He moved along the ledge, his gait tense and distorted. Then he was away, heading for the upstream slope. Soon even the beat of his hoofs had vanished.
The Grouse did not know what the danger might be; only that it was downstream, since the Buck had gone up. Before he had taken the first leap she had slipped under a fern. There the pale marks on her shadow-colored plumage matched the spaces between the leaves, larger near the ground, small on her head among the finer tips of the fronds. Her root-shaped feet branched where they stood at the base of the plant.
Before the warning, a junco, a fox sparrow, and a purple finch had been singing, sending out their voices boldly in order to be heard above the stream. Now their songs, and all other living sounds, were gone. The animal that was coming must move about in a silent forest, in a silence of its own making.
Up the bank slanted an animal path, marked with tracks of bears and coyotes, dappled over with pits formed by smaller feet. The Grouse held her eyes on this trail. Now a part of the spotted earth seemed to be sliding. No — there was something upon the path, spotted too. It was the wildcat.
The trail passed within the length of a cat’s spring from the Grouse’s fern. The cat’s powers of smell might not reach that far, but her vision certainly could. This was a true test of the Grouse’s defense. No jays were here; her safety depended upon her coloring and her skill in freezing. She seemed as motionless as the brown earth, with no sign that she breathed, no pulse of breast feathers to show a heartbeat. She was alert, ready to fly as a last resort, yet she looked as if she had removed herself already in some inner way, as if even her emotions were helping to disguise her by avoiding any intensity that might attract the cat’s attention.
As the cat drew near, her eyes were on the water. Perhaps she was thinking of fish. And then she was down at the end of the path, slipping over the streamside boulders and onto the sand. Her belly low, her shoulders strong beneath her fur, she crouched and drank. Smoothness made the motions of the cat almost invisible. It was much like the Grouse’s smoothness, but the Grouse’s was for escape, and the cat’s for capture.
Now the wildcat had flashed from the water and pounced at the edge of a rock. Did she think she would catch a mouse? She should have known better. This shrew under her paw had been squeaking to announce that it was a shrew, relished by no animal except an owl. The cat sniffed at its body, even smaller than a mouse’s, and drew away.
The cat sat on the sand and watched the patterns of spray, existing only as something remembered. Then the Grouse allowed the lids to close over her eyes. For no cat was there. She had gone on, with her scarcely perceptible tread, to surprise other creatures. The Grouse remained frozen until she heard the lyrical song of the fox sparrow again.
The Grouse left the stream and started up the slope to Beetle Rock. Whenever she could, she remained against backgrounds colored like her feathers. She climbed near an animal trail, but went along at the side, under grasses and brush and seedling trees. The branches over the animal trail were high enough to clear the shoulders of the bears, and the Grouse felt exposed under them. Her own trail was as secret as a nest.
Even when she was walking, it seemed that she never quite emerged from stillness. She never risked discovering too late that she should not have taken a step. Before she had gone far she saw a red and black millipede lying in a spot of sunlight. A thrust of her beak would have reached him, but she
moved forward until she was above him and could take him with a less conspicuous peck.
She strolled on; but suddenly waited, for something had flashed orange above the top of a rock. There it was again — a chipmunk’s tail. It might have been the twitching ear of a coyote. Approaching a chinquapin bush, she saw the leaves on one branch shaking faster than the leaves stirred by the breeze. She froze while she watched them. A pair of juncos flew out. A flicker glided from a pine tree to a fir; its shadow passing over the ground checked the Grouse with a step half-taken. Why did the jay screech? Was the puff of dust raised by the breeze or an animal? What had started the rolling pebble? The Grouse stopped until she knew. Since she placed each foot directly in front of the other, in the center line of her body, her weight was always perfectly balanced and she could become motionless the instant she sensed possible danger.
The flowing quality of her motions was all the more remarkable because the Grouse had an injured leg that summer. When she walked more quickly, she limped. Early in May she had been caught by the Coyote. She had been sunning herself, with her mottled feathers outspread on the granite gravel, when the Coyote had appeared from behind some brush. He had not smelled her, for he was following another scent, but the Grouse was directly in his path. Seeing her, he had sprung for her. She had tried to fly, but his jaws had closed over her leg. Beating a wing in his eyes, she had forced him to let her go, then with an extreme effort she had reached a low branch of a cedar.
At first she could not stand on the leg. She got over the ground by fluttering, and drank from melting snow near Beetle Rock. But within a few weeks she had returned to her former habits, including the daily trip to the stream. The leg was sore and stiff and the Grouse instinctively treated it by using it.
These recent weeks had been lonely, for it was the nest-building season when the covey was broken up and the pairs of birds stayed in deepest hiding. Late in April they had flown down from the higher mountains where they spent the winter under the snow tents of the western white pines. Almost at once, then, they had found their mates of the year, and had gone down into the thickets, to make their wonderfully disguised nests on the ground, to fill them with eggs, and remain secluded until the eggs were hatched. But now it was almost time for the covey to assemble again. First the cocks would appear, leaving the later training of the chicks to the hens. And the families would be out in the brush. The Grouse found one of the hens with young chicks as she climbed the slope on June eighteenth.
One Day On Beetle Rock Page 3
