Dipper of Copper Creek

by Jean Craighead George

  When the rain began to splatter the meadow and bend the bright heads of the scarlet gilia he started back to the den. Trotting along with his nose in the wind, he crossed the scent of Odocoileus and her fawn. He followed their steps toward the dark spruce forest. The storm dumped itself upon him and he put his tail between his legs and slipped away to the nearest entrance of his den.

  This was the back door and it opened above the ouzel nest. Canis knew the nest was there, but it was fifty feet down the cliff. Below it the swirling flume danced and roared. An ouzel was not even a consideration, as far as Canis was concerned.

  Canis lay at the entrance. Hailstones were falling with the rain, and the air was cold. Through half-shut eyes he watched the blue lupines and larkspurs bend and bounce in the storm. The purple monkshood trembled under the ice pellets and wind. When the rain fell so hard that Canis could not see even the yellow cinquefoil before him, he closed his eyes and slept. Even a father of four was not expected to provide food in such weather.

  Teeter pressed her first egg against the bare brood patch on her breast. She did not move for an hour. It was as if she were sleeping with her eyes open, so strange was her mood.

  But this egg was not to be incubated yet. After she had rested, she slipped out of the nest and dove into the flume. Cinclus was beneath the water, and the sight of him feeding reminded her of the rocks and the water and the cadis fly larvae.

  The rest of the morning they hunted and rested behind the cascade in the glassy air bubbles. Toward noon Cinclus encouraged her to come onto the rock that split the falls. Then he sang and danced in the canyon again, becoming larger and more important with each turn and twist.

  Finally he alighted beside her and sang a few soft notes. They spread their wings and flew side by side down the canyon to Flycatcher Cliff. Under the roots of a spruce tree they stopped; dipped, and as if this were just any day of the year began to preen and oil their feathers.

  The cave under the spruce was hung with tiny gray rootlets. Pushing toward their midsummer flowering were the little green shoots of the fringed parnassia and the brook saxafrage. They colored the edges of the cave. A pebbly beach led from the roots to the water. A few feet out, the stream was green. The color said it was deep and cold.

  Cinclus had his back to the pool, but he could see the cool patch of green water in the back of his eye. He ran onto the water. He floated toward the pool, riding high like a cork, until his entire vision was green and he could almost taste the water life that lived in that color.

  He put his head under to dive. Suddenly into the green came black. Cinclus focused quickly and saw the protruding lip and red eye of an enormous cutthroat trout.

  A loud cry of “zeet” came from the throat of the ouzel as he brought wings and feet into action. The still pool became white with bubbles, spearheaded by the open jaws of a tremendous fish.

  The sun sparkled on the waves the cutthroat made as he broke the surface. Cinclus saw the water shine from the safety of the beach and he heard the snap of jaws as he sped to the back of the cave.

  Cinclus was gripped with fright. A cutthroat trout of such size could swallow him. The giant trouts of the mountain streams were a real danger to the ouzel birds.

  The big fish rolled back to his hideout beneath a water-soaked log and slushed the water through his gills as he watched for more prey.

  The fear in Cinclus lasted only long enough to print on his memory the green pool by the cave. It was necessary to his survival that he suffer this fear-filled moment. In the pain of such an emotion he became a wiser ouzel. Cinclus had learned through similar experiences where other big trout hid. Teeter had also marked these hideouts in her memory. These things the dippers learned.

  With Cutthroat Pool established in his mind, he was drawn back to his instinctive duties. He dipped to Teeter and clinked the signal “follow me.” With the beat of gray wings, they went down to Copper Creek bridge.

  There were more eggs to be laid. The courtship was at its peak. Cinclus had no beautiful colors to display to Teeter, no nuptial plumes or tufts to show, but he could sing and he could fly and dip and swim and dive.

  In his maneuvers he broke a law of the bird world and flew past the bridge into the territory of another ouzel pair. Teeter followed. With Teeter beside him, Cinclus sang on the other dipper’s territory. Hardly had he begun when the offended male appeared, diving straight toward Cinclus, crying his angry “zeet.”

  They fought before Teeter. Wings touched, bills clicked and the strong, fine nails tore at each other. They rose into the sky fighting. They dropped low over the water, a feather or two burst into the air.

  The offended male fought the hardest. He was defending his home. But Cinclus fought brilliantly. He was defending his mate. It was over in a few seconds.

  One final buffeting and flutter and Cinclus flew back to his own territory. Teeter followed him, dipping and flashing her eyelids in excitement. Cinclus fanned his short stubby tail and strutted grandly before her. His bill parted and he panted under the strain of the duel. He caught his breath and was about to bow to her, when she flew away.

  Cinclus followed her back to Vera Falls. Teeter plunged into the roaring cascade and fastened herself to a crack behind the water. Cinclus found her with some difficulty.

  Teeter sat silently. The duel was forgotten, but it had kept the complicated chain of hormones going in her body. The nest and its one lonely egg were calling her. But it was not time to incubate and she stood under the waterfall waiting.

  Cinclus preened his feathers endlessly. Another afternoon storm came and went, and all the other life at Vera Falls sought shelter. The ouzels did not even hear the storm behind the roaring falls.

  That evening Teeter looked at Cinclus. Once more he filled her whole orb of vision. There was no cliff and no waterfall.

  A second egg lay beside the first in the dawn of the next morning. That day Cinclus noticed two things that did not pertain to the immediate world of his nest and his mate.

  The water in the flume was rising and growing muddy. It was becoming difficult to see the May-fly larvae in the stream.

  A boy and a horse stood together under the twisted spruce across the flume and the boy with his binocular vision watched every movement that Teeter made. The boy was familiar. He had been to the falls before. He was quiet and Cinclus felt no fear of him. However, the bird was curious about him, and occasionally ran along the shore below him and cocked his head to look at the boy’s wide bare face.

  The storms were beginning to make the animal life restless, for so much water was not the rule in the high country. Land could slide under too much weight of water, floods could wash out dens and nests.

  Finally Teeter noticed that the stream was rising. The spray from the flume was soaking into the dome of the nest, making the moss green again.

  But she could not change a thing in her plans, even if she knew she faced disaster. Three more eggs had to be laid, this number was destined to be. Through a hundred thousand years the water ouzels had found this to be their successful number.

  She laid another egg and then another and finally, a fifth; each one at five o’clock in the morning when the sun was just over the peaks. The storms came each day and the water piled high in Virginia Basin.

  When the fifth egg was laid, Teeter turned the clutch with her bill, opened her feathers, and pressed the hot featherless skin of her brood patch against them. Her eyes became clear and bright, and she slipped into the wide-eyed stare of incubation. It was as if the feel of the five eggs against her breast held her spellbound. She was responding to thousands of years of bird lore that brought to her a knowledge more useful than thought. It was instinct, based upon success.

  Down at the cabin, Whispering Bill was becoming excited. On the first clear day he would start up Rustler’s Gulch.

  As Doug helped his grandfather pack supplies and go over the food and equipment they were to take to the claim, he thought about the water ouzels. H
e had looked into the ouzel nest a few days ago, the day he had put a log across the flume and carefully crawled up it.

  Doug was still eager to mine, but many events of the past week now held him to Gothic. The entire land had suddenly come into bloom. It was not the bloom of the lowlands, a season for the avalanche lily, the iris, the buttercup, the columbine, lupine, sun flowers, asters, and goldenrod. It was an upsurging of all of this at once. The days and weeks were not long enough for separate seasons: they were short, so that each subseason telescoped the others.

  Doug also had found the nest of the Whiskys, and was watching the growth of their comical and rowdy twins. They were a few days out of their eggs, awkward and hungry. They were so hungry that they begged food from Doug when he shook their nest tree as he climbed it. Any quiver in their spruce and they thrust up their wobbly heads on long necks and opened their yellow edged red mouths. Doug liked them, they seemed to have inherited all of Whisky’s charm and mischief.

  But more fascinating than the Whiskys were the mysterious water ouzels of Vera Falls. While resting in the sun one day by the dam, Doug had seen Teeter go to the dome of moss on the canyon wall. With astonishment and joy he realized the strange nest belonged, not to a mouse, but to the water ouzels.

  From that time on he came every day to Vera Falls. He played on the rocks, built damns in the stream below and watched the birds singing and honoring their nuptial ceremonies. Occasionally one of them ran up to him to see what he was, but for the most part they ignored him. He did not press them, and finally he was no more than a deer to them. Cinclus even lost all curiosity about him.

  The day Doug had struggled to the nest, he found two eggs. The birds were gone and he quickly slid back down the log, removed it and ran all the way home to tell Bill. The run did not wind him, and he was pleased. He was getting acclimated to the higher altitudes.

  Upon returning to the cabin he took off his trousers and shirt, soaked by the plunging spray. It no longer occurred to him that Bill should tell him to change, and Doug had forgotten that there was once a warm voice at home that reminded him of such tasks. Like Whisky’s twins, he no longer needed the shell.

  Whispering Bill whistled through his teeth as he eyed the storm coming down the mountain the day the fifth egg was laid.

  “Well, we won’t get off this afternoon,” he said to Doug. “You’d better take Lodestone out for some exercise.”

  Doug saddled the young pack horse, jumped onto him, and took him at a canter up through the center of town. The boy called and yipped as he passed Lee’s Tavern, and the ghosts of the long dead merrymakers echoed back.

  They climbed the steep road out of the townsite. The big gelding thrust his fourteen hundred pounds forward and trotted high-headed to the crest of the hill. Doug turned him onto a trail beyond the aspen grove, and let him pick the way down the precipitous footpath to Vera Falls.

  This was the type of mission the horse had been trained to fulfill. Obediently he stopped in a surefooted stance as Doug pulled him to a halt beside the flume.

  The boy leaned on the saddle and studied the nest, and then the sky. The water was only a few inches from the bottom of the dome, and the storm that was headed for the valley was no April shower. He heard the ouzels calling from the waters around Mule Deer Meadow, and wondered if they, too, were concerned about their home.

  The storm was coming fast. Doug turned Lodestone up the trail, and they jogged back to the barn.

  It was pouring when Doug unsaddled Lodestone and bedded him down for the night. He burst into the cabin, and the sight of the beans and bread on the table reminded him that he was starved.

  “That’s a lot of water coming down,” Bill said to Doug.

  “Too much,” Doug answered.

  “Well, it might hold us up another day, but we’ll get off ahead of schedule anyway.”

  But Doug was not worried about starting the trip. It was as Bill had once suspected, the boy was now involved in the world around him. A world of chickens, marmots, jays, and water ouzels.

  “How high does the water rise at the old dam, Grandpa?” Doug asked after he had plunged through a quarter of his meal.

  Whispering Bill Smith put down his fork and raised a gray eyebrow suspiciously, wondering why Doug wanted to know.

  “I’ve never seen it go over the limestone flume.”

  Doug sat still as he figured. The old man had given him the level on this side of the stream, not on the nest side. Finally he began to eat again. He said.

  “Well, maybe it won’t reach the dippers’ nest.”

  Bill didn’t smile, although he was pleased to have his curiosity satisfied. Instead he immediately projected himself into the danger that threatened the birds, and he, too, was caught up in the drama of the water ouzels.

  “I hope nothing happens,” he said. “It’s a short season up here. Those birds would have to build a new nest mighty quick, lay new eggs, and get young off before the winter settles in. Takes ’em a couple of months and we don’t have much more than that up here.”

  When Doug went to bed that night, he could hear Copper Creek rising. The rain was still falling. It was a deluge. Every pot in the cabin was plipping and plupping in various spots on the floor where they had been set to catch water from the leaking roof.

  From time to time the boy awoke and sat up in bed to listen. The valley was running with water. Copper Creek was boiling nearer and nearer the cabin, and Richard’s Rapids was so full that Doug could not hear it fall. He thought about the little water birds and feared for their home.

  THE MOUNTAIN POURS

  THE WATER OUZEL sleeps on the side of the canyon wall. Cinclus always roosted above the dam on a crack of rock a few inches above the stream but now this roost was flooded, so the night of the big deluge he took a higher perch. He was awakened by the sound of the stream roaring at his feet.

  He fluttered blindly up the wall until his toes latched in another crevice. He adjusted his feathers to shed the rain and went back to sleep. He kept waking, for he could hear the stream rising inch by inch, and he was nervous about the nest and about Teeter.

  In Virginia Basin the water gathered. The rain water was running off the land, and the drainage from the swiftly melting snow fields was overloading even the highest streambeds and gulches in the mountains above.

  The storm ended at midnight, but the water came on and on; through the spruce forests, over the rocks, down the creeks and runnels. It collected in a deeper and deeper flood lake in Virginia Basin. Finally it tore out the lower end of the basin and roared down the valley of the little stream that drained the Mt. Belleview watershed.

  Water from Mt. Baldy and Mt. Avery joined it. By the time it reached Open Meadows there were tons and tons of it pushing downstream like a tidal wave.

  It poured into Straight Edge Pool and tore out the side of the shale wall. It thundered over Bar Rapids and scooped the bar in passing. It plunged past Slate Rapids and spread wide and deep over the open meadowland. It piled up and funneled over Mule Deer Rapids. It roared into Brook Trout Pool, and only the biggest fish fought it, hiding behind a section of the cliff that had fallen into the stream. The smaller fish rode down with the current. The plunging water approached the ouzels’ nest at Vera Falls.

  Teeter awoke in the middle of the night to turn the eggs. She clinked softly to herself. A foreign sound was pounding in her cars, but she did not let it in until each egg was carefully rolled. Then the sound came to her brain, and she was frightened.

  She stood up, close to the explosive threshold of fear. She must act to save her life. Water splashed just below her nest, and the growing sound was more water.

  “Chink, chink,” Cinclus warned her. His voice came from above. This was wrong, he always slept below her. She was terrified. She wanted to burst from the nest, but was unable to. The eggs touching her breast held her with a force too strong and deep-rooted to break.

  But water ouzels had always managed to survive. The chain of
life that led back to the ancient seas never had been broken, because in an emergency they could learn and transcend their instincts.

  Teeter looked out of the nest to see what she should do. She saw the wall of water too late to fly above it. She set her feathers and fell into its crest. She rode it to the falls, giving herself time to work with the currents that swept up to the surface.

  At the falls she gained her wings and as the water took the plunge, she flew straight out of it and crashed into the spruce trees below. She fluttered down through the dark limbs, breaking more feathers than she had in the rolling flash flood.

  She gripped the bark of the tree with her hooked nails, righted herself on a limb and called to Cinclus.

  Although the thunder of the stream was tremendous, Cinclus heard the high chink and burst into song. It was a rippling, bubbling song, and singing it to Teeter was his way of coping with his fears. He had not meant to sing, but he wanted to act; and singing was the only way he could act.

  Teeter clung to the spruce limb all night. The tree leaned and bent before the water, but it was well-rooted and did not fall. The crest of the flood moved downstream. She listened until she could hear it no more. Exhausted from her fright, she closed her eyes and slept.

  Up the stream from Teeter paced Canis the coyote. He had been forced out to hunt by his yelping, hungry cubs. The storm had lasted long, and it was hours past their feeding time. He had crossed the stream before the flood to dig pocket gophers in Mule Deer Meadow. He was heading back, empty-mouthed, when the flood wall exploded on Slate Rapids. Canis leaped up the hill, knocking the almost bloomless yellow head from the ragwort plants. He wurped and awoke a pine grossbeak sleeping with her fledgling in a nearby spruce. She chirped and Canis looked up at her, but she was too high.

  When the crest of the flood had torn by, the coyote walked down the stream looking for a place he could cross. He must not only try to feed his family, but he must return to his mate who was guarding the pups. The night before a mountain lion had come up the creek, following the deer and the elk out of the lowlands. The big cat had found their den and had lain in wait for the coyotes. When it seemed to the cougar that his prey had scented him and would not come out, he had padded up to the den entrance and dug at it with his claws. He dug without much interest knowing the den of the coyote was deep and secure, and soon he turned away and loped silently up the side of Gothic Mountain.