Dipper of Copper Creek

by Jean Craighead George

  Two of the nestlings were males, the third was Tippit, a female. She had hatched last, but she was wiry and vigorous. She got to the doorway past her struggling brothers, and her opened mouth was stuffed for fifteen minutes before she felt satisfied and sleepy. She doubled her weight that day and settled down to a regular feeding routine with her brothers.

  White Eye would hang out the doorway until he was full, then Diver would push him away and take his place. Tippit would shove Diver into the back of the nest when he was sleepy and she would beg at the door.

  All day they revolved around the nest. If their parents were gone too long and they all got hungry, there was bedlam in the doorway when Teeter or Cinclus returned. The longest neck usually won. Then the nestling at the doorway would turn its back to the parent and drop a fecal sac, the excreta of the bird that is held in a fine mucus membrane. Teeter or Cinclus would carry it away from the nest. When the birds evolved this tidy system is another mystery that is locked in their ancient and unwritten history. It helped them to protect their young and keep the nest clean, and so it continued. The young of the water ouzels were protected by so many things, their nest, their cliff, their long stay in the nest. It was not likely that excreta at the site would mean much danger, and yet the parents removed it. The tradition was established and Teeter and Cinclus were tied to their ancestors through their instincts. They took each fecal sac and dropped it away from the nest, usually in the stream. Often they would seem to wash their bills in the water afterward.

  After five days of feeding, the little dippers were about seven times their hatching size. Over their backs were soft lines of fine feathers. Blue quills protruded from their wings and tails. The quills were sealed. It would be another few days before they began to break at the tips and release the feathers to cover the bare skin.

  On Tippit’s sixth day she was first at the doorway. As she waited with mouth ajar, her entire head seemed to light up. She shook it, and found she could move the muscles of her eyelids. She gobbled her tremendous meal looking at Cinclus. What she saw, the position of his eyes, the way his beak fitted to his head, the size and tilt of his nostrils was completely absorbed by her. This was her father. And she would never forget the image of him that was imprinted on her mind at that moment.

  When her mother came in with food a few minutes later, she looked at her. This was a different combination of detail of bill, eye, head shape—all the things that make one individual ouzel different from another—but still she was an ouzel. This was her mother, who brooded her and pecked her, and was her warmth and comfort.

  By ten o’clock that morning, all the nestlings had been fully fed and were resting quietly. Teeter and Cinclus went over the falls to play in the spray. Canis, dozing at his den entrance above them, heard them clink as they dove and swam. Then he got up, for he thought he smelled a skunk. He went down the hill a few paces, sniffing, and came back to flop disgustedly on the ground. He had been fooled again by the odor of the blue flowers of the Jacob’s ladder that bloomed in profusion in the rocky gulch below the den. He was annoyed that a plant could so tax his sense of smell. His daughter pup came out of the tunnel, her nose twitching. Canis waited with some pleasure for her to track the scent to the plant. She sniffed it again, knew what it was, then dropped beside him and went to sleep. The old dog coyote of Dipper Hill closed his eyes as if in a huff.

  The second week after the nestlings had hatched, Cinclus was awakened one morning by the rain dripping down his back from the ledge above. He shook himself and called to Teeter to begin the day.

  Teeter had spent the night with the nestlings, brooding them through the cold hours before dawn. She thrust her head out the door and saw the wet gray clouds sweeping the top of Gothic Mountain. The light rain was like cascade spray to the dippers and they flew into it. They sent the raindrops off their wings with pumping flicks.

  Teeter plunged into the water just above the falls. A fish might have been swept over the falls at the point where she entered the water. It would seem that nothing could withstand the powerful pull of the stream at the brink of the cataract, but Teeter knew how to make use of the pull and she hunted the edge of the precipice as a robin hunts a lawn.

  She surfaced near the shore and walked along in the shallows, snapping the flies and larvae in the pot holes, drilled by the water-spun stones.

  The rain fell all morning. It seeped into the crevice of the rimrock, and Canis resting in his den, felt a tremble in the earth. It lasted for only one second but he was disturbed. The earth was his security. It must not tremble.

  When it stopped, he did not go to sleep again, but lay with his eyes open, his forehead wrinkled.

  The broken section of the rimrock had slipped another inch under the added weight of this rain water. The whole mountain received the force of the movement. The ground squirrels as far away as Lee’s Tavern came out of their burrows to see what had disturbed them. Only soft low clouds blew by.

  Teeter did not hear the slip in the mountain, for she was in the air, flying back to the nestlings with food. However, Cinclus who was gathering May flies in Iron Wheel Pool, not only felt it but heard it.

  He was so terrified he dropped his food, swooped to the surface with a “zeet, zeet.” The water carried the sound more clearly than the air, and the water ouzel of Copper Creek was the first to have any inkling of the impending disaster. He knew he had heard the mountain move. He knew much about the mountains; he often heard them crack and shift while he hunted under water. He knew the sound of rocks rolling on rocks, wearing slowly away, returning to the sea. But this sound was not a rock breaking, a stone grinding. This was big.

  He ran along the shore dipping and dipping. His wings fluttered and dragged. Cinclus was excited.

  Teeter, coming peacefully toward him through the air, became alarmed when she saw him. She looked for a cutthroat trout, a mink, a turtle. She zeeted because he zeeted, but she saw nothing to frighten her and gradually lost interest and alighted to gather food.

  Cinclus waded into the water, put his head under and listened. There was only the clink of the rolling stones and the swish of the shifting sand grains. He was calmer when he surfaced.

  The next five days were sunny and full of flies. The mountain relaxed, and Cinclus ceased to listen for the voice of the earth as he hunted the bottom of his stream. The life growing in the moss nest was too immediate.

  The ceremony of feeding the young was a lovely sight. For about an hour Teeter and Cinclus did nothing but fly off for food, return and stuff the yellow edged targets. When the mouths closed and the sleepy heads went down, it was the signal for the two parent ouzels to go over the falls and feed and play. They would disappear behind the thundering sheet of water and sit in their favorite air pockets. Here they would tidy their feathers, straighten the twisted, water-bent ends of their tails and rest. Presently Cinclus would chink, and Teeter would look at him. He was still large and important in her eyes—perhaps not as large as during the breeding season—but big enough so that she responded to him and flew after him to feed. They let about half an hour pass in this pleasant way.

  When they were comfortable they would fly past the nest and call to their nestlings. If a screaming head appeared at the doorway, and it always did, Teeter would fly upstream to Lincoln Sparrow Point, and Cinclus would go downstream into Saxifrage Pool.

  As Teeter gathered nestling food she listened to the tiny Lincoln Sparrow chip at the whisky-jacks. He was always chipping at them, for they often came slinking through the trees and once they had robbed his nest. Teeter listened to this little worrier, and noticed a change in his frantic note. It had a slightly higher pitch than his “here come the jays” cry. Teeter checked for the sparrow hawk.

  Out of the top of her eyes she saw a pair of golden eagles. She tilted her head to see them circling like black leaves high above Gothic Mountain. They were coasting on the winds that ebbed up from the peaks, looking for big things like marmots and coyotes. She went b
ack to larvae hunting.

  The nestlings kept growing. All they needed was food, care, and time. They happily popped to the doorway in their turn, going around and around, and during the first week they were bigger at each feeding. When they were hatched they weighed about as much as a twenty-five-cent piece. At the end of the first week they weighed as much as seven quarters. Now the nestlings were two weeks old and weighed as much as eight quarters. Teeter’s weight was equal to about ten quarters. As the weight gain slackened, the feather growth quickened. At hatching the baby birds were protected only by a scant, wispy covering of natal down. At the end of the first week, soft quills stuck out in narrow rows on their wings, tail, back, belly, thighs, and head, but the nestlings still looked naked. At the end of the second week the growing feathers stuck out from the quills and covered the bare areas between the feather rows.

  The scarlet gilias faded from the meadows, except for a few late ones still blooming in cool spots. Cinclus saw the red go from the hills, as he and Teeter worked from dawn to dusk, feeding the nestlings. During this fifteen hours of light they brought food every minute or two; rarely, they rested and stayed away as long as thirty minutes. The adults tired, but the nestlings must be fed. Already the days were an hour shorter than in June, and the nights, never warm, were getting cooler—only a few degrees above freezing.

  In his eager quest for food Cinclus occasionally dipped into Cutthroat Pool. He would stab quickly and run out. Salmo would follow him. It became a game, but a deadly one for Cinclus, should he misjudge.

  Cinclus found a pool rich with insect life below Salmo’s haunt. He changed his hunting area, but as he passed Cutthroat Pool he would wing low over the water, and Salmo would rise and snap the air.

  Tippit and White-eye and Diver filled the nest. Now, when they came to the door, they not only called for food, but they looked with interest at the world beyond them. This morning they saw Doug across the flume. He was looking at them.

  Doug had spent the morning watching the ouzels. He was trying to find what they caught in the water and pools. Every time he went to a pothole where Cinclus had eaten, he could find nothing. He finally located a fly at the edge of the water and put it in a jar. He was planning to raise the flies so that he could feed the little ouzel he was bound he would capture. From time to time he looked up at the puffy nestlings. After his first difficult descent to the nest, he had decided that it might be easier to catch an ouzel as soon as it left the nest and before it could fly too well. Perhaps he could do this the first day it fledged. He watched the nest carefully to see if any one of the little birds was testing its wings for flight.

  A shot boomed out from the top of the cliff. Doug looked up to see Cowboy Pete riding down Dipper Hill. The horse ran into the spruce forest as if spooked. Cowboy Pete was pulling the reins and shouting, but the horse plunged on.

  Doug wondered if Canis had been shot. No, a dead coyote would not frighten a horse. Something else was on that cliff. He searched the top of the cliff for the answer, then ran for the trees.

  A big tawny cat leaped to the edge of Dipper Cliff and caterwauled. From behind a spruce Doug saw that his shoulder was bleeding where Cowboy Pete had wounded him. Doug had the feeling that the big mountain lion would leap the gorge and fall upon him. The cat was angered by his hurt. Doug turned and went up the hill with the bounce of a snowshoe hare.

  Felis, the mountain lion, spit at the dashing figure but it was too far to leap. In the town below the cry went up, “Cat in the mountain!” Cowboy Pete had carried the news, and it was verified by Doug as he ran down the moraine, wide-eyed and skittering pebbles under his racing feet. He shouted to the gathering cattlemen:

  “I saw him. I saw him. He’s up on Dipper Hill!”

  There had been no report of a mountain lion in Gothic town for many years. People said that they had been wiped out. But now that the town was deserted there were not as many people to watch the mountains, and although the lions were few, they were not entirely gone.

  Felis, a two-year-old, had wintered in the lowlands where the mule deer yarded. As the deer pushed higher and higher into the mountains seeking forage, the big cat had followed them. He had come up the main street of Gothic in the dark spring night. On the air was the scent of the prospector and his grandson, and as he passed the ruins of the old hotel, he veered left and went up Gothic Mountain. He had no use for man. High in the alpine forests, he hunted successfully for three or four weeks.

  The day the mountain moved he was sleeping in a narrow cave. The rumble seemed to come from all around him, and he bolted out of his shelter. Sensing that Gothic Mountain was not behaving right, he bounded down the talus slope and into the forest where Odocoileus and her fawn were dozing.

  He was still there when Cowboy Pete discovered him.

  OVER THE FLUME

  DOUG WAS telling Bill about the lion when one of the cattlemen came riding around the horse shed. “News from Pueblo!” he called. “Guess you’re a millionaire now.” He laughed, as he handed Bill an important-looking letter.

  Whispering Bill took it, tucked it slowly in his belt, and thanked him. When the man saw that he was not going to read it aloud, he turned his horse into the trail and rode off. Bill was pleased to see that he was disappointed.

  No sooner was he gone than Bill snatched the letter and tore it open. Before he read it, he called a loud “yahoo!” He could hear the rider rein in his horse beyond the shed. When Doug realized Grandpa was hollering to tease the horseman, he, too, shouted. Then they sat down on the steps of the cabin and studied the letter.

  Early the next morning, as the cattlemen and their hands were cooking flapjacks, Bill and Doug and Lodestone started off for the peaks. The news that an exciting letter from Pueblo had come for the old prospector was common knowledge in Gothic, so it was with silence and some envy that the cattlemen watched the prospectors move slowly up through town. Lodestone was bristling with axes, picks, pans, and boxes. Not one of the cattlemen laughed, for each was remembering that there had been history made in those hills. It could happen again.

  The prospectors knew full well what was going on in the men’s minds. Outwardly Bill maintained an easy calm. He knew this casualness made the expedition look all the more suspicious. He was thoroughly enjoying his game, and when the party was out of sight and earshot, he burst into laughter. Doug joined him and even Lodestone seemed to prance. This day was theirs.

  The second trip to the mines was so easy that Doug was amazed by his memories of the mountains. The snow fields were melted now, the air was warmer, and life above timberline was entirely pleasant.

  The winds still howled, but they no longer sounded like bears and mountain lions. It was only the wind carving the top of the world with infinite patience, back to the sea.

  This night Doug lay awake because he wanted to. He pulled his sleeping bag out of the tent and watched the billions of big stars hanging like street lamps all over the sky. Doug fell asleep with his head in the stars and awoke with the dawn in his face.

  The top of Mt. Avery was yellow-pink. The rest of the mountain was still dark. Doug saw that his grandfather was sleeping and he got up quietly to start the fire and make the coffee and sourdough pancakes. He went down the mountain for water. The marmots were waking, the little conys were already harvesting their crops.

  Whispering Bill sat bolt upright in his sleeping bag. He smelled coffee and recognized the thump of sourdough batter when the soda is added. He looked at Doug and smiled.

  “Well, now,” he said, “who wants to go to Pueblo when Mt. Avery has service like this?”

  He reached out and poured himself a cup of coffee, and drank it in the warmth of his sleeping bag. Doug was so proud he could not speak without betraying himself.

  Whispering Bill and Doug worked and sang until about nine o’clock. They loaded two bags with ore and still in high spirits made the descent to Gothic in about three hours.

  Slowly they walked down the one remaining stre
et of town. Heads tilted behind windows, and men appeared at doorways to knock the mud off their boots. They tried to tell from the faces of the prospectors whether the letter had borne good news. Whispering Bill looked straight ahead of him, dead-panned.

  Doug wasn’t as skilled at this kind of acting. The corners of his lips curled upward, but the men thought he was trying to keep some secret. Again the cowboys wondered. Again the prospectors won the day.

  The following day Bill went to town to renew his supplies, and to arrange for a truck to take his ore to Pueblo.

  Doug went back to Vera Falls and spent the day with the dippers. He took his grandfather’s shotgun with him, for he remembered Felis. The morning was hot and the sun so bright that Doug’s eyes were bloodshot. He rested in the shade of the tall spruces. He watched the young birds carefully.

  Felis was sleeping in the forest above the Dipper Cliff.

  High above Vera Falls, the rimrock had settled, and the treacherous water was seeping out at the bottom of the cliff. It looked harmless as it wound down through the blue harebells and the saucy yellow blossoms of the false dandelions. A flock of pine siskins, with their patches of bright yellow in wing and tail, arose from a clump of paintbrushes and flew into the harebells. They were like bobbing flashes of sunlight.

  Whispering Bill did not return to the cabin that night. Doug checked the fire, lit the kerosene lamp, and read in bed until ten o’clock. He blew out the light and before he fell into a deep sleep he wondered briefly to whom Grandpa was bragging about his mine. For an instant Doug was amused that he was so unconcerned about being alone in Gothic. He thought perhaps that it was because he now knew what to expect of the old man. Then he realized that he was quite capable of being alone. He knew what to do.