One Day On Beetle Rock

by Sally Carrighar

  While the brood fought over the chipmunk, their mother ran across the slope to explore the leaves beneath a dogwood thicket. By the time she returned, the shadows were thin and the chill of dawn was creeping in among the trees. Two of the young weasels munched last bites, but the others moved about slowly, only half alert, their tired legs hardly lifting their bodies above the ground. The mother bounded in among them. Her own strength still was keen but the kits needed rest, so she called them and the little pack moved down the hill.

  At the base of the slope they must cross the stream. An uprooted sugar pine leaned from one side and a silvered fir snag from the other, making a bridge with a short gap in the middle. A few times when the kits were smaller one had missed his footing and had fallen into the water, but this time, tired though they were, all made the jump with safety.

  The weasels’ den was in a thicket, a few bounds off the top of Beetle Rock. To reach it they climbed the slope beyond the stream. When the Weasel approached the cliff from below, she often circled north and up through the brush at the end. Now she led the kits home the short way, over the Rock’s broad, open terraces. They met no other animals until they came upon two gray mounds, strong with human scent. The Weasel dodged into a crack between the granite slabs. By connecting crevices she evaded the sleeping human forms and brought the kits to familiar ground beneath a shrubby oak. There, one by one, the six small creatures slipped into the earth.

  A cry from the Steller Jay reached the Weasel. It was like a touch on a spring. Out of the den instantly, she stretched herself up, her eyes glittering, darting everywhere, trying to see what enemy of the bird was making him so angry. There was a rush of wings as four more jays flew in to aid the screamer. The Weasel often stirred commotion similar to this. She was not the one who had done it now, but if there was going to be a fight she wanted to see it and if possible to join it.

  The jays grew even more excited, for they had lost the object of their hunt. They tossed themselves through the branches of a pine, peering everywhere over the Rock. The Weasel found what they sought — a wildcat crouching under an edge of the granite. A figure of wonderful tense stillness was the cat. Watching her, the Weasel swayed with emotion, her ears, her eyes, her pointed tail, her very fur electric. She saw the wildcat wait, quiet but alert, while the voices of the jays grew less and less belligerent. Finally they ceased. When there had been no outcry for some time, the smooth round body slipped from its crevice, into a gully and out of sight. A moment later it appeared at the gully’s end, a shadow sliding across the gravel to the brush.

  The Weasel flung impatient eyes around her. She was charged with energy and once more had no chance to spend it. The human creatures had partly risen during the jays’ noise. Now they were lying down again, composing themselves, but the Weasel could not escape so easily from her emotion. She prowled over the ground, sniffed for a promising scent, but found none. Still restless, she withdrew into the burrow, to lie with her body in the tunnel, her little triangular head at the entrance where she could watch for something to battle or to chase.

  The lustre of the moon was dulled by the gray of the dawn, and no pocket of full darkness now remained, not even in the underbrush or the depths of the trees. A few chirps rose from high nests, but as yet no pewee droned, no chickaree’s query rang from the pines. After the jays ceased screaming, most of the sounds were lifeless — a small wind knifing through the oak leaves, and the pricking of stiff needles against bark.

  All around the Weasel, animals were sleeping. The hunters of the night were drawing long breaths from tired flanks, their eyelids nerveless and their faces empty of expression. Other animals were breathing lightly now. Soon they will waken, stretch, rise, suddenly leap for a fly or perhaps pounce on a leaf mistaken for a mouse. They will feel it good to have their muscles speeded by an inward fire, just as the Weasel does. For them, the fire will burn out later; then they will be glad to lay their tired legs on their beds. Each satisfaction in its time, and no resistance to the loss of any. For the Weasel, though, the fire will not die. Her nerves cry always for more and more intensity — for wilder winds, for colder air, for faster streams, for sharper scents! In the wilderness most animals’ needs are answered, and strain is balanced by repose. But the Weasel never quite relaxes, since her longing for sensation seldom can be filled completely.

  Her taut nerves had been stretched still tighter by the restricted life she had led while her kits were small. Through the rest of the year she gained some peace by being always on her way to a new place. There were boundaries to the territory where she wandered, but she never returned to a meadow or grove or granite field until the season had moved along and given it a different look and to some extent a different population.

  Quick roamer that she was, she found her food by covering much ground lightly. She cleared out the slow, the weak, and the injured prey, and then went on. By June eighteenth, however, she had stayed at Beetle Rock for thirty-seven days. Long since, she had found the easier victims, and now was forced to hunt with a sickening persistence. The very sight of the Rock, hard, gray, unmoving, was like pressure on a bruise.

  The Weasel’s den, too, was now almost uninhabitable. It had been a good one this year. The Weasel had got it by eating the gopher that had dug it. The central chamber already had been prepared for a brood of young, with a lining of grass and roots, to which was added gradually the fur of mice. Six side burrows branched from the nest compartment. The tidy Weasel used them for discarding refuse. The entrance had been well built, hidden at first beneath a crust of rain-stiffened leaves. But the crust was broken down. The whole burrow was going to pieces, and the nest was becoming intolerably crowded as the five kits neared full growth.

  The dawn on June eighteenth was colorless and cold. Above the canyon staggered a bat, its flight abrupt and senseless to an eye that could not see the insects it pursued. A late owl flapped to rest. The breeze drew across the Weasel’s nose a tassel of scents, but none of them interesting: the bitter odor from an anthill, the dried blood of a deer mouse slain by the owl, and smell signs left on a bear-tree. The Weasel noted these and remained where she was. Then she caught another scent, from the black oak overhead. It was faint but exciting — the clean, sweet spiciness of purple finches!

  A flock of the birds had flown to the tree on the previous evening, while the Weasel was away. Now they were stirring for a farther flight, beginning to layer their feathers and to stretch their wings. Cautiously the Weasel crept up the trunk of the oak and stepped onto one of the branches. The canny finches were perched at the outermost ends. Twig by twig the Weasel approached them. The branch is bending a little, now, under her weight. Two of the sleepy birds are almost in her grasp. But she cannot spring; the bough here is so light that she must coil her body around it to keep her balance. It dips. The birds are warned and the whole flock bursts from the tree.

  The sharp fights of the earlier night, and the prey that had filled the stomachs of the Weasel and all her brood, were too far past to be remembered. She only sensed that she was tortured with disappointments. She stood at the entrance of her burrow and looked again around the Rock, empty of life except for the sleeping human figures. Finally, more in disgust than fatigue, she turned into the tunnel and the nest.

  While the weasels slept, the sun rose and became warm and the daytime animals began their frank and visible play. Only three or four bounds from the den, chipmunks raced on the Rock, the Lizard searched for insects, a junco sang, and a butterfly dangled above a clump of golden-throated gilia. A chickaree danced through the branches of the nearest pine, continually calling in his high, sweet bark.

  There was a little time of wary silence when the human creatures threw off their blankets, stood up and stretched, and walked to the rim of the Rock. But they paid more attention to the canyon view than to the scores of eyes that watched them from the pines, the manzanita, and the nooks in the granite. As soon as they took up their blankets and strolled towards the border
ing forest, they were followed by a wave of small bright sounds.

  The weasels, down in the cool dark earth, lay with their bodies coiled together, breathing softly into one another’s fur. But their graceful sleep was jolted. The nest was shaken by a series of great thumps, slight at first but quickly becoming violent.

  Two of the smaller weasels were so exhausted that they did not waken, but the mother and three larger kits streamed out. They saw the white rump of a deer who was bounding down the slope, alighting each time with a force that would have collapsed the den if he had struck it. His passage was a crashing — the earth resounding, fallen branches snapping under his feet, and gravel rolling.

  The animals’ calls and movements all had ceased. But after the deer had disappeared and the forest had been empty of sounds for a moment, a chirp was heard from an oak tree and a chickaree dropped a cone from the top of a pine. Among the leaves a wing flashed and a fluffy tail unfurled. Soon the creatures were frisking more recklessly than ever, relieved to feel again that they were safe.

  A golden-mantled squirrel made the mistake of jumping over a log without stopping on top to see what was on the other side. He came down at the mouth of the weasels’ den, in the very midst of the four who had awakened. The squirrel had seen them before he touched the ground, and had twisted his body so that he was able instantly to dodge back towards the Rock. But the mother Weasel cleared the log on his heels and caught him.

  The two fought back and forth across the granite. The squirrel was larger, the Weasel faster; in fury they were matched. Every breath of the squirrel was a shriek of rage and protest.

  In this battle the Weasel must really spend herself. Now the two are together, now apart, streaking away side by side. Together again, they claw and hiss feverishly; their teeth flash and grope for each other. The Weasel has caught the squirrel around the haunches. All her attention is given to coiling herself around his body. She shifts her hold until it is more and more secure and her teeth can approach the base of the squirrel’s skull. Finally she sinks them in a precise and fatal puncture.

  The feast is shared by all the family except the two still sleeping in the den.

  Now the Rock is indeed quiet. Gone are the junco’s song, the chickarees’ barks, and the quick brown scallops of the chipmunks bouncing among the boulders. No jay screams. This is one of the times when the undependable jays have failed to call a warning. If they saw the flight of the golden-mantled squirrel, and its end in the whirl of cinnamon and yellow fur, they watched without a flutter or a sound.

  The fight with the squirrel unbound the Weasel’s nerves and filled her with a sense of ease and grace. For a short time now she found it a pleasure merely to be alive on this height above the canyon, circled with sky and sparkling with pine-sharp light.

  Without returning to the sleeping kits, the Weasel led the others down over Beetle Rock to the stream below. She crossed the granite flats with airy leisure, looping high, like an elastic measuring worm that sprang from the ground each time its two ends came together.

  At the base of the Rock the slope was covered with boulders, chaparral, and seedling pines. The Weasel’s lithe little body flowed among them. Smoothly she wove her way through the stubs protruding from a fallen cedar, jumped over and under the manzanita branches and ran along the boughs of the pines. Gravel dust coated leaves and needles, but she melted through without getting a speck of it on her coat. The three kits followed closely. They were not so agile, and they could not finish a bound with their mother’s perfect balance, but they tried and they were learning. Finally the family reached the taller tangle of green along the stream.

  On the bank above the water, under a slanting black oak, was a clear space free of brush. Here the three young weasels stopped and looked around, sniffed across the moist earth, jumped on the trunk of the oak and down as if they knew this place and were glad to come back to it. They started to chase each other. The leader leapt upon the tree, then, as the other passed, he bounded to the ground and into a pile of dead leaves. The pursuer whirled and also darted into the leaves. The leader returned and paused, moving his nose deliberately along a root. But when his brother was out of the leaves and streaking towards him, he spun around and caught him. The two became a single boiling mass of fur, paws, tails, and teeth.

  While one was on his back, the other astride his belly, the third kit, a female, ran up and took a nip at the victor’s leg. Her brother sprang off and after her. He gained as they dashed across the clearing, but just as he would have leapt at her, the other brother streaked between them. The two males locked together, rolled over and over, then suddenly were apart, racing after each other. Their golden bodies were like the darting sunbeams under shaken leaves.

  Their game was sharper than the play of most young animals. It was more subtly timed, more finely fought, exquisitely close to deadlier emotions.

  The mother had climbed up into the oak tree and watched the kits from the crotch of a branch. Her eyes flicked also to the jerking head of a kingfisher on a higher branch, to the zigzag of a dragonfly, to the water’s lacing, and the dipping of a mountain lotus. She heard each touch of bough on bough, each gulp of the current. Even the roundness of the branch, the movement of the stream-stirred air, and the smell of the moist bark, came to her as brilliant and provocative sensations. Her head swayed on her long neck, now from side to side, now up and down, as she tried to see and smell more, even, than a weasel’s senses have been tuned to catch.

  Into the amiable, easy morning came a little heaviness. The Weasel dropped from the tree with a silky leap, and down the stream bank to a wet root. She sucked a long drink from the water, then thrust her head entirely under, where the lovely movement was so like her own. Abruptly she pulled up her nose and watched the splash of shining drops. Again she shattered the water, as if she had learned a new game. The young ones, tired of their own game, tumbled down the bank and joined her. Even the leopard lilies at the edge were not more vivid than the tawny splashers.

  The Weasel lifted her wet nose high. She found that the air had become cold. The sun was gone, and the leaves above the stream were troubled with a dark motion. Smelling a storm, the mother sprang up the bank and growled to summon the kits. But they were lost in their play. She called again and one of them bounded to her side. The remaining two continued to chase each other in and out of the muddy roots. But when the stream was splashed with heavy raindrops, even the kits were prompted to look for cover.

  The weasels raced up the slope towards their den, but the storm was faster, and the family was caught in pelting rain. The mother led the kits up a dead white fir to a hole a dozen weasel-lengths from the ground. They entered and took shelter in the hollow trunk.

  Thunder crashed. It brought the mother out to the hole. There she crouched, beside herself with emotion at the violence around her. With a roar the rain streamed down, now flung aslant as the wind tore through the trees, now tumbling upon the forest with seemingly the weight of a cataract. The branches churned and pitched. Some snapped and fell, catching on other boughs, then breaking away and plunging to the ground.

  The water had its own smell. More pungent were the moistened odors of needles and bark, of the earth and its decaying cover, of wet granite, and of all the animals, and their trails left everywhere that feet had passed. Soon the air itself was stinging with ozone generated by the lightning. The Weasel sharpened her nose to suck each thrilling scent.

  Green flashes fill the forest. They seem to come from the very depths of the trees. In the leafy caverns never reached by sun or moon, the glare exposes the hidden nests of birds and small furred creatures. It points to the mottled owls attempting to hide themselves against the mottled bark.

  As the canyon trembles with the shocks hurled on its sides, the Weasel in the fir hole weaves and sways. This at last is a weasel’s forest — lights, sounds, scents, intensified to the limit of excitement.

  Too soon the storm began to pass. The Weasel felt its going.
She detected the first crumbling of the violence — the delay in the thunder, which then broke slowly, lacking its earlier, full, murderous crack. It rolled out longer, a sustained, reverberating roar.

  The lightning flashes came less often, and were paler, weaker, a suffused white-green. This was only a pretense of danger. The rain was ceasing; in diminishing waves it was departing down the mountain. Finally there was only water dripping from the leaves.

  A break in the clouds showed high blue, and below, in the canyon, sunshine tinted a misty feathered slope. The storm was over. The Weasel’s world had fallen away.

  She sank within the hole. But soon she reappeared, to lead the three kits down the tree, through the steamy thicket, and over the wet loam to the den. She had not been concerned about the two she had left asleep, for other storms had proved that rain did not drain in. But she uttered a shrill cry at her first sight of the burrow. Over it crouched a great fur body, the Coyote digging to the nest.

  His paws worked fast, scattering clumps of mud to both sides. His haunches twitched, and his nose moved impatiently across the fresh-cleared earth. The tiny Weasel instantly attacked. She sprang for the face of the Coyote, where she caught with her teeth through his lower lip. The Coyote yelped. He swung his head to try to shake the Weasel off. Still she clung. Desperate, he gave his head a great jerk and the Weasel was hurled to the ground with his torn flesh in her mouth.

  She leapt again for his face. But he was ready; she barely missed death between his snapping jaws. Again she tried. This time she felt the grazing of his teeth. Hopeless now, but wild with grief, she crouched in the hollow center of a log, out of his reach. The Coyote resumed his digging, his sidewise glance on the little head, all fangs and scarlet tongue, and glittering eyes.