Lightly she sped away from him, back down the slope and into the grasses, dodging among the stems in a bewildering way. She seemed to be trying to lose the fine small rustle that followed, yet she never ran so fast that she quite escaped. Soon she was in her home-range, leading over familiar ways.
This was like racing with her brother, only somehow more amusing. The Deer Mouse dipped under a root, up and over another root, a gasp of a little run. A pause, then as soon as the pursuing patter came close, she rippled across the gravel to the log. She slipped to the log’s other end. Finally she led to one of the manzanita bushes.
Back and forth on the gnarled stalks the Mouse flew, as if she had snapped the threads of gravity. Even the lift of a bird’s wing hadn’t a freer motion. The other mouse raced well, too. Sometimes he would leap from behind her onto the branch above or below, and skim ahead. Then, unexpectedly, he left her, ran down the main stalk and crouched at the base of the bush, a secret place only visible from the branches above. The Deer Mouse could see him there. And he could see her, the gleaming white fur under all of her body, streaming along the boughs.
The male mouse beat on the bush with his forepaw, a spray of patters, a pause, then another quick knocking. The Deer Mouse crouched motionless and listened. The drumming was repeated. She came in along the branch. Once more he drummed. She hesitated — then sped down. With a soft brightness she drew up to the mouse. Playfully she began to nibble his ankle.
WHAT HAPPENED TO
The Steller Jay
In the trees’ fluffs of shadow that night were many small, bright, black points, the eyes of birds wakened by the conflict of winds. The wind reached the coast as a single north-flowing stream, but the Sierra ridges divided it. Above Beetle Rock two of the currents were meeting again. One had swept down from Mineral King, unopposed until midnight; then the canyon wind strengthened, rising against the slope. The colliding gusts battered the trees.
Birds like the flickers and chickadees, in the hollows of rigid dead snags, were not roused, but the wind alarmed every bird on an outside perch. It was giving a wild ride to the Steller Jay, clutching the end of a limber branch. And no bird could fly to a firmer roost until morning, since wings cannot grope their way through the dark as feet can.
The nest of the Jay’s family had been abandoned weeks earlier. Now on June eighteenth, the Jay’s young, almost grown, perched among twigs near their father. They were better able than he was to keep their hold on the jerking branch, for the Jay was tattered in plumage and energy from the long strain of rearing the five. Even yet, though they were stronger than he, he hunted most of their food.
If a whole crowd of jays had been competing in jauntiness, the bough’s movement would have been a chance to show off balancing skill. If the sun had been lighting the Jay’s performance, and one observer had watched, his spirit might have been stronger. But no jay is fitted by temperament to struggle alone in the night’s obscurity. Finally the exhausted father was almost ready to let the wind snatch him, toss him above the trees in a last, light, effortless flight, then fling him down on the granite. Still his toes gripped the perch. At the most sudden pitchings he fluttered his wings to stay upright, but he never quite lost his touch on the bough, which was his touch on life.
At last the dawn separated the trees. As soon as it clearly showed new landing places, the Jay flew to a lower branch, which extended into the sheltering boughs of a pine.
The pine was the Grouse’s roosting tree. The Jay could see her, a motionless knot of shadow close to the trunk. As he sat and watched her, his wings and tail flicked. He was impatient to have her fly down for her day on the ground. She stood ahead of him in the forest boss-order, and had dominated him so many times that he knew he was not supreme in the tree with her there.
But now he forgot her. Suddenly he was taller, alert and hopeful. He had heard a flake of bark hit the earth, and a scratching of claws. Oh, let that be a predator for him to berate! For many weeks the jays had not molested any animal hunter, because with young in the nests, the parents must keep themselves inconspicuous. But the Jay’s caution dropped away when the bark dropped from the pine trunk. He dived for the lowest branch.
A wildcat was climbing the tree. The sight of her was like a poison that exhilarates. The Jay screeched taunts at the cat, so vigorously that four more jays flew in from other trees. Each seemed to try to make his cries the most shrill. As the cat climbed, the birds kept pace. The Jay took the lead. He flew towards the cat’s face, apparently meaning to jab his long black beak into her eyes. Of course he always stayed far enough back to be out of her reach, but his raids were brave-looking, impressive gestures. Anger flashed from the cat, from her very fur. Once it drove her to dart a paw at the Jay. He dodged away with a clattering clamor.
The cat was nearly as high as the Grouse’s roost. Though the Jay was not fond of that bird, he would not let her become a victim. The cat turned to pass a branch that intervened between her and the Grouse. But at that point she paused. It was useless to go on; the jays’ din made it impossible to surprise the Grouse, as she had intended. She began to back down the tree.
On the ground she raced away to a manzanita thicket and disappeared. The jays had followed her down but soon were up in the branches again, scanning the Rock, still crying threats after the enemy who had escaped. Gradually their excitement subsided. One by one they became silent, and all but the jay father left the tree.
This was the first time his brood of young had seen a jay flock mobbing a hunter. They had watched the performance without helping to make it noisy, but they had absorbed the spirit of it. When the Jay wished to perch quietly and enjoy his triumph, they flew at him, thrusting their squawking beaks into his face. They were screaming only for food, but now with increased vigor. As the Jay looked at the big birds, whose stomachs never were full, the exuberance which had stiffened him crumpled. Without it he felt very tired. He knew that those cries would continue all day, however strenuously he worked to feed the five.
This brood was his first. He had no experience from which to foresee the steps in his cycle of fatherhood. Guided only by instinct, he had helped his mate to build a nest of new pine needles, softened in water for weaving. He had fed her while she incubated the eggs, had guarded the nest, and when gaping mouths had replaced the eggs, had filled them tirelessly. His mate had helped, but on the day before this she had disappeared. The Jay did not know the reason; he had not seen a goshawk tossing jay feathers down from a tree.
During those weeks in June, the forest clanged with the cries of young jays, dozens of them, old enough to find their own food but demanding that their parents supply it. Curiously the mature jays, so sure in movement, so energetic, could be imposed upon — by many small animals beside their own offspring. Supported by a flock of their own kind, they were bold, but individually they weakened when other creatures became decisive or vehement.
Soon after the wildcat left, the Grouse sailed out of the pine. The Jay continued to perch on an upper branch with his young screeching around him. Suddenly he screamed back at them, surprising them, and even himself. Then he drooped on the bough.
The battle of the winds had been won. Now the canyon current swept up the mountain, steady and swift, as if to meet the sun at the crest. This up-flow, the deepening of the sky’s blue, the temperature, and the feel of the branch were a combination that stirred a memory. On a morning in a previous June the Jay, then a fledgling himself, had felt cramped in his parents’ nest. He had climbed over the rim to the bough at the side. Never had he flown, but the wind pressed against his breast. It pried beneath the edges of his wings. When he lifted the wings a little, it grasped their wrists and flung them up.
Anticipation had trilled in the Jay as the air flowed under those upraised wings. The invisible support was almost as strong as the branch he grasped. It seemed to urge him to launch out and rest upon it. Then he was in it. Sky was beneath him, all around him. As the mountain dropped away, panic ha
d struck him, but that set his wings in motion, as the sense of drowning prompts a creature to swim.
In a quick surge of learning, the Jay’s whole mechanism of flight had begun to work. Unexpectedly his wings were beating the air … backward and up … forward and down. On the swift rise they almost relaxed, letting the wind fling them high, with quills opened like slats. At the top of the stroke came a splendid flip of the end-feathers, then the Jay felt his breast muscles grasp the wings and pull them into the slower down-beat, quills now locked in a solid sheet. Even then his wings had moved gracefully, only three beats to a second, like the great buzzards’, while the sparrows flapped thirteen times in the same interval, and the humming birds two hundred times.
Until that day the Jay’s ribs always had expanded to draw in his breath; when he flew they clamped into a rigid support, and his wings’ motion sucked the air through him, through a chain of air sacs under his skin, in his muscles, in even his bones, keeping him cool without perspiration, circulating fresh oxygen in amounts that replaced his strength as he spent it.
On this June eighteenth the similar wind under the Jay’s breast awakened a similar anticipation. Again his wings rose involuntarily, and he found himself flying above the canyon. His leaving was so abrupt that the young did not follow. He was alone. Unreachable! Instinct had shown him how to father and rear a brood; now instinct said that the undertaking was finished. By leaving his five, he learned that he might leave them. He was independent, with no more need for discretion, again free to be the flashing blue focus of many eyes, again free to mind every other animal’s business.
First he needed food, large quantities all for himself. Too smart to seek it where his young might discover him, he circled the face of the cliff to its east edge and alighted on a grassy bench. Leisure seemed to expand all around him as he stood on the mossy side of a spring and sipped the cold water. The sunlight cupped in the little meadow had warmed the bordering trees. The Jay would forage among their branches, for the sun was almost like nourishment to flesh as hungry as his.
He looked for signs of insects. The outer twigs of a Jeffrey pine had a sooty color; perhaps the coating was honeydew of the large brown Cinara aphids. The Jay flew to one of the boughs and found hundreds of the tree lice, their beaks in the wood of the twigs, feeding on sap. He ate aphids until he noticed a sawfly cutting into one of the pine needles with her sharp abdominal organ, to deposit an egg. She was a bigger beakful than an aphid.
As the Jay had alighted in the twigs, a chickadee had fluttered away. She knew she must give up the aphids if the Jay wanted them. He threw a “Tchah!” after her. A ruby-crowned kinglet and an Audubon warbler had been picking over the needles. They too flew off, but rather as if blown by the breeze, not with such heart-warming acknowledgment of the Jay’s dominance as the chickadee had shown. Sometimes one might profit by watching the insignificant smaller birds. The Jay heard the lisp of a Sierra creeper and discovered her, like an animated cocoon, hitching up the trunk. She kept shining the almost-luminous white of her throat into the cracks, where there must be insects, for she often stopped. The Jay flew to the trunk, driving away the creeper.
He found flat-headed borers, both beetles and slugs. The green-bronze beetles were as vividly iridescent as the Jay. He got only two, but stripped off a loose piece of bark and uncovered four of the big moist grubs. He noticed that an adjoining fir had thin-looking sprays, flew over, and learned that the needles were being eaten by tussock-moth caterpillars. The Jay ended the damage that five of the orange-striped worms were doing. He would return to this fir many times; without any tree-saving motive, he and his jay comrades would restore its health by the end of summer.
His hunger satisfied, the Jay relaxed on a shady bough until his energy was not needed for the work of his stomach. Immediately, then, there bounded up in him an impulse to make himself handsome. He returned to the spring, dipped in the water, and whipped his feathers until the dust was washed from quills, coverts, and down. Up on an oak branch, he whirred the moisture out of them. The vanes of a number were ripped. The Jay oiled his beak in the gland on his rump and pulled the beak down the feathers with a quick, sawing touch. The barbules locked together much as humans’ zippers lock; the feathers became smooth and glossy again. Another whirring layered them.
With the grooming done, the Jay was a splash of magnificent blue, all his back and wings an unbroken blue surface that seemed more intense against the black of his head and breast. The blue was not true pigment as, for instance, a western tanager’s yellow and scarlet are, but the prisms in the Jay’s feathers made him look blue, more dazzling than if the blue had been real. His electric color actually was light, the reflected blue element of the daylight.
The bird’s manner was equally brilliant now. He flicked about on the oak branch, snapped his wings, turned from side to side with motions dramatic and vivid. No hawk had a glance more dominant. Was the Jay really so sure of himself? Or was his confidence like the blue of his feathers, lost if a harsh touch broke the prisms?
The Jay started for the top of the tallest fir on the upper surface of Beetle Rock. That pinnacle was almost directly above the small meadow; since birds seldom ascend at angles of more than forty degrees, however, the Jay mounted the cliff in a spiral. He left the branch with a strong forward push into the canyon wind, swung around, and placed his wings well to the front, a position that made him tail-heavy and gave his body an upward tilt. He flapped vigorously, and also curved down the wings’ trailing edges so that each had a deepened arch in which the wind caught and helped to lift him. The wind turned up sharply on striking the cliff; the Jay took advantage of the vertical current. At the top of the Rock he alighted on the fir’s lowest bough and climbed by fluttering up from limb to limb — a ladder of more than fifty steps before he reached the banner-like tip of the tree, streaming eastward above the long, limber trunk.
From his green peak in the sky the Jay saw a golden eagle, like a mote of black dust, appear at the head of the canyon. It flew down, but over against the opposite ridge, for the Jay warned it to stay away from the Rock. He watched two red-tailed hawks at their nest on one of the Ash Peaks. They were likely to come out in the sky soon, and soar on the up-draft. Let them ride it too close and he would send the great birds retreating — the Jay would, although his size was in the chickadee class compared with theirs. Around the edge of the Rock went his glance to make sure that no weasel or other predator crept up to surprise the animals warming themselves on top, on the granite now creamy with sunshine. A human being at the Jay’s post would have needed binoculars to discover a weasel there below, but the Jay’s eyes could see farther than a human’s.
With a showy flutter his wings broke the sunlight. He tossed his head, and the brightness glinted along his beak. A cry seemed to explode in his throat. Ringing out over the Rock went the jay-scream that said, “Hunter!” Then — and what a fulfillment it was! — the deer pranced with alarm. The chipmunks and squirrels raced for hiding. The wingbeats in the trees vanished. An instant earlier all the mountain was stirring with life. The Jay called a warning and now every creature had fled or frozen. The Jay was master! Again he screamed.
But the scream broke off. What were those two mounds below on the Rock, as large as resting deer but without antlers or tails? They should be investigated. The Jay set his wings, drawn back to make him head-heavy, and launched himself from the branch. Down forty times the height of a human being he fell, then levelled out by advancing the wings and spreading and lowering his tail. The change in the shape of his body stalled him at the precise point to alight on a pine bough.
He slipped through the tree, observing the curious mounds from different angles. One mound broke open, arms flung off a blanket, and a man sat up. At the first move, the excited bird fairly tipped off his bough, but when he saw a human being emerge his tail ceased to twitch and the gleam in his eye faded.
Humans were only starting to appear on the Rock in June. They were mig
rants like the deer and many of the birds. The Jay, who stayed through the winter, had seen many animals come and go, but all fitted, however briefly, into the Rock’s wilderness ways — except the people. People were unpredictable. Every other species had a limited range of motions and sounds; chickarees climbed trees, for example, while ground squirrels did not; an eagle dove onto its victim, but a red-tail might chase a bird on the wing. One’s whole security lay in knowing what any creature might do, but there was no safety with human beings for they had no sure pattern of action; they might do anything. The Jay had a special reason for disliking them. They would not heed his voice, would neither frighten, like the prey animals, nor be driven away, like predators. The Jay’s mastery of the Rock was not complete while human beings were there.
Yet they were interesting. The second mound had disclosed a woman. Now he would watch these two. They strolled out around the rim of the Rock, then up a trail to one of the cabins, with the Jay over their heads, never separating himself from the trees’ shadows. At the cabin the woman began to work at the stove. The man got a bag of peanuts and sat on a bench near the door. He tossed a nut to a robin.
The Jay dove from an overhead branch with his fine, particular knack, not gliding until his momentum was lost, but alighting with a strong forward speed, then bouncing gracefully to a stop. No robin made such a spirited landing. It deserved a nut, but the man didn’t notice it.
The Jay hopped nearer, but not as close as the robin, who was receiving nuts as fast as he ate them. How did that bird, less adroit than the Jay in quick take-offs, dare to go within reach of the man’s hand and shoe? Back and forth at a safe distance jumped the Jay, as sprightly as a grasshopper. Each time he came down he flung his head so that his crest whipped from side to side. Amazing that the man failed to see him, or to hear him, for the Jay incessantly screeched. If the man would throw a nut only a little farther, the Jay would get it. He was frantic to have one, not only because he liked peanuts, but to keep up with the robin. Repeatedly the Jay bent his legs, meaning to match the robin’s fearlessness, but his intention failed somehow and he always hopped sidewise instead of forward. He really was waiting for an instant when the man and robin would turn away and he could dart in and snatch a nut without any risk.
One Day On Beetle Rock Page 13