One Day On Beetle Rock

by Sally Carrighar

  Here now came a pair of chipmunks, bounding with motions as fine as tiny foxes’.

  “Oh, the darlings!” cried the woman.

  She left her cooking to come to the man’s side and help him throw nuts to both robin and chipmunks. The chipmunks sat up with the nuts in their forepaws, shelling and skinning them with their teeth. At last the woman, who threw less precisely, sent a nut far enough out so the Jay could get it. Faster than the speed of the nut, he jumped to it. He and a chipmunk reached it together. With his long beak, the Jay could have grasped it first, but the little chipmunk was bolder and took the nut. The Jay shrieked his disappointment.

  Now the man saw him. He said:

  “You get away from here. You’re too noisy.”

  How humiliating was his tone!

  “Go on, get. We don’t like jays.”

  The man threw something. Could it be a nut? Eagerly the Jay hopped towards it. It was a piece of bark. The man scooped a handful of chips from the chopping block and began hurling them at the Jay. He strode out from the bench and the Jay flew into a tree. The man sailed the chips up at him and the Jay fluttered higher. He no longer screeched. From behind a fir spray he looked down and saw the man go back to his bench and resume the friendly gesture of giving food, so similar to the gesture of throwing in anger, yet so different.

  But the Jay would yet have some of those nuts. He watched until the chipmunks began taking away the nuts to bury them. After a chipmunk had tucked his nut in the ground, whirled the earth over it, and bounded off, the Jay would uncover it. He cached the nuts in crevices of tree trunks, with bits of bark jammed above to conceal them. He ate only one, adeptly holding it on a branch with his foot while his beak broke off the shell.

  When the peanut feast ended, he flew to his fir lookout. Now, however, he stayed in the deep shade of a middle bough. He perched with his blue feathers against the trunk, showing the world only the black front of himself. Into his retreat penetrated the screams of the Weasel and a squirrel, but the Jay was no longer inclined to lead a clamor against any hunter. He was a changed bird, so secretive that he seemed born and trained by habit for hiding. The predators could do as they pleased; the Jay’s eye showed that he had a different, more personal interest in mischief-making.

  He was so quiet that he was not even discovered by a red-breasted nuthatch searching for insects on the bark of the branch. The nuthatch flew down to its nest in a stump, shooting into the hole without alighting, a trick it had had to learn because it had smeared pitch on the hole to keep out ants. The picture of the nuthatch entering the hole dropped into the Jay’s mind with peculiar sharpness. A wish formed around it. From his hidden perch he began to scan all the dead trees he could see.

  He watched a large oblong hole in a stub, but with curiosity more than hope since it was the home of that black and white giant, a pileated woodpecker. Some bird was tapping on a live tree; he? No, the blows came too fast. That would be the little white-headed woodpecker, smaller than the Jay. The Jay knew that one’s nest, too. It was in the sky-horse, a twisted pine snag on the center of the Rock. The Jay held his eyes on its hole. He was about to fly down when the female’s head appeared in the circle. The Jay settled back. On a fir stump he recognized the opening to a red-shafted flicker’s nest, shaped wider than long by the broad-shouldered owner. A flicker was a large bird, so the Jay looked elsewhere on the stump. A chickadee flew from a knothole and the Jay tilted forward with eagerness. He could see a blurred movement inside.

  The stump was below, at the side of the Rock. A wing-slide would have taken the Jay there in an instant, but he flew around through a chain of shadows among the trees. Finally he reached a cedar bough near the stump. He saw the father chickadee come back to the hole, immediately followed by the mother. Then both parents left. They would be absent now for a while. The Jay could hear the cries of their young. In that hole was a meal that he would enjoy. He went and got it.

  When the chickadee parents returned, the Jay was perched on the sky-horse, bare pedestal in the sunshine. He stood with legs erect, bill uptipped, tossing his crest. If he had seen any other animal rob the nest he would have screamed the fact to the neighborhood, but there was none to expose him. He called:

  “Tchah! Tchah!”

  It was not his warning. It sounded instead like a shout of restored defiance, as if he had gained back self-confidence lost to the man, the chipmunks, and the robin.

  The chickadee meal was digested quickly. Then the Jay mounted the fir. He would station himself in the sky again, to protect the Rock’s population from robbers and hunters, but now would fly a patrol, rather than perching.

  He stood on the topmost branch until the wind surged full on his breast, then flung himself forward upon it. This was not a flight to take him anywhere, but only to stay aloft, so he checked all his large movements. By tilting his wings’ under-surfaces forward, he could make his glide level. The wind was irregular, as disturbed as a river. The Jay rode its uneven stream without flapping, with only small, sinuous changes in his body’s form. The shoulders, elbows, and wrists of his wings were ever slightly turning, bending, rotating, adjusting themselves to the air’s pressure, pliant all over their surfaces. He steered with the wings even more than he did with his tail, though his tail, too, was supple, and helped the bird keep a steady course through a wind that would have tumbled him wildly if he had not made himself its responsive partner.

  The beautiful flying ended, the Jay glided down to the ground. When he fluttered up the boughs of his fir again, he was singing, a melody humble and sweet.

  White cumulus clouds were blocking out part of the Jay’s sky. Soon they had shut away all its blue, and rain was filling the air. The Jay must retire to some sheltered nook. He was ready, anyway, for a rest. He perched in a cluster of fir sprays as quietly as if he were not aware of the lightning flashes, the shocks of thunder, and the rain falling so heavily outside the canopy of his tree. By the time the sun shone again, he was much refreshed. He, and other jays too, flew about in the sparkling boughs, often alighting as if they enjoyed dislodging the showers of drops.

  A change could be felt in the weather. The breeze had died, and there was a new mellowness in the warmth. Under these conditions the vigilance of a jay would be very important. Already many prey creatures had emerged to relax on the Rock. The predators would resist the atmosphere’s loosened tension, and, being familiar with the way of their quarry after a storm, would stalk them with sharpened eagerness. The Jay must protect the unwary ones.

  The first hunter to arrive was a coral king snake. The Jay saw it gliding along a granite crevice towards two lizards, battling among dry, crackling oak leaves. The Jay flew to a bough over the lizards and cried his warning, but they failed to listen. The snake surprised them and captured one.

  The Jay could discover no other predators, then, for some time. Yet the afternoon was still favorable for attacks. His anticipation built up and up, to an intensity almost unbearable. He watched the red-tailed hawks feeding the young at their nest. Each time they flew out over the canyon, he prepared for a magnificent outcry, but the hawks did not once approach the Rock. Finally the Jay could stand the suspense no longer. From the distant ridge he heard the high cry of the male hawk. He could imitate that cry — and he did, from a well-concealed perch. It caused havoc! As the Jay screamed the hawk-like threat, terror struck one creature after another. Every animal except the deer showed panic, and the Jay watched from behind a dense tangle of needles. This was a much more desperate disturbance than he could make with his jay-warning, which did not tell who the enemy was.

  While the silence of fear still lay over the forest, the Jay slipped down into a clearing behind the trees and quietly searched for insects. When he was ready again to appear, he flew out — and saw an immense wing descending among the tree trunks north of the Rock. That was a hunter’s movement, one with a plan in it never sensed in the stealth of prey. The Jay sailed into the grove. Ahead rose a great horned
owl with a mouse in its claw. It flew up to a high sequoia bough, followed by the Jay, who sent out a summons that filled the air with approaching blue wings by the time the owl had alighted.

  The owl was enclosed in a swarm of hovering, screeching jays. It looked at them from behind the yellow screen of its eyes. When the riot continued as if nothing ever would tire the jays, the owl gathered its dignity closer, and flew to a branch of a sugar pine. The Jay and his comrades strung behind. They would wear out this monumental patience. After some time the owl’s eyes began to show flicks of rage, and then the clamor gained volume. At last the owl bristled its feathers, and with half-opened wings leaned forward in a threatening lunge. But it would not attack the jays, as they knew. Suddenly, still carrying the mouse, it dropped to a hollow snag and disappeared. The victory of its small tormenters was final.

  The Jay started back towards the Rock, arrogance in his eye. On the way his offspring discovered him, and burst forth from the pine where they had been perching, disconsolate. Their screams were indignant as well as hungry, but their father sped away from them, losing them in the intricate boughs of a cedar. He stole a mushroom from a chickaree’s store as he passed its tree. And he stopped to taunt the man and woman who had humiliated him in the morning. They were standing on a trail, looking at the sky. The Jay perched above them, screeching that every animal should beware of them. As he went on to the Rock, then, all his movements were challenging. Near the edge of the granite he found the robin, his rival, drinking at a rain pool.

  With a squawk that fairly scratched the air, the Jay dove to the robin’s side. Approached so boldly, the robin surely would give up his place at the pool. But he did not! Instead he turned to the Jay with a vicious snap of his beak. Amazing little robin, a head shorter than the Jay; why was his bluff so alarming?

  The Jay hopped up high in the air. That should intimidate the robin. But the robin hopped nearer, again clapping his beak. The two danced around each other, feathers on end. This certainly was to be a fight. But the Grouse stepped up to the pool now, and in her quiet way moved ahead of the others. Why did they not protest, and include her in their battle? The Grouse simply surpassed them in inner force. In sharing defeat, they forgot their anger.

  The sun was close to the western ridge when the Jay returned to his lookout. He perched with no motions except the turn of his head and eyes. He saw the swallows cutting out over the canyon among the clouds of insects. Warblers fluttered around the trees for the insects in the branches. The Mule Deer Buck stood at the Rock’s rim listening to the sounds of a day passing into those of a night. Directly below the Jay, a ground squirrel sat upright at the mouth of her burrow, forepaws folded upon her white breast. These creatures seemed to have forgotten fear. Should the Jay cry out his warning, and once more see them scatter?

  If he was tempted, he did not do it. Perhaps he was satisfied to know that he could. So many events of this day had shown him to be a master, that his ego did not need any further proving on June eighteenth. He flew down unaggressively to the ground for a late meal of ants. Afterwards he climbed his lookout fir to one of its thick lower branches, took a stand there and let the lids close gradually over his eyes.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO

  The Mule Deer

  Out from the trees on one side of the meadow swept a great horned owl. Even in the deer’s eyes, it was large. It passed low above their heads, a dark rush, gone before the air was quiet again upon the deer’s faces. The owl was seeking prey, and the prey were there, mice all through the meadow. But the grass blades had protected them. The owl was gone, and this time no small life had been pressed out between its claws.

  In the cabins behind Beetle Rock human beings slept, trusting the cabin walls to keep their food from bears. Animals that were food themselves also had let their alertness go, believing that in their burrows, trees, and rock-piles no predator could find them. The deer, out in their meadow, were still awake, watchful as they grazed. It was nearly midnight, but the deer, largest of prey creatures, had no dens where they could hide.

  The Mule Deer Buck was nipping off new fronds of bracken near the meadow brook. One hoof stepped into the water. No other deer mistook the sound for a diving frog. Their seventeen heads turned towards the Buck, for he was the herd leader. If he was crossing the brook to leave the meadow, they would follow. But he stood quietly, facing the east, and the wind. After he swallowed his mouthful of bracken, he waited until the flavor no longer blurred the odors that he smelled. Then he moved the soft end of his nose up and down to sharpen the wind-borne scents. Tonight the wind was so strong that his nose would give him the quickest warning of any enemy approaching from the east side of the meadow.

  The other deer were wary, too, but they relied on the herd Buck’s greater caution. His ears lay back along his neck, reaching for danger signs from the west. The ears, more flexible than the ears of other deer species, turned to each minute sound, quivering to enfold it more completely. They responded to sounds that human ears could not catch, perhaps to a cave-in behind an insect’s burrowing, to a mouse’s panting, or milk in the throats of little flying squirrels. To be a leader, a deer must hear a predator’s footfall while it was no louder than such innocent stirrings. The followers of the herd Buck knew that they could depend upon his listening, even though half his left ear had been torn away the previous winter, during the annual mating contests.

  The deer were out in the meadow because they had learned where homeless creatures have the best chance of escaping predators — away from the trees on dark nights; in the deep shade under branches, but with openings for escape, when the moon is bright. There was no deer tradition to cover a night like this. The moon had not yet risen, but vapory small clouds had caught the approaching gleam and reflected it down on the grass. The leader could clearly see the herd’s black tail-tips, tight against the white rumps. If he could see them, so could a cougar. Should the deer go back under the trees?

  The speed of the clouds was wilder than any movement in the forest. No need for caution delayed the luminous spindrift, flying perhaps to a safer, freer world. The cloud-foam disentangled itself from the treetops on one side of the meadow, an instant later had blown beyond the treetops on the other side. It made this pit at the bottom of the foliage walls seem a little like a trap.

  The Buck looked off into the tree trunks. There the night was dense, but not as black in a deer’s eyes as in humans’. He watched for movements more than shapes, for the lifting paw or gliding head. What was the wave-like motion at the top of a log? The Buck’s nerves bounded. But the sinuous looping was only the passing of the Weasel and her five kits. They were gone. A flying squirrel dropped from an overhead branch to the log, alighted in the weasels’ frightening scent, and darted away. A gray squirrel, restless on this windy night, marched down a pine trunk. On the ground he stopped and called. He was a harmless creature, yet his voice had a tone of urgent cruelty. Now the wariness of the Buck seemed intensified. He leapt over the stream to leave the meadow.

  He led the way northeast to an open grove where the deer spent moonlit nights. The younger deer would sleep beneath any convenient trees, but most of the older ones had favorite beds. The bed recognized as the herd Buck’s was under a cedar’s low branches. The tree was on a slight rise, so that the wind swept directly to the Buck’s nose. And from there he could see into distant patches of moonlight that an enemy would cross in approaching the herd. It was a well-placed bed for a leader.

  The Buck did not go to it at once. He stopped to browse on the leaves of a scrub oak near the cedar. The other deer, accepting his wisdom, were coming into the grove and finding their resting places. The order in which they came told something of their position in the herd.

  First to follow the Buck was a forked-horn two-year-old, his satellite. After him came the eldest buck, whose weary weight swung from the framework of his shoulders. These two bedded down beneath a sugar pine next to the herd Buck’s tree. Behind them a three-point buck,
two four-pointers, and two does entered the grove and stopped at adjoining trees. Three does stayed in the deep grass of the meadow. The does would bear their fawns in a few days, and made all moves reluctantly.

  The ears of the mature deer twitched with annoyance, now, at the approach of the yearlings. The six yearlings, tensely forlorn at being motherless, always stayed together and a little apart. They were as restless as birds fluttering on their perches; their hoofs plunged constantly, heads tossed, and ears jerked. They would call the attention of any predator to the presence of the other deer. Some of the yearlings were learning poise, however, and were working out their relationships to the herd. That one who struck so precisely with her forefeet would make herself boss of all the does within two years. But what good could await the anxious young doe, so nervously prancing, pounding back and forth in the meadow at scents and sounds she only imagined? The yearlings stopped beyond the others. Would it take them all the night to get themselves distributed?

  One deer had not come. He was waiting until it would seem that he did not follow the herd Buck. There now was his confident step, and his lifted head, high and black and sharp against the light on the meadow grass. Tonight for the first time his antlers showed a new point rising in each front fork. No other buck in the herd was growing fifth points, though they were not uncommon among mule deer. They meant that this buck would have five tines instead of four, this year as last, and that the extra tines would give him a deadly advantage in the combat season.