One Day On Beetle Rock

by Sally Carrighar

  The buck was a young outsider, just entering his prime. He had joined the herd during the mating contests of the previous winter. He had come closer than any other buck to defeating the present leader. Each time the leader and the new buck clasped their antlers and began the struggling pressure against each other, the stranger’s fifth tines had come dangerously near the leader’s ears. At first, by holding his head at a strained angle, the herd Buck had avoided the extra points. At that angle, however, he could not use the full strength in his neck muscles. Finally he had thrust his head forward recklessly, let one of the fifth tines tear through his left ear, and thereby recovered all his neck power. While blood flowed from the side of his head, he forced his weight against the challenger. Shadows lengthened before he felt the other give. Even then the stranger’s weakening was so slight that the leader could not measure it. But he sensed it, and exhilaration renewed his energy. More quickly then, he drove the other back and down on his knees. The five-point buck had groaned submission, the leader relaxed, withdrew his antlers, and stepped away. The does belonged to him still, and for another year the rights that went with his proved superiority.

  Within a few weeks all the bucks had dropped their antlers, and their antagonism towards each other. But the competition would arise again next fall. And again, it seemed, the outside rival would be armed unfairly. The leader must watch those fifth points grow, longer and longer, and finally lose their sheaths of velvet. Then he would see their owner polish them on willow bark. To win against them, he must well surpass the other’s strength. But tonight the tines were only swellings on half-grown antlers.

  Usually the five-point buck went directly to a bed near the yearlings. Now, however, he came to the oak where the leader browsed. He, too, began to nip at the leaf-buds, but he stayed well out of the leader’s way.

  The swing of the earth had taken the deer’s grove to the point farthest from the sun. It was midnight in time; was the Buck aware of time? Perhaps he was more aware of it than human beings are. Hours and weeks are not measured in the wilderness, but the life there is determined by the sun’s days and the moon’s months even more than is the life in cities. The Buck must also adapt himself to nature’s smaller movements, to winds, clouds, the lengthening of shadows, leaves’ growth, the rise and fall of streams. Being dependent on such delicate transitions, might he not sense a change when the ground beneath him curved no longer away from the sun, but towards it, when his night of heightened danger began to end?

  And since his place in the herd was related to time’s changes in himself, might he even be aware of the important turnings in his life-span?

  At midnight the Buck walked away from the oak leaves, and farther out into the grove. He may only have been nervous. For more than seven days he had not seen or scented the Beetle Rock cougar. The cougar hunted over a wide route, returning approximately once a week. The Buck had had ten years in which to gain a feeling for the interval between its visits. When it was due, the Buck was restless. He drained the wind, and started at every falling twig, at every stirring of a bat or mouse.

  Finally he was satisfied that no predator stalked in the grove, and turned back towards his cedar. The moon was up now. As he passed from tree to tree, he crossed its light, which touched to a blaze the shine that smoulders only in wild eyes — red-white in the Buck’s eyes.

  The five-point buck left the oak and he, too, walked into a channel of brightness. But why is he not going to his bed near the yearlings? Incredibly, he approaches the leader’s tree. He is pawing at the leader’s bed. Finding no rocks or branches, he drops a knee to lie upon the needles.

  The leader’s anger was a hot, dark flood. He reared and struck at the other with his forefeet. The five-point buck leapt up and towards him. The night was violent with the stomping of their hoofs and with their snorts and hisses.

  The other deer all rose from their beds. Perhaps a sense of their presence, of the startled herd around them, came to the five-point buck with the pressure of a custom. He stepped back, away from the leader, withdrawing his untimely challenge. Briefly the two deer faced each other with no motion but their heavy breathing, then the leader turned and lay upon his bed. After the five-point buck had stood where he was a little longer, he pawed out a bed for himself beneath the same tree, but with the trunk between him and the herd Buck. The leader chewed his cud, showing no sign that he was aware of the other. Both deer kept their heads up; both were alert, defensive in their resting.

  Through the rest of the night the herd stayed under the trees. They were still forms, with their tension gathered deeper in them now. From time to time the leader closed his eyes, but his ears and nose were informing his sleepless nerves.

  The weight of the oldest buck lay on the ground more flatly, his quietness was more inert, than the other deer’s. When the dawn first marked him, his eyes were open, but he seemed remote from the crystal chirping of the birds, from the chipmunks’ waking energy, and other creatures’ lively return from sleep.

  He could show the pattern of a deer’s aging to the herd Buck, watching him. The old one’s shoulders were high between his tired back and his tired head. His legs were stretched out straight to ease the cramp in his knees. On his hind parts, his thick gray winter fur had not been replaced by the summer coat of rusty tan. His antlers had not yet grown to the first fork; they were forming only one fork these years. In June the antlers of all bucks ached at the bases and were sensitive in their turgid sheaths, but the old one’s may have been especially painful. For that reason or some other, his temper was quick to flare.

  No muscle sagged in the sides of the present leader. His back was one smooth, curving line from tail to antlers. He lay with his legs all folded beneath him, so that a single, straightening move would spring him farther than any predator’s pounce. Yet this morning his tail twitched and his ears were nearly as wild as a fawn’s. His composure had been upset by the presence of his arrogant rival, and perhaps by the strain of the windy night, with the cougar expected. When he left his bed to go out in the meadow, his faithful forked-horn follower rose to go with him. Irritably the leader struck at him. The forked-horn watched with astonished eyes as the leader walked away. Then he wandered off alone among the trees.

  Now in the dawn there were rounder curves on the tree trunks. Countless details which darkness had covered were coming back into the meadow and the forest. The snow plants and mushrooms were back on the ground, the cobwebs were on the ferns, the rippled sand was in the brook and the silken shadow below the layer of flower heads. Boulders were clasped in the upturned roots of the sequoia log.

  The Buck found a patch of Spanish lotus. Its puckery freshness was the taste he always wanted in his mouth in the early morning. But on this day he ate little of the lotus. He was restless, and would finish his first meal somewhere else. Soon the other deer would be leaving, too. In pairs or singly they would start away on trails to groves, to thickets, and smaller meadows. They would not be a herd again till nightfall, though various ones would meet where they were going.

  The Mule Deer Buck turned east towards Beetle Rock. There, beneath the fir that overlooked the granite field, he joined a group of animals every afternoon. Most of them lived around the tree; they knew each other and had worked out peaceful ways to share the spaces of shade and sunlight, the food, the water at the nearest spring. In a way the Buck was also a leader among them, for they relied upon his watchfulness.

  All the way to the Rock he found animals that he knew. Along the stream was a separate neighborhood of those who liked the shelter of the gorge. Descending the steep trail, the Buck saw first a pair of gray squirrels. This morning the squirrels were absorbed in a grave game, a chase more like a dance. Beneath a scrub oak they pursued each other in small intricate circles, first the female leading, then the male. Above them floated their long tails, swaying with elaborate grace. The patter of their feet was their only sound.

  The birds were leaving their night roosts, finding
their seeds and insects, starting the busy play of fluttering from one side of the stream to the other. That weaving of their flight across the water’s flow would fascinate them all day. The Buck approached a red-naped sapsucker drilling for his drink on a pine trunk. As the Buck passed, his antlers could have brushed the bird, but they frightened it no more than a blowing branch would. Down on the edge of the trail a fox sparrow scratched for food, with forward jumps and backward scrapes of its feet. It didn’t miss a jump when the Buck walked by, for it knew the caution of deer’s feet, how they avoided stepping on small creatures, even on flowers.

  Finally the Buck leapt across to the other side of the stream, came out on an apron of sand and put his mouth into the water. The stream was quiet here. Down in its brown, wet clarity he could see a bird, a dipper, pushing itself along with feet and swimming wings as it searched for larvae under a sunken branch. The dipper’s head bobbed forward, then the bird made an upward dive from the water, and carried the food to its fledgling, who stood near on a wet rock. The mother, too, perched briefly on the rock before she went into the stream again, and the two gray birds ducked up and down in time with the ripples.

  The diagonal paddles of the water-skaters were snapping together energetically, sending the watery-textured insects darting over the surface. Six minnows, who had been resting under a stone, glided back into the swiftest current and took their stand against its pressure. All day they would fight the stream to make themselves strong.

  And now, with a ruffling whir of wings, the wounded Grouse arrived. The Buck expected her, but she vanished after she alighted. The dipper had time to find two more larvae before the Grouse appeared again. Where had she been? Perhaps in plain sight. No other creature had so unearthly a talent for making herself invisible, by her markings and by the stillness that seemed to remove her altogether. The Buck finally found her when he heard her beak click over a beetle. Slowly, with a sort of waiting awareness, she walked along the sand and picked up other insects.

  The green sedges near the water were sharp in deer’s mouths. The Buck preferred the tender grasses higher on the stream bank. He and the Grouse climbed up to them with movements so harmonious that they seemed to show a silent communication between these unlike creatures. The two stayed near each other, the Buck searching for delicate new blades of grass, the Grouse for worms.

  As he grazed, the Buck was listening to the confident sounds here, feet running and bounding, wings whipping into flight, voices calling, chattering, singing. The streamside animals had a fearless way, perhaps because the gorge was a tangle of natural screens for hiding — of leaves, logs, rocks, and piles of flood wreckage. The cover was not the kind a deer could use, but the Buck seemed soothed by the lack of strain around him. More spring came into his movements, and even a little playfulness.

  The squeak of a shrew was like a prick of threat. Smallest of mammals, but one of the cruelest, she slipped along past the Buck’s nose, leaving an acrid scent. He raised his head, and sensed that the squirrels’ feet had stopped tapping, too abruptly. Why? His legs moved tensely; there was alarm in his nerves. Cougar? The birds still sang; a chipmunk cracked an acorn. The Buck’s fear eased. His mouth went down for more grass. But when he passed beyond a boulder into a flow of wind, he found a new scent, sharp as a scream. It was not the scent of cougar, but of its relative, wildcat.

  Quicker than thought could have sent him, the Buck was up the bank, was clearing logs and rocks with bounds three times his length, up over lilac and hazel bushes, up past the humans’ trail, up the gully of a dry creek, up an animal path now, up and up and up. The effort was excessive, but the Buck was fleeing from his nervous fear of the cougar more than from the cat.

  High on the slope he stopped and whirled to face the trail. Had the cat pursued him? He waited, eyes, ears, nostrils tense. His bounding had caused a startled silence here, but soon a chickaree and a jay returned to their foraging. The Buck relaxed, and when he did, found that his legs were shaking uncontrollably. He felt that he was smothering for lack of breath. This was the first time any chase had winded him completely. He lay beneath an oak.

  Now another buck was bounding up the trail. It was the forked-horn, but he was not in flight; when he stopped he did not turn to face the gorge. He knew nothing of the wildcat. He had seen his comrade pass and had come to meet him, leaping with the exuberance of a young deer.

  The herd Buck seemed glad that he had come. The two deer walked along the slope towards Beetle Rock and the dogwood thicket where they often spent the morning. There they would rest, enclosed with chinquapin brush, and chew their cuds. When they reached the thicket, the herd Buck ate for a while at the pungent leaves of the chinquapin. His interrupted feedings had not yet given him twelve pounds of green food, which he needed for a meal.

  Finally he let himself down near the forked-horn. Each knew an opening through which he would escape if a predator entered the brush; they were enjoying the only ease a deer knows, ease based on readiness. Or the forked-horn was. The herd Buck did not feel even that security. A mouthful at a time, he brought up the food he had ground imperfectly and chewed it finer, meanwhile waiting in his muscles and his nerves for the return of his full strength. He still sensed an unfamiliar weakness from the exertion of his uphill flight.

  His antlers throbbed from the increase in his blood pressure. Twice he laid one fork on the ground for the comfort of its touch. Biting deer flies clung to his nose; they had beaded it with blood. Several new wood ticks had fastened upon him. He bit off those he could reach and was going to get the forked-horn’s help with the others when a rising storm distracted him.

  The storm was stimulating. It broke quickly and with violence. The rain seemed not to fall, but to be hurled upon the forest. Thunder and lightning filled the sky with the power of wild destruction. The Buck and his young companion moved beneath a cedar, where they stood and watched, comparatively dry and much excited.

  The thunder and lightning departed before the rain did. For some time the rain continued at shower-strength, an easy-falling freshness that drew a spicy fragrance from the leaves and a good, damp, woody odor from the bark. Dust, granite, even the dead leaves on the ground, smelled clean. The Buck felt ready again for any encounter. The storm had renewed his energy, as rest had not.

  He saw that there were ticks on the forked-horn’s neck and chewed them off for him. The forked-horn removed the ones on the leader’s back. Each was exceedingly careful not to hit his antlers on the other’s, a precaution purely in self-interest, but there also was a kind of tact in the motions of the deer around each other, a graceful giving way, a lack of wilfulness.

  Without warning of scent or sound the Coyote came around the brush. The herd Buck only glimpsed the humped speed of the enemy flying towards them. He sprang back, body low, ready for a great leap, but he waited. He let the young buck bound away, a decoy, drawing the Coyote out of sight. Then the leader trotted off in the opposite direction, noiselessly, almost as slyly as a cat. He never before had reacted thus to an attack. In his early years, the Buck had been tricked like that by older deer to save their energy. He had forgotten the strategy, but his nerves remembered it. Now he had a new defense technique, adapted to some new stage in his physical progress.

  On the lower slope the Buck stopped in a copse of young pines. The deer trail from the stream passed by the copse. Up the trail was climbing one of the Buck’s does, a two-year-old, soon to bear her first fawn. Lost were her own fawn traits, the intensely questioning eyes, the secretiveness, the distrust. When she saw the Buck, she joined him. Standing beneath the little trees, she reached up and back with her mouth to eat some of the needle-buds. The needles were strung with raindrops, each one catching the sunshine now. The Buck browsed on the needles near her.

  The shadow of his antlers lay upon the creamy fur of her full side. But the antlers’ shadow was blotted out by a larger one. The five-point buck, who had been following the doe, walked between her and the leader. He to
o began to browse.

  At this season the leader was not usually jealous when other bucks approached the does. He had had them all for himself in the winter, when they were important personally. This day, however, there seemed something more than amorous interest in the way the five-point buck had cut between him and the doe. Perhaps the manner of the five-point buck was always challenging. At least, the herd Buck felt himself displaced. The hair on his back rose, and his breath came quick and wild. Just then, however, the doe took fright at a falling cone, and shied, and raced away. The five-point buck turned from the pine trees to a fir with staghorn lichen on its trunk. The lichen was browsed off to the height of most deer’s mouths, but the five-point buck could reach a little higher. He chewed at the lichen, apparently giving all his attention to keeping his antlers away from the tree.

  The leader’s annoyance was not dispelled. But he started on to the fir tree at the Rock. Soon he had lost sight of the five-point buck, yet his tail flicked, his ears whirled, and his hair still bristled.

  At the fir he found a disturbance that increased his agitation. The forked-horn buck had disappeared, but the Coyote was there, digging into the Weasel’s den across the draw. The Weasel was shrieking, jays were squawking overhead, and a ground squirrel piped a shrill whistle. The Buck stood under the fir, his nerves distraught. At his feet the helpless little Deer Mouse bounded from leaf to twig in a search for some small refuge.

  When the Coyote finished the weasel meal, the Buck was ready to break into flight, but the predator turned off down the Rock. The sentries became silent. All the animals remained cautious for a while, then one by one they dared again to flutter, to leap, to chirp.