She would come to his side without sound, and together they would slip into the clear pools and feed.
They explored the underwater canyons for exercise. Teeter stayed away about ten minutes. He never needed to tell her to return, for the eggs had great power. Teeter would be back with them before she thought about it. Sometimes Teeter would not leave the eggs. Then Cinclus would feed her at the nest.
Other lives came and went around them. The birds did not think about them. They felt the young ground squirrels, the round chubby young of the marmots, the splash of red in the meadows as the scarlet gilia bloomed in full. They knew that time was passing. The nest could be built hurriedly, the egg laying cut short by producing fewer eggs, but the incubation took at least fifteen days, and nothing could make it shorter.
On July 6th, fifteen days after the last egg had been laid, Cinclus had to call Teeter three times before she left the nest. She fed more quickly than usual and did not take time to exercise. She returned to the nest on the canyon wall without delay.
Cinclus did not go to his runnel. He stood across the stream and dipped and dipped, for Teeter was awakening within him the knowledge that the eggs were ready to hatch. More and more he brought food to her at the nest.
Cinclus got her to leave the eggs only two more times that afternoon. The sun slipped behind Mt. Baldy and the long shadows of the early twilight raced swiftly upon Gothic town. Vera Falls fell in the shadow of Gothic Mountain at six-thirty. Cinclus fed Teeter several times during the next hour and then flew to his roost on the limestone wall high above the dam. He pecked a beetle, shook his feathers and went to sleep.
Teeter was aware of the roar of the falls for the first time in fifteen days. Her eyes were wide open, her breast feathers were fluffed to their fullest and the temperature of her body was at its maximum. She poured heat from her brood patch into the eggs.
An hour before sunrise Teeter awakened from her deep sleep. She focused her eyes on the moonlit spruce across the flume. She turned the eggs. They had grown lighter during the fifteen days. Not much, but a bird, who was concerned entirely with the destiny of three eggs, knew. The water in them had evaporated a little.
The first egg cracked. It was an exciting sound. It was followed by a stillness within the egg as the tiny dipper suffered its first gasp of air. It was the sound of the unhatched baby rubbing its wobbly head back and forth in its case that had excited Teeter yesterday. She watched with interest.
As the tiny bird revolved, its egg tooth wore a little crescent in the shell. It weakened it until at last the case yielded and the little bird appeared.
It was dewy and cold, and it weighed less than a twenty-five-cent piece.
Teeter pecked the little thing, and dried it with her hot breast. Then she took the discarded shell in her bill. She could just see the pale thread of the stream lying between the dark rocks when she flew from the nest with the shell. She carried it beyond Mule Deer Rapids and dropped it in a willow thicket.
She chinked and Odocoileus twitched one of her big ears. The deer was standing not far from the stream by the round silver trunk of a spruce. Her growing fawn was bedded down in a shadowy copse not far away.
Teeter was back on the nest when the mule deer walked to her secret. She leaned over and licked him. The fawn unfolded his long legs and stretched. Together they slipped out of the dark forest into the glowing meadow. They tipped off the sweet grasses with their reaching tongues.
Down the mountainside came Canis, the coyote. The wind bore his scent before him, and Odocoileus and her fawn stood still. They could see him above the scarlet gilias, carrying a pocket gopher home to his pups. Feeding them was like trying to fill a canyon with gophers. Canis was ragged and his tail full of burrs. The grand lord of the cliff top was no more than a tired father earning a hard living off the land.
Cinclus heard the coyote pups yipe and bark at the mouth of their den as Canis returned with his offering just before sunrise. Ever since the flood Cinclus had been roosting high on the canyon wall and the voices of the coyotes were familiar to him.
He looked down into the flume and saw Teeter returning to the nest. He flipped into the air and called to her from above the gorge. She winged to him and dove into the water below the dam. She ate, and then she gathered a large mouthful of caddis fly larvae and flew out of the water.
The sight of Teeter carrying food sent Cinclus hunting. He ran along the bottom of the stream, flipped his wings, and bobbed to the surface. He forgot why he had gathered the food, ate it and flew to a spike on the beam of the dam to sing.
This was a short song. When he had finished, he flew to the nest and looked in. He jarred the lining slightly as he landed, and a red mouth, rimmed with yellow, wobbled out from under Teeter’s breast and cheeped at him. Cinclus looked at it curiously, and then flew away. He went up to Bar Rapids and gathered food.
He returned to the nest on the canyon wall and the yellow target with the red bull’s eye raised to him. He filled it, watched it wobble back under Teeter’s breast feathers. He flew downstream.
He stopped on the shore by the cave of roots at Cutthroat Pool. He knew the danger of hunting here, but a large hatch of larvae caught his attention, and a hatch of larvae was important to him now. He would stay out of the deep water.
He slipped into the water and snatched as many larvae as he could reach in the shallows. He watched the circles of sunlight on the stones. There was no shadow of old Salmo, the cutthroat trout.
Cinclus walked deeper into the water. Now he could see the old iron pipe. It teemed with aquatic life. He did not dare to go down to it, but even in the shallows near it there were hundreds of larvae. A young ouzel needed this food.
The water did not change its shadowy blue-green color as Salmo, the cutthroat, rippled his fins and drifted from his deep hiding place under the bank. He slid toward the water bird, keeping the pipe between them to hide his approach.
Cinclus had packed his bill almost back to his throat with nymphs and larvae. Well supplied with nestling food, he stepped up the slope to the beach.
Suddenly the pipe enlarged. It grew a fin. The water churned and the pebbles rolled and Cinclus plunged for the surface. Salmo streaked after him.
Cinclus saw the white teeth in that tremendous circle of red. But Cinclus was no ordinary bird. His knowledge of the physics of water was his freedom. He sped up, but to gain more speed he also spun downstream on a swift current. He felt his body lighten as the heavy surface water rolled back from his neck and shoulders. Then he was airborne.
Salmo leaped out of the water in the same spot. His mouth snapped shut, but he had missed. He arched his body. There was a heavy splash as the trout sank back into his water home.
Cinclus was flying. He rounded the bend and dropped onto the wheel in Iron Wheel Pond. Here he rested from the excitement, dipped and flew upstream to the nest.
When Cinclus arrived, Teeter left. Cinclus again looked with interest at the straggly nestling. With a quick stab he deposited a mouthful of food in the scarlet gap. He studied the nestling a little longer, then went over the falls to hunt with Teeter.
Late that morning there was one less egg and one more bird. The next morning three sightless young water ouzels rested in the dry inner nest. There had been no fourth or fifth egg, for Teeter’s second clutch was smaller in number than her first.
Teeter and Cinclus easily met the demands of the day-old nestlings and at noon they rested. Teeter brooded the young. Cinclus sought his moss-covered rock in the Gothic brooklet. He sat quietly. A small patch of sunlight that penetrated the dense spruce limbs, played at his feet. Occasionally he nipped at it.
High up on Gothic Mountain above the ouzel nest a stone broke loose and rolled off the rimrock. For seventy feet it bounced, rolled and spun. It came to rest against the tough mat of alpine willow that grew at the bottom of the slope.
The falling stone was heard by Cinclus. It did not worry him. He simply listened to it as he did to
so many stones in this land of breaking mountains.
For countless years the rimrock had been freezing in the cold, cracking as it thawed in the sun. It was cut with many crevices. There was one big longitudinal pocket that was filled with water. The early rains had melted the snow field above, and the water had not yet drained from the cliff. The rimrock strained under the weight of the water, and yielded imperceptibly. Below it the dippers carried on their duties.
The morning when the nestlings were three days old, and their gray-blue quills were appearing in orderly patterns down their backs, on their sides, and on their wings, Cinclus saw a more immediate menace on the mountain.
Doug appeared at the top of the cliff with a rope. He tied one end around his waist and anchored the other to the spruce beside the coyote den. Slowly the boy edged himself over the face of the gorge, getting hand-holds and foot-holds in the neatly broken limestone. He descended foot by foot.
Cinclus was surprised that this little fawn of man could maneuver on a cliff. He had always been a quiet animal resting under the spruces and watching the water. He had been gentle. As Cinclus watched him climb down the cliff, he concluded that he was not so gentle and he warned Teeter of the danger.
She heard the signal but brooded close. She sat tight on her nestlings. She heard the hard leather boots scrape and dig for holds on the rocks above her.
There was a shattering scramble and the boy’s legs appeared to the left above the nest. He reached down, touched the nest and seemed to be satisfied. He scrambled back up the cliff.
Teeter came to the door. Her head poked out like a curious housewife as she watched the boy scramble back up the wall. When he was near the top, she loosened her feathers and went back to the little ouzels.
Doug stretched out by the coyote den. He put his head on his hands and smiled. He knew now that it was possible to get a little water ouzel before it fledged. He would raise it and let it swim in the bathtub at home during the winter.
While waiting to hear from the assay house, it had occurred to Doug that it would be wonderful to have a baby water ouzel. Nothing seemed so much a part of the high country as the dippers. Once the idea came to him he could think of little else. During the long winter ahead, it would remind him that he had been a man and could be independent.
He saw Cinclus wing down the stream toward Flycatcher Cliff and he wondered what he would feed such a bird, now that it was possible to have one.
July in Gothic was warm during the day and cool at night. The alpine flowers flooded the meadows, all colors, all kinds. The shifting winds played over them all day as if to remind them that winter was only a few degrees away.
The meadows were busy with life. Ground squirrels brought their young into the sun to forage for their own food, and chipmunks ran up and down the rocks alternately looking for seeds and the other members of their family. The young of the wilderness were everywhere.
At this season the cattlemen brought their cattle to the high meadows to pasture, and Gothic town sounded with the stamping of hoofs and the yipes and whistles of cowboys. They camped in the old abandoned cabins of the town, and when they weren’t herding the cattle in the hills, they were out hunting coyotes, or standing around their doorways swapping yarns.
Doug had been glad to see them come. The first few days they were there he had spent hours talking to them. But they were older than he, and he found less and less to say to them. The things they wanted to learn from him, Doug would not tell.
He said, with the same straight face that his grandfather wore when speaking of a rich lode, that he did not know where the coyotes denned, or the whisky-jacks nested.
Then one day he overheard three of them speaking of Whispering Bill and himself. They laughed and called them “loco old mavericks.” Doug was dismayed and when he met them later he came to the defense of his brand. He bragged of his treasures in the mountains, and told them that eight bags of ore was all he and his grandfather needed to live for a year.
When Doug told his grandfather what he had said, the old man sent his chair rocking in joy. Eight bags of ore—he knew the boy had the makings of a good prospector.
It was the middle of July. The assay house had still not returned the estimate of the ore. Doug began to show concern, for after bragging to the cowboys, he had a personal interest in the findings. What was more, he was curious.
“Let’s go mine it, anyway,” he suggested one evening as the man and the boy sat on the step of the cabin and looked at Avery. Then he added softly:
“The winds are probably shouting to us up there, and the stove is getting rusty.” The memory of the trip seemed pleasant and wonderful. He had a longing to see again the land above the timberline.
“You know, Grandpa,” he said, “it’s not the gold or the silver; it’s the big, silent old mountains that get you.”
“Now, you understand me,” Bill said quietly. “I’m caught by those mountains and I’ll never get away. All other trades seem dull and tiresome compared to prospecting.
“I’m not rich. Matter of fact, most of the money from that claim I sold four years ago is gone, but I just can’t leave this place. I’ll just sell another claim and go on prospecting. Some day maybe my turn will come to find a rich strike. The old Silvanite mine up Copper Creek ran two thousand ounces of silver to the ton. There’s wealth all around us; but, best of all, there are the mountains.”
“Beeerr,” a voice called from the spruce grove. Whisky was sitting, cocky and erect, on a low branch. As Doug looked at the bird, he remembered that the sourdough pancakes were gone, but there was some left-over trout. He went to get it and Whisky came excitedly to the woodpile.
He jumped onto Doug’s hand as he stepped out the door. Bill looked at the bird.
“Whisky’s gonna get it one of these days,” he said.
“Why? What do you mean?”
“Oh, all the critters that come to depend on man, better watch out. It hain’t good for them. Cooked fish; that’s no food for a decent bird. All that crazy Whisky eats is what we give him. He needs some bird sense if he is going to last through the winter, and the kind of bird sense that tells him to go eat some berries and worms and good natural foods. The cold is gonna come and he’ll shiver with skimpy old pancake fat. He’s getting too logy to rustle up his own grub.”
Doug was dismayed. It had never occurred to him that he was doing anything but being kind to the bird. He watched Whisky carry a piece of the fish back to his nestlings and wished that he could take it away from him. Yes, Whisky needed to go off on his own and become a man—even, he thought in amazement, as I have.
“What Whisky needs is a grandpa,” Doug said. The old man scratched his sunburned head and tried to make sense out of that. When it came to him he smiled.
“Well, maybe,” he added, “but animals are animals and people are people.”
Whisky was back within five minutes for more food.
Doug looked at him helplessly and went into the cabin for the rest of the trout. He spoke to him gently as he ate.
“You’re the nicest, most foolish jay in the world.” He turned swiftly to Bill.
“But I’m only trying to help him.” He stopped in surprise and added slowly. “That’s what Mother always says to me. It’s funny, but up here alone like this people and birds and animals get all mixed up together, and it’s hard to tell where they end and we begin.”
Whispering Bill just nodded and looked at his dusty boots.
Whisky carried the fish back to his fledglings and stuffed their open mouths. Bill had hit upon part of the truth, for Whiskey was not well. However, it was not the food that was causing him to lose weight ever so slowly. Malaria had gotten a good start in his bloodstream. The pancakes and bread did not make him ill. It was the bite of a mosquito carrying the disease. The old jay was active and spry in spite of the infection, but the parasites were there and they could be deadly if Whisky were weakened. It would be wise for Whisky not to get too wet or cold o
r frightened or tired.
Before going to bed, Doug noticed that the snow field on Gothic was smaller.
Rivulets of water seeped away from the glacier and bubbled into the crevice of the rimrock. Relentless pressure over the years had weakened a fifty-foot section of the rim. Last winter the expanding ice had shot a crack through the rimrock to the outside wall. Held by its own weight, the giant block rested in place.
Below the bulging wall of the mountain lay the den of Canis. The old coyote had retired to his lair early this morning for the cattlemen were all over the hills, riding their horses and occasionally shooting into the brush.
Canis was uneasy. He sensed that they were hunting him and his Gothic clan. It was time to teach the pups the meaning of a man with a gun. He pushed down the tunnel to the living chamber.
One little female pup was stretched out on the cool earth. As soon as the sun rose, she had stopped playing outside to escape the millions of sun flies that were now pestering the coyotes and deer and squirrels and men. The flies spent the night on the under sides of plant leaves. When the sun came out they swarmed by the hundreds to bite anything that walked.
Canis saw his daughter sleeping and forgot his important mission. He yawned and stretched out beside her. He remembered that he was going to hold school when he felt the vibrations of Cowboy Pete’s horse galloping up the talus slope. He would do this when he awoke.
The sun flies that the coyotes found a pest were a boon to Cinclus and Teeter. There were so many and they were so easy to catch. They stuffed the three little nestlings without going far from Vera Falls.
The little water ouzels grew more slowly than many young birds and stayed in the nest much longer. They would be able to fly before they left their nest. Then they could get from the cliff, across the flume, to the bank of the stream. Twenty-four days were usually spent in the nest before they would leave. The sun flies were indeed a welcome sight to the parents, for already some of the water insects had hatched and taken to the air. The season was getting along. It would be August when the young fledged.
Dipper of Copper Creek (American Woodland Tales) Page 8