One Day On Beetle Rock Read online

  Copyright 1943, 1944 by The Curtis Publishing Company

  COPYRIGHT 1944 by Sally Carrighar. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages or reproduce not more than three illustrations in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by THE RYERSON PRESS

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83141-5

  PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 13, 1944

  REPRINTED FIVE TIMES

  SEVENTH PRINTING, FEBRUARY 1948

  v3.1

  TO JOHN AND JANICE

  who heard the cricket walk away

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introductory Note

  Beetle Rock

  The Weasel

  The Sierra Grouse

  The Chickaree

  The Black Bear

  The Lizard

  The Coyote

  The Deer Mouse

  The Steller Jay

  The Mule Deer

  INTRODUCTORY NOTE

  THIS IS A dangerous book, full of disturbing possibilities. Should it fall into the hands of the young, it is extremely likely to make naturalists of them. Even a hardened adult must read it at his own risk — the risk of being seized with an overwhelming desire to hear the wind in the treetops and to smell the incense of the forest; to watch a lizard sunning itself on a rock, to glimpse the lithe form of a weasel disappearing over a log, or to come briefly face to face on the trail with a startled buck; to hear the evening songs of birds, to see the bats come out at dusk, and to share with the creatures of the wilderness the adventures of the night.

  He may even have to visit the particular place in Sequoia National Park which is here so accurately, compellingly described, and to see with his own eyes its animal inhabitants leading their busy, interesting, self-sufficient lives.

  These are stories of the adventures of animals, but with a difference — the stories are of actual animals in an actual place, as the author has observed them. She has watched carefully and reported truthfully, always with sensitive understanding and a keen awareness of beauty. The tales are fiction, yes, but fiction closely parallel with fact. This is real natural history.

  ROBERT C. MILLER

  DIRECTOR, CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

  Beetle Rock

  The water of the brook reflected the sunlight up to an alder branch, where it flickered along the gray bark. On the fool’s gold under the ripples lay a web of the sunlight, gently shaken. The sound of the current was subdued here, and the stir of the streamside leaves, and the Mule Deer was quiet too, as he moved slowly forward along the bank, clipping off willow buds. But the Deer was approaching a rockier channel in which the stream tumbled and splashed. When he reached the cascading water, suddenly he leapt over it, and back again, and then stood in the blowing spray, sharply white and cold, with his head flung up and excitement in his eyes.

  In April all the bucks had a wild playfulness, quick to rise. Two would be sniffing for acorns among the dry leaves beneath an oak, when one would spring away — a challenge, and the second must follow. The deer’s hoofs would make their clean arcs over the yuccas, over the redbuds, over the mounds of yellow fremontia blooms, arcs so high that other deer could have stood under them. At the end of the chase, the bucks would meet in a climax of vertical leaps, tossing heads, and whistling breaths. Afterwards some watching fawn might try bounding over a small yucca or redbud, but the mood of the older bucks seemed the more resilient.

  Were they feeling only the exuberance of spring, or did the older deer have a memory of Beetle Rock, and were they pleased to be climbing again to the granite field in the sky?

  The herd had wintered low on the ridge between the Middle and Marble Forks of the Kaweah River. They had been down in the dwarf forest, where the same storms that heaped snow on Beetle Rock fell as rain, and had brought up fescue and wild oat grass. Now the mountain’s snow cover was shrinking upward. The deer stayed below the edge of it, since snow would hinder their flight from coyotes and cougars. They grazed back and forth on the side of the ridge, rising about a thousand feet every month.

  The ridge became steeper the higher they climbed. In many places they had to circle sheer granite slides, polished by ancient glaciers. Beetle Rock was a similar part of the mountain’s skeleton, protruding through soil and forest. But the Rock lay at the crest and its top was nearly as flat as a meadow. By summer the upper surface would be so airy and warm, with so many crannies for hiding, and such an abundance of food, that more than forty animal species, besides the insects, would be competing for home-sites there. Down in the chaparral the deer had left a group of winter companions. Upon the slope they were meeting others. But nowhere in their wanderings did they find such a dense population of animals as in summer at the Rock.

  By April the herd were a mile above sea level. Even there the trees were not much more than brush-high. Looking out over them the deer could see the series of mountain ranges that piled up to the Western Divide. Dropping away on the other side was the Marble Fork canyon, a vast tapering cut, spreading out at the low end upon the floor of California’s great Central Valley, narrowing at the upper end between towering ridges. Beetle Rock, directly above the deer, was still covered with snow, still only a short, smooth line breaking into the treetops along the sky.

  Abruptly the deer found themselves beneath firs and ponderosa pines, a few weeks later beneath sugar pines and the giant sequoias, some of the tallest trees in the world. Trees like these formed a wall around Beetle Rock’s inner edge. Back among them were cabins for human beings, looking very small; six or eight of them could have been built upon one another without reaching to the lowest boughs of many of the trees. Some of the pines were twice as tall as the same trees elsewhere. Here they had a longer growing season, and perhaps the trees responded to the light on these Sierra Nevada Mountains. The subtropical light, so clear on the valley below, was even more fresh and elastic at the Rock. The atmosphere seemed light more than air above the milky stone. Had the trees thrust their tips up as far as possible to reach more of it?

  The deer came to Beetle Rock on a morning in May. The herd Buck, the leader, took them around the cliff’s semicircular base to the west side, then back into a green-shaded gorge. Along its bottom a stream, now at flood stage, was thundering towards the canyon; before the deer started down the mountain again it would have become a trickle. The herd’s upward migration was over. For the meadow where all of them had been born (all but one buck) lay only a few bounds off the top of the left slope. One by one the deer leapt the water to climb to it. But the leader turned right. He would go up on Beetle Rock first. Among the snow patches on the side of the gorge he found the animal path he would follow daily, now, for the tenth summer.

  The Buck passed a dogwood thicket where he was accustomed to lie and chew his cuds. He continued up through an open grove with scattered manzanita and chinquapin brush among the trees. Hearing the cry of a bear cub, he bounded behind a clump of the manzanita. From that shelter he peered out, and farther along the slope saw a creature he knew well, the Black Bear. She would be irritable this year, for she was guarding two young ones. On this morning they were having a lesson in tree-climbing. A black cub had tried to go up a cedar, but his claws were pulling out of the fibrous bark. It was not the slide down the trunk that distressed him, but the coming rebuke for forgetting that bears do not climb cedars. On the ground he galloped away from his mother, but her paw caught him and sent him rolling. A brown cub, pigeon-toed in both front and hind feet, was shambling towards a pin
e trunk.

  When the Buck came to the Rock’s corner, he found a brook flowing down along its north side. As soon as the snow was gone, the brook would be dry and its bed would become the gulch, the draw, used by many animals as the shortest route from the slope to the top of the Rock. The Buck walked on up beside the water.

  He saw the Weasel slip out from a chink between stones. A limp deer mouse hung from her mouth. With bold, arching leaps she crossed a log over the brook; had she no enemies that she, so small, could be so arrogant?

  She scarcely had reached the log when the mate of the deer mouse appeared in the hole. She paused for a wary instant, then darted out, carrying one of her tiny young. She would try to take all her brood to a new hiding place before the Weasel returned, but one, at least, would be safe. Through the summer the Buck would see that small Deer Mouse grow and establish her own family.

  The Buck reached the fir tree, on the forest side of the draw, beneath which he often rested on summer afternoons. Now down from its branches somersaulted the Chickaree, vanishing, saucy chatter and fur, in a snow bank. Quickly he sputtered out, snatched a twig from the ground, leapt on the trunk, and was bounding away through the tree, probably towards a half-finished nest. In the Buck’s eyes was a flicker of recognition. The squirrel, almost grown now, had been the liveliest of a family reared the previous year in a pine stub near the draw.

  The Buck looked back into the thicket behind the fir, back through the bare trunks of the trees, seeming to crowd closer as they receded, the bark of the firs gray, of the pines wine-color, of the sequoias rust. The trunks seemed to lift their masses of overhead needles up even among the white cloud puffs motionless in the sky. The Deer’s eyes did not search the trees, but rather exposed themselves to movements there. His gaze was passive until he discovered the Steller Jay, hidden within a dense fir, turning its head to search in the bark for grubs. Few eyes but a deer’s would find the Jay during this month, when his sense of responsibility for his young made him one of the most secretive Beetle Rock birds.

  Even the Buck had not seen the Grouse, although she was less than a deer’s length from him, concealed beneath a seedling pine. Now she came out to lie in the sunlight, and startled him, for she did not move with a grouse’s usual, unobtrusive step. She fluttered, half flying, half hopping. The Buck sensed that she was wounded or sick. Her eyes were sunken, and her feathers were dull and disordered, showing weakness as plainly as human pallor does.

  The Grouse stopped at his very feet. She may have been one of the last year’s young, for he did not remember her. He stayed with her under the fir for a while. He too lay upon the needles, chewing his cuds, watching the tired lids close over the Grouse’s eyes as if she felt safer with him there, depending on his alarm to warn her if an enemy should approach. When he rose to go over on the Rock, she fluttered back into hiding.

  Several rills joined to form the brook, a short distance above the fir. The Buck waded across them, and finally stood on the inner edge of the Rock. Before him lay the two acres of granite field, almost square, divided like a beetle’s back. The forest rose behind the north and east sides. The other sides ended in a sharp rim out over the canyon.

  Most of the Rock’s terraces were smooth, but some were broken up into domes, knobs, and angular boulders. A few pine and cedar trees had found rootholds in the crevices. Their shade lay cool on the gray and ivory-white stone. Brush was growing from soil blown into the cracks; rock flowers and grasses leaned from smaller pockets; back under the ledges were cliff-brake and moss. On the May morning when the Buck came to the Rock, a green fuzz was showing in some of the shallow depressions. A month later golden-throated gilia and baby’s breath would be blooming there.

  Energetically the birds were singing their claims to their particular trees and bushes, and small furred creatures were chasing each other, settling the boundary lines between their private areas of the Rock. Before the Buck had gone many steps he came to a bluffing contest. The Lizard and a neighbor who coveted his gully were pumping up and down on their forelegs, trying to intimidate each other by displaying their bulging blue throat-spots.

  The Buck moved from one terrace to another, browsing on the manzanita bushes, straying towards the north side of the Rock. The deer did not often go to the south side, for there they found a disturbing bear scent. It rose from a small meadow below, and from a wooded shelf on the face of the cliff where several bears stayed in the daytime. This morning the Buck caught none of their odor. The air was lightly pungent with the fragrance of new needles on the trees and new leaves on the brush. And everywhere was the sound, which never ceased here, of the canyon wind flowing among the crevices, turning between the boulders, blowing upon thin edges of stone, the wind that had given sound to the mountain before any leaves grew there to rustle, the wind that the Buck would not hear forever.

  But now he has leapt to a higher ledge, is ready to bound away from the Rock, and into the forest. For a turn past a chinquapin has disclosed the Coyote, stalking granite-hoppers in a space hidden by brush. The Coyote sensed that the Buck could escape, and gave no sign that he heard the scattering gravel and the hoofs’ landing upon the ledge. The Buck looked down from above. The Coyote was new here; for three years no coyotes had lived in the deer’s immediate range.

  This summer, then, the herd leader would need even more than his usual caution. Wariness was his skill, his most significant quality. In the Buck was the best example, among all the Beetle Rock animals, of the willing tension that keeps a wilderness society stable. His was the finest alertness, but every creature had much of it. Since long before he was born the community here had been holding together, because each of its members was ready to leap, to chase, to freeze, to threaten, to love, or to step aside — in an instant.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO

  The Weasel

  Night’s end had come, with its interlude of peace, on the animal trails. The scents that lay like vines across the forest floor were faded now, and uninteresting. Hungry eyes had ceased their watch of the moonlight splashes and the plumy, shimmering treetops. No heart caught with fear when a twig fell or a pebble rolled. For most of the nocturnal hunters had returned to their dens, or ignored one another in a truce of weariness.

  From the frail defense of an oak leaf a deer mouse stared at a passing coyote, sensing its safety by the mechanical tread of the great paws. A frog and an owl at opposite ends of the same tree closed their eyes. A black bear, trampling a new bed at the base of a cedar, broke into the burrow of a ground squirrel. With heavy eyes he saw it leap to a rock-pile; then he made a last slow turn and curled himself against the trunk.

  The Weasel was not tired, and never joined a truce. She was stung by only a sharper fury when she saw the darkness seeping away beneath the trees. On the hillside where she hunted with her young she suddenly pulled herself up, sweeping the slope with her nose and eyes, trying to cup the forest in her ears for the sound of a chirp, a breath, or an earth-plug being pushed into a burrow. There was silence — proof that all the quick feet had been folded into furry flanks. She and her kits were alone in a deserted world.

  The Weasel too was leading her family home, but she had stopped to try to stir up one more chase. She had chosen a slope that never furnished much excitement. The ground was a clear, smooth bed of pine and sequoia needles, with no underbrush where victims might be hiding. Even the odors beneath the Weasel’s nose were of little help. For here no large obstructions, no fallen logs or gullies, had gathered the scent threads into strands. Still she whipped across the surface, vainly searching. It was not that she needed food after the night’s good hunting. She was a squirrel’s length stripped to a mouse’s width, and was no glutton. But she was driven by insatiable hungers of the nerves.

  Now she has caught the scent of a chipmunk, redolent and sweet. Perhaps it will lead her to the chipmunk’s nest. She bounds along the path of odor with her tense tail high. But here is the trail of a second chipmunk crossing the first. The Wease
l stops, confused. Now she follows one trail, now the other. Back and forth across the slope, the odors weave a record of two chipmunks chasing each other. But where are the small warm bodies that left the tracings of delicious fragrance? The Weasel turns in her own tracks, comes to an angry stop. Her five young watch her. What will she do now? She’ll forget the chipmunks. She stands erect, moving her nose through the air as she tries for a different scent.

  Her nostrils trembled with her eagerness to find an animal odor in the smell of needles, loam, and cool dank funguses. She caught the juiciness of crushed grass mixed with faint musk. Meadow mouse! Off again, she sped along the mouse’s trail towards the stream below. But the trail suddenly ended in a splash of mouse’s blood and coyote scent.

  The intense hope of the Weasel snapped into rage. The young ones saw her swirling over the needles like a lash. If there was another scent trail here she’d find it. She did — at this blended musk and pitchy odor left by a chickaree when he jumped from the trunk of a pine. The odor line turned to a patch of cleared earth, where he had patted down a seed, and then to the base of another pine, and up. The Weasel pursued the scent to one of the higher branches and out to the tip. From there the squirrel had leapt to another tree. That was an airy trail no enemy could follow.

  The Weasel came down the tree in spirals, head first, slowly. When she reached the ground she paused, one forefoot on a root. Her eyes looked out unblinking and preoccupied. Perhaps her hungers were discouraged now — but no. Her crouched back straightened, sending her over the root in a level dash.

  The Weasel young had scattered while their mother trailed the squirrel. They came flying back when a high bark told them that she had made a find at last. She was rolling over and over with the body of a chipmunk. This was not like her usual, quick death blow; again she drove her fangs through the chipmunk’s fur. Then the harsh play ended. The Weasel leapt aside, allowing her kits to close in on the quiet prey.