Dipper of Copper Creek (American Woodland Tales) Read online

  It grew dark early and swiftly below the peaks, and Doug turned and ran homeward, for the stream bed was now in the shadow of the mountain.

  In the cabin he found Bill splitting kindling. Doug saw the pot of mush on the stove. He waited a moment to receive his scolding, for he had forgotten his chore and was soaked to the skin. No scolding came. Although his teeth were now chattering, there was not even a suggestion that he change his wet clothes. Did this silence mean that Grandpa considered him old enough to take care of himself?

  He shivered as he struggled out of his wet clothes. He thought of home; the warm fireplace, the good stew ready to dip and eat. He dressed by the stove, trying to think of some of the unhappy times at home. He could think of none until he stopped shaking. Once warmed, he remembered the hours of boredom that had been his in the deserted town.

  Whispering Bill did not seem to notice the boy’s thoughtful silence. He went about setting the table, and when he was finished he called pleasantly to Doug. Doug pulled on another sweater and bounded to the dynamite box that was his seat.

  While they ate canned hash, Doug told of the bird in the water. He described it with some disbelief in his own observations. Bill smiled and leaned over his bowl.

  “You aren’t crazy, boy, and don’t think you’ve got the ‘altitude,’ cause what you saw was correct.

  “That little fellow is called a water ouzel, or dipper bird, and it’s got more sense than any other bird in the world. It should have been called ‘the prospectors’ bird,’ ’cause where that bird goes, so go old dogs like me.

  “I’ve seen those little birds way up in the waterfalls of Mt. Avery. I’ve talked to them and told them where my silver is; and they don’t rush down and get a lot of diggers up there, they just go on liking the water, and hunting bugs and raising young. They live in the prettiest places in the world, and they know it, and that’s all they care about. Oh, they’re great little birds.”

  Bill’s voice wore down to a whisper, and now he was speaking of the ouzel that had nested almost on top of his richest find. Bill had been working hard the day he saw the bird, and stopped now and then to look at the dipper and consider its wisdom. The bird lived to enjoy the splashing water, the dark stunted trees of timberline, and the banks of alpine flowers that bloomed like a paint palette along the waterway.

  That afternoon he had almost blacked-out from working too hard at thirteen thousand feet after coming from the lowlands. He left his hole in the mountainside and fell toward the stream. He fought the dizzy darkness in his head. Then the dipper diving and plunging in the water caught his attention and he concentrated on the bird to keep himself awake. When he finally pulled out of the dizziness, he stopped mining for the day and walked through the rocky gorges with his fishing rod. The cascades and the flowers and the rocks had always looked different after that day.

  Doug felt much better. He was warm and full of food, and his grandfather was speaking of something he knew. It was very cozy. It was also a triumph. He had found the bird that his grandfather admired the most.

  Doug stretched out on Bill’s bed to listen. His spine pressed into the down comforter and he was asleep.

  Bill finished his journey into the past to himself.

  He took the overdone mush from the stove and hung Doug’s boots in a warm spot where they would dry by morning.

  THE NEST ON THE CANYON WALL

  TEETER, the mate of Cinclus, the water ouzel, alighted on the jutting beam of the mining dam and looked down the flume. In her bill was a stalk of dried grass. This piece of grass had been carefully selected. It was well cured, dry but not brittle, having aged slowly in the air and shade. The bird felt the rightness of this blade and she came to the old dam to dip and dance before she carried it to the nest on the canyon wall, the very nest that Doug had seen.

  Lining the nest was not just a chore for Teeter. It was a ceremony and to do the job well required many little niceties on the part of both birds.

  Teeter was dipping high on the dam, her white eyelid flashing. She tilted back her head and worked the strand of grass through her bill until she held it by the tip. Then from the bottom of the falls she heard the song of the ouzel. Cinclus had seen her standing high above the cascade with the first grass for the nest and he threw back his head and voiced his melody of the waterfall.

  Teeter was reassured by the song and bowed to her songster. Then she flew down the flume to the wall of limestone. The precious stalk of grass trailed behind her. She alighted alongside the dome of moss that was her nest. The nest was a little wider than the ledge that supported it. The low door opened into space and flying spray.

  Teeter had built this nest a year ago. She was a young bird then, and had never constructed a nest before. There had been an old male dipper who had courted her when she came winging up-mountain. He had sung and encouraged her as she worked and when she had finished, she had built a dipper nest, like all other dipper nests. Her instincts had guided her. The old male was her partner in the rituals of the ouzel birds, helping her where there were no instincts to direct her.

  They raised one young ouzel who fledged from the nest above the rushing flume. After the nesting season they had all flown to the lowlands where they separated.

  That winter, the old male, as if he had completed his work, succumbed to one of the terrible winter nights of the Rockies.

  It happened during a cold wave in January. For days it was difficult to get down through the ice and snow into the water, where the ouzels searched for the dormant insect eggs and larvae.

  Late one afternoon the old male dipper had to break a thin film of ice to get back up through a plunge hole. At first he could only get his head and neck out. He pumped and pumped his wings until he finally wedged through the ice film. His feathers were wet and he was cold. He ran to a niche in the rocks, out of the path of the biting wind, where he could preen and remove the water. But darkness fell before he could dry his feathers, and he never grew warm again. The temperature dropped far below zero and the old male, who had helped young Teeter to become a mother of the wilderness, slept on and on.

  When spring came Teeter left the wintering grounds of the ouzels and flew alone up Copper Creek. She did not know if the old male would meet her. She hurried, for she desired one thing—to get to Vera Falls. She did not stop to explore other falls as did the younger females. They did not know where they would spend the summer, and they checked all the possibilities. Teeter knew, and she wasted no time along the way.

  Teeter traveled swiftly. A few days ahead of her were the male dippers, who left the lowlands early to establish their nesting grounds.

  Teeter was the first of the females to go into the mountains. Up the snowy glacial valleys she flew, always following the streams, flying low and clinking her soft notes. She did not sing like the males. She clinked, and her voice sounded like stones rolling and bumping under the water.

  Teeter flew faster as she turned into the tributary of Copper Creek, and she stopped only once for food before she reached the lacy falls. She dipped in great excitement on the old rock below the cascade, recalling every toe-hold and angle of the stone.

  She spread her gray wings and swooped up the falls to the giant boulder that split the water into a shawl of bubbles and spray.

  There at the foot of the miners’ dam was Cinclus. He was strong and large, and his gray feathers were pressed to his body with the smoothness of a mountain stone. She had passed no other dipper on the way upstream from Copper Creek bridge. As she came up the falls and looked at Cinclus, her entire attention was given to him. She studied his mannerisms and appearance, and in this way she learned he was a male, although he looked just like her.

  As she looked at Cinclus she felt the nearness of her nest, the plentiful food of the thundering falls, and the potentialities of life within her body.

  Then Cinclus sang. Some birds sing more beautifully than others, and although each species of bird has a song to sing, each individual does i
t a little differently.

  Cinclus could sing the song of the dipper birds with more beauty and fullness than any other male in the Rockies. He had extraordinary control and richness, and ended his song with a note whose tone could not be matched by instrument or bird. It was full of the bubbling of the water, and the sadness and hope of the wilderness—that success is right, and that the failures give way to the successful. The miracle of living is to be alive; for all those who are living and alive are part of an unbroken chain of success, whose origin began in the primordial seas two billion years ago. Not once in all those years could life fail to give life. So the miracle of living, its hope and sadness, is to be alive.

  When Teeter heard this song, and she heard every note of it, the ceremony of life surged forward. Cinclus dipped to her; she accepted him with five deep dips. All memory of the old male was gone. For she would live in the presence of Cinclus. She did not see him in his proper size, but as a much larger bird than he was. At times he would be the focus of everything and dwarf the cliff and the falls and the mountains. He was necessary to her. He brought to her the secret of the seas, the mysterious beginning of life.

  Teeter was stirred by the music. She looked at the nest on the canyon wall and wanted to see it. She flew over to it and the dark round interior reminded her of the moss on the stones in the runnel, and of the grasses in Mule Deer Meadow.

  The nest needed repairs. This must be done soon, but not yet.

  She came over to Cinclus at the end of his song and he flew dipped and spoke to her with a soft clink. They flew together over the falls and fed in the crystal water. It was an hour of splendid play. They dove and swam beneath the water, they explored the currents of the flume and the air pockets behind the dam.

  Then Cinclus noticed that Teeter was aloof. Much of the time she forgot him. He took himself to the boulder that split the falls and he sang. He sang a long, long time, filling the canyon with music.

  Finally Teeter stopped feeding and flew to the runnel near the dam. She pecked at the moss.

  That was all she would do that day. The earth must tilt her longer into the sun, Cinclus must sing many more times to her and the nights must not be so cold before she would be ready for the full performance of the nest building rite.

  So it was a glorious song that arose from the throat of Cinclus when he saw one day, soon after, the silhouette of Teeter and the blade of grass against the sky.

  The song burst from the canyon like spray, so that even Canis, the coyote, stopped his hungry search of the land to listen.

  Cinclus sang almost without letup for the next three days, as if he were accompanying Teeter in her arduous rhythms of flight between the canyon wall and Mule Deer Meadow.

  Finally she stood in the doorway of the home and looked at Cinclus. Her eyelids flashed quickly. Softly, like the rising bubbles of a spring, then fuller and stronger until it rose above the thunder of the failing cascade, came the song of Cinclus. The nest was lined and ready.

  Cinclus had never performed the last nuptial song-dance of the dipper birds, but that evening he sang as he zig-zagged between the walls of the canyon.

  He looked down at Teeter, filling the doorway of the nest, and he banked and side-slipped across the canyon, climbed higher and slipped back along the limestone wall.

  Now the Townsend’s solitaire heard the flight-song of the ouzel, and he tilted his head that he might hear each perfect note.

  Teeter did not move, nor did she take her eyes from this gleaming dancer in the sky. He spread his primary feathers like fingers pushing against the air, turned over and dropped onto the top of the nest.

  Teeter could not see the immense wall of limestone. Only Cinclus and the nest were there, but she could still see the waterfall. She flew into it and let herself be dragged to the bottom by an undercurrent. Gently her toes locked in a crack between the stones and she walked into stiller water and fed avidly.

  Her intense concentration on Cinclus was instantly replaced by her intense interest in food. The high emotional pitch that she had reached while lining the nest had exhausted her body and she required almost her weight in larvae. Cinclus followed her into the flume. He would not let her forget him now. He fed beside her. They arose in a single flash from the water and flew up the stream.

  The following morning Cinclus danced for her in the canyon again. Dawn was still in the peaks, coloring them orange and rose. The light in the canyon was so faint that Teeter could barely see the performer.

  She felt him everywhere; and as the light increased she could see nothing but Cinclus. Now there was no wall, no canyon, no waterfall. Only Cinclus. He filled her entire world.

  EGGS

  THE NEXT DAY a series of heavy rainstorms rumbled into Gothic. Teeter and Cinclus flew to shelter during only one of the storms. The others did not stop them because the ouzels lived continually in water. Furthermore they were busy. The singing of a song erased the rain, as did a last stalk of grass that Teeter wanted to mold into the lining of the nest.

  Over the hill of bobbing avalanche lilies and down the road to Gothic, the storms were of great interest. Whispering Bill Smith watched them eat away the last remaining snow. The alpine sun glanced off the white snow and did not melt it, but the rain did.

  Bill was thinking that it would not be long before the climb to the peaks.

  While the storms drenched the old townsite, Doug and Bill went to shelter in the cabin and devoted their time to reading. They read everything in sight, school books, mining papers, even the old newspapers that were pasted to the walls.

  The papers transported Doug back to 1889 and the elaborate preparations for the Chicago Fair of 1890. A Saturday paper in November described the wondrous projects people were proposing; Mr. Macomber’s toboggan tower with toboggans reaching out to Omaha, Kansas City, and Montreal; Mr. Baird’s seven-hundred-foot-high Ferris wheel; a gigantic windmill, and other structures of enormous design. Doug had time to read all this, as well as some recipes and medicine ads. The storms continued.

  Vera Falls plunged over its wall at the base of Gothic Mountain and pounded the bed of Copper Creek. Above the falls the talus slopes were spilling their burdens of snow water. The rains from the thunderstorms seemed to tax the rocks and soils, and the land sagged a little under the weight.

  In Virginia Basin, four miles east and a thousand feet higher than Vera Falls, the rocky land could not absorb so much water at once. It drained into the runnels and creeks. First there was bubbling. Then an ominous growling as the beds filled and overflowed and leaped toward the glacial valley.

  Still Teeter and Cinclus did not consider the storms. The other animals did. Each afternoon as the clouds were gathering, Odocoileus, the long-legged mule deer, led her fawn up the meadow to the spruce grove above Vera Falls.

  She nosed her fawn into the dense forest and signaled him to lie down beneath a fallen log. Even the heaviest of the rains did not touch them, so dense were the needles above them and so broad the fallen tree. Occasionally she would twitch her nose and turn her ears, for Canis, the coyote, lived on this hill, and it was well to keep track of him. Canis might attack her fawn, but he was no match for her. She could defend both of them against a coyote.

  Over three months before, Canis had left the lowlands, responding to the longer days, the first onset of spring, and had trotted through the aspen grove toward Vera Falls. The mountain coyotes that had hunted the warmer valleys during the winter, had gone off in pairs to find private sites for dens where they could rear their young.

  Canis and his mate had settled on the knoll above the falls. She was a lean wiry coyote, her tawny fur swishing and parting as she jogged silently over the land. She had dug their den at the edge of the alpine meadow and whelped four fine kits. They were now a week old, fat and husky. Their parents hunted the food of the summer high country.

  Mounds from the diggings of pocket gophers, a favorite food of the coyotes, were scattered over the meadow. Golden-mantled ground sq
uirrels and chipmunks were abundant. Pikas were in the talus slopes, as were yellow-bellied marmots, who whistled from everywhere on the mountainsides.

  Varying hares were not hard to find in the broad valley, and little deer mice crowded the meadows and the spruce forests.

  One family of skunks, a new arrival in Gothic, were living under an old cabin, but Canis did not bother them, nor did he bother the lone badger family living high up Belleview Mountain.

  He liked to hunt muskrats and red-backed voles around the beaver ponds. Sometimes he pounced upon the musky water shrews, but he dropped them for he did not like to eat them.

  Just below the den, meadow voles and jumping mice ran through the grasses, and occasionally as he hunted them he would take a snap at a chickaree, if one of these little red squirrels ventured too far from a spruce or fir tree. The porcupine was safe behind his quills.

  One morning Canis found a phenacomys along the edge of a high snow field. The little mouse had left its maze of burrows to harvest some sedges.

  Canis had little to fear except man and dogs. The wolves and grizzly bears stayed in the rugged mountains to the north, or on the headwaters of the Rio Grande to the south. The few black bears could not catch him, and he was more than a match for the marten in the forest and the weasels in the fields.

  On the day that Teeter laid her first egg, another thunderstorm formed in the mountain tops around Virginia Basin.