Маргарет Миллар - The Birds and the Beasts Were There

Instead of making good use of the time by getting some rest, Jo and Robin and I sat in the library for a while and talked. Robin especially was to regret this since she was drafted to spend the next two nights helping look after some reluctant and difficult refugees at the polo field — 150 show horses, mainly hunters and jumpers.

Eventually Jo showed me upstairs to my room, gave me a sleeping pill and said goodnight. There was a small radio beside the bed, and while I knew it would bring only bad news at this point, I couldn’t resist turning it on. A man was announcing in a voice hoarse with fatigue that fifteen houses had been destroyed and a thousand men were battling the fire on a ten-mile front. There was no hope of containment as long as the santana kept blowing. Flames were fifty to seventy feet high and had already reached Cold Spring Canyon on the northeast, Gibraltar Road on the northwest, and Sycamore and Rattlesnake canyons on the west.

I turned off the radio and sat on the edge of the bed, the reporter’s words echoing in my ears. I knew those canyons well and had spent many good hours birding in them, especially Rattlesnake Canyon. It was the topography, not the rattlesnakes, that had given the place its name, and the wildlife I encountered, except for deer and rabbits and the occasional red fox and coyote, consisted mainly of birds.

At the old stone bridge that marked the canyon’s mouth, hundreds of wintering robins and cedar waxwings fed voraciously on toyon and coffeeberries and the miniature apples of the manzanita. Oregon juncos and hermit thrushes bathed in the shallow pools, Bewick wrens picked their way fastidiously through the underbrush, pausing to catch a bug or denounce an intruder, and red-breasted sapsuckers played hide and seek with us around the trunks of the live oak trees. Wide-eyed kinglets rattled from leaf to leaf, every fidgety-twitchy movement distinguishing them from their look-alike but more phlegmatic cousins, the Hutton vireos, which were found in the same area though less frequently. The difference between the two species became unmistakable when two male kinglets met and the top of each tiny head burst into a crimson rage.

When spring came to the canyon, shooting stars, owl’s clover, blue-eyed grass and milk maids bloomed in the sun, and in the shadier places, fiesta flowers and Indian pinks, woodmint and the little green replicas of artists’ palettes that are called miner’s lettuce because the forty-niners used them for salads. It was then that the phainopeplas arrived to nest in the mistletoe, the lazuli buntings in the silver-lined mugwort along the stream, the Wilson warblers under the blackberry vines, the black-chinned hummingbirds in the sycamores, the cliff swallows under the stone bridge already occupied by a pair of black phoebes, the olive-sided flycatchers in the pines, and Hutton vireos in the oaks, the western wood pewees and Bullock orioles in almost any tree or bush.

No summer rains fed the creek and by September some parts of it had turned to mud and some to dust, and the slow trickle of water was only a reminder of the past winter and a promise of the one to come. Along the banks the leaves of the poison oak turned orange and red, and its smooth white berries were eaten by wrentits and California thrashers. Audubon warblers were everywhere, from the tops of the tallest trees where they flew out after insects like flycatchers, to the ground where they foraged like buntings. From ceanothus and chamise came the golden-crowned sparrows’ sweet pleading, “Hear me! Dear, hear me!” Pine siskins and American goldfinches gorged on the ripening seeds of the sycamores and alders, and high in the sky, white-throated swifts tumbled and turned and twisted with such speed that no single bird could be followed with the binoculars. (W. L. Dawson, in Birds of California , estimated that a white-throated swift which lives for eight years covers a distance equal to ten round trips to the moon.) Among the fallen leaves brown towhees foraged, both feet at a time, sounding like a whole battalion of birds, while tiny grey gnatcatchers searched the limbs of the pepper trees for grubs, and bushtits bickered through the oaks, followed by other little birds attracted by their antics and gay gossip — Townsend and Audubon and orange-crowned warblers, plain titmice and Hutton vireos, and in some years, mountain chickadees and red-breasted nuthatches.

This was Rattlesnake Canyon. I thought of all the small confiding creatures who lived in it and I wept.

The sleeping pill Jo Ferry had given me hit me very suddenly. I don’t know what it contained but I can vouch for its effectiveness: I slept through the arrival and bedding down of my fellow refugees, a family of eleven with all their household pets, including a snake and a parakeet.

I woke up at dawn and became immediately aware of a change in the atmosphere. I was cold. The air coming in through the window was grey not with smoke but with fog, and it smelled of the sea, of kelp and tar and wet pilings. The santana had stopped.

I put on my coat, picked up the three leashes and made my way through the quiet house out to the driveway. Zorba, the Ferrys’ spaniel, was stretched out, dead to the world, under an olive tree. My three dogs were arranged around the car, panting even in their sleep, as though this was merely a short recess in a long game. At the sound of my step they were instantly alert and eager to go home. They hadn’t the slightest doubt that there was still a home for them to go to. Their only anxiety seemed to be that they might have to be separated from me, so they all insisted on riding in the front seat. It was a cosy trip.

At the top of Barker Pass there was an abrupt change in the weather. The fog dropped away like a curtain and the air was hot and dry and windless and ashes were falling everywhere, some particles as fine as dust, some large as saucers. On Sycamore Canyon Road I came across a road block, but after a brief exchange of words I was allowed through. The men in charge looked too tired to argue. They had been up all night like hundreds of other volunteer workers — students from the university and from City and Westmont colleges, Red Cross and Salvation Army workers, civil defense and National Guard units, radio hams, firemen’s wives manning the stations while their husbands fought on the front lines, nurses and nurses’ aides, teachers, city and county employees, and such a varied assortment as the members of a teen-age hotrod club, a folk-dancing group, and a contingent of deep-sea divers from one of the offshore oil rigs.

I turned into Chelham Way.

It was like the fringe of a bombed area. The houses were still standing but deserted. In one driveway a late-model sedan was parked with a small U-Haul trailer attached to the rear bumper. The trailer, heaped with clothes and bedding, had been left unprotected and the top layer of stuff was black with ashes. The sedan, however, was carefully covered with a tarpaulin. Perhaps its owner was a veteran of the disastrous 1955 Refugio fire, when a great many of us learned that ashes falling through atmospheric moisture made a lime mixture which ruined even the toughest paint.

Halfway around Chelham Way was a narrow black-top road leading to Westmont College. A locked gate kept the road unused except in emergencies. Beyond the gate, which had been opened, I could see a large section of the athletic field where the main firecamp had been set up the previous day. Here, where Ken and I used to walk our dogs, where we watched robins in winter and track meets in spring, this place meant for nothing more than games was now headquarters for hundreds of men, a kind of instant village. Here they ate at canteen tents, slept on the ground, received first aid for burns and cuts, were sent off in helicopters, fire trucks, buses, pickups, jeeps, and brought back to begin the cycle all over again.