Маргарет Миллар - The Birds and the Beasts Were There

“Well, you can forget the experiments,” Jewell said. “This sweater happens to have been a gift from one of my favorite relatives. It’s practically a keepsake.”

“You bought it yourself last year. I was with you, I even remember what it cost.”

“All right, all right. But I want it back.”

I assured her that she’d get it back, providing that during the next three days it wasn’t eaten by some animal, ruined by rain or blown away by the wind.

I tied the sweater to the top of a small ceanothus bush to mark the spot where we’d seen the first Townsend solitaire. To indicate the location of the second bird I was forced to sacrifice the lace hem of my slip, which I ripped off and impaled on a dead oak twig. The lace could easily be spotted by someone who was looking for it, and the sweater was conspicuous enough to prove that the experiments were right: if you want to be seen, wear yellow.

The following Sunday was count day. As usual there was a last-minute mixup and El Camino Cielo, which was to be Mary Erickson’s territory, was assigned to someone else. I didn’t know about this until the following Tuesday afternoon when the group captains and other interested people met in the junior library of the Museum of Natural History to make their official reports and add up the number of species and the number of birds seen between dawn and midnight on the Big Day. No one had remembered to have the heat turned on in the library ahead of time and we all sat around a table, huddled in coats.

The total number of species that year was 166, good enough to place us fifth in the nation, just one up on Freeport, Texas, and Oakland, California, tied at 165.

I greeted Mary Erickson, who was sitting across the table from me, and asked her what mountain species she’d found up on the ridge. She told me she’d been assigned to a beach and slough area instead.

A woman I’d never seen before volunteered the information that she had helped cover Camino Cielo, and except for a Steller’s jay and a varied thrush the place had been very disappointing, bird-wise. She’d obviously missed the Townsend solitaire, so I didn’t mention it.

The library was much warmer by this time and people were starting to take off their coats. The newcomer made a ceremony of removing hers, as though she wanted to make sure everyone noticed the costume she had on underneath. Everyone noticed all right. Especially me. Over a plaid wool skirt she wore a yellow sweater the exact shade of the band across the tip of a waxwing’s tail.

She saw me staring at the sweater. “Like it?”

I nodded.

“You’ll never believe where I got it.”

It was at that point, I suppose, when I should have taken her aside and explained the situation, but I didn’t. Instead, I listened in a kind of numb silence while she described to us how she’d seen the sweater, flapping in the wind, stopped the car and went over to investigate.

“... And there, tied to a bush, was this perfectly good sweater which turned out to be exactly my size. I couldn’t leave it out there in the weather to be ruined, so I brought it home and laundered it. And lo and behold, here it is and I am. It makes you wonder though, doesn’t it? What kind of a nut would leave a perfectly good sweater tied to a bush in the middle of nowhere?”

The answer seems inescapable: my kind.

The second night of the fire came on. At seven-thirty the heavy winds which had been blowing all afternoon at the upper elevations reached the foothills, and many of us found out for the first time what the term “wildfire” really meant. The whole mountain range seemed to explode, and flames were suddenly roaring down toward the city itself, through San Roque Canyon, Laurel Canyon, Mission Canyon, where the Botanic Garden was situated, all the way to Romero Canyon at the northeast end of Montecito. Because of the winds and approaching darkness the borate bombers stopped operating, and by this time, too, there was a drastic drop in water pressure.

Mass evacuations began, with some motels and hotels offering free rooms, and moving companies volunteering trucks and vans. Many people were double evacuees who’d fled Sycamore and Cold Springs canyons the first night and were now forced to flee their places of refuge; and before the fire was over, there was even a small band of very tired and jittery triple evacuees.

Our Chelham Way situation, which had been fairly good all day, was suddenly ominous again as the fire turned back in our direction. I thought of the house on Mountain Drive that had been saved in the afternoon only to be burned to the ground at midnight, and I wondered what similar ironies fate might be preparing for us.

Blessing counters and silver lining searchers found a plus in a negative: there were no sightseers. The noise from the fire camp, however, was incredible, a continuous roar of helicopters arriving and departing, the blaring of air to ground loudspeakers, the shrieking of ambulance and fire truck sirens. It was decibels rather than danger which strained my nerves to the breaking point and convinced Ken I’d be better off elsewhere.

Jo Ferry called to repeat her invitation of the previous night, but Ken decided that this time more constructive action was necessary than simply sending me off with the three dogs. He made arrangements with my brother-in-law, Clarence Schlagel, to bring his pickup truck over. After a series of delays caused by roadblocks Clarence arrived with the truck and we loaded it with our main valuables, manuscripts and books. We owned no art originals, no fine china or silver, no furs, and I wore my two pieces of jewelry, my wedding ring and my “lucky” bracelet which had been a present from our daughter, Linda, many years before. (Some people we knew, trapped in the fire by a sudden, violent change of wind, used their swimming pool as a depository for their silver, jewelry and furs, including a beaver jacket whose original owner wouldn’t have minded at all.)

It was agreed that I would go to the Schlagels’ house with the two smaller dogs, leaving Brandy with Ken. That way Ken could rest at intervals during the night knowing that Brandy would wake him up if anything unusual happened. German shepherds have a highly developed sense of propriety and when things go wrong they indicate their disapproval readily and unmistakably. Having Brandy in the room was like having an alarm clock set to go off in any emergency.

I rode in the truck with Johnny sitting quietly beside me and Rolls on my lap, trembling and whining all the way, partly out of fear and partly anticipation of spending another night chasing around the Ferrys’ house with Zorba. He was in for a disappointment: no chasing was allowed at the Schlagels’ place because there were too many chasers and chasees, and to avoid a complete shambles the animals had to be kept separated as much as possible. I counted four cats — a fat, ill-tempered orange tiger bought for Jane when she was a baby, an alley cat who realized he’d struck it rich and seldom left the davenport except to eat, and a pair of tabbies abandoned by a neighbor who’d moved away; Jane’s pygmy poodle with the giant name of Cha Cha José Morning Glory, my sister’s burro, Bobo, who had a loud, nervous hyena-type laugh he seemed to reserve especially for me, and Clarence’s four Shetland ponies. Sibling rivalry was rather intense on occasion, and the arrival of Johnny who loathed cats, and Rolls who hated horses and rapidly learned to hate burros, didn’t improve matters. There were many times during the night when I would have welcomed the sound of helicopters and fire sirens to drown out some of the yelping, yowling, whinnying, barking, and above all, Bobo’s wild bursts of laughter.

I woke up at dawn, leashed my two dogs and took them for a walk down the road toward the sea. When I faced that direction everything seemed quite normal. The light breeze smelled of salt and moist kelp. Mourning doves and brown towhees foraged along the sides of the road and bandtails gathered in the eucalyptus trees, getting ready to come down to feed. Brewer’s blackbirds and brown-headed cowbirds were already heading for the Schlagels’ corral, Anna’s hummingbirds hurled themselves in and out of fuchsia blossoms and the bright red bushes of callistemon and torches of aloe, while half a dozen dogs vehemently denounced me and the company I kept.