Rose Marie
I
I NAMED her Rose Marie the first time I saw the sunlight fall full upon her plumage. She was coming out of a small V-shaped hole at the end of the roof, when the sun slipped up over the Cascades and tinged with faintest rose her snow-white breast. Oddly enough, although she returned to the old nesting place for several seasons, I never saw this faint flush of dawn upon her breast again.
Had I been a good carpenter, I never should have had the sheer joy of knowing Rose Marie. When I built the cabin, I put in a board ceiling that left a space halfway up the roof inaccessible, and quite dark. Later I added a sleeping porch to the side of the cabin, and where its roof slipped under the eaves of the main building I inadvertently left the small opening which Rose Marie’s sharp eyes spied out one day in early April when, just arrived from the South, she had gone house hunting.
Rose Marie was nothing less than lovely. With her violet-green back of a richness beyond the robes of kings, and her white underparts whose mere touch would have cooled a fevered cheek, she darted and looped and swung through the clear April sky with a grace and swiftness known only to the white-bellied swallow.
To watch Rose Marie enter this small opening under the eaves was to witness a feat of accuracy and skill unbelievable by any except an eyewitness. The aperture was barely large enough to admit the body, with no landing place or surface of any kind to cling to before entering. She would come sailing across the orchard like a winged joy, and head straight for this small hole with a speed that, had she erred in judgment the smallest fraction of an inch, would have tumbled her on the ground beneath, a shapeless mass of feathers; but at the last moment she would lay her wings along her sides and shoot in. It was the most marvelous example of speed and accuracy I have ever seen exhibited by any living thing. Even after I had watched it through a nesting season, the hazard seemed so great that as she approached the entrance I always caught my breath.
I never saw the nest that Rose Marie and her mate built in that dark retreat under the roof; but day after day I watched them carry rootlets and feathers that multiplied the dangers of entering the hole. My bed was under the slanting ceiling, and morning and evening I listened to their soft twitter (the white-bellied swallow is the only one with a musical voice), or followed the scratching of their small feet across the boards.
These slanting fir boards had shrunk after being nailed in place, leaving inch-wide cracks between them. Over one of these cracks, apparently because it offered anchorage, the nest was built. Rootlets and a few barnyard feathers projected through; but I kept the location of Rose Marie’s future nursery a secret, knowing that the mistress of the house would not take kindly to any such untoward innovation in household matters.
At the end of the cabin, and directly under the small hole used by the swallows, was a grape trellis. It was wide and nearly horizontal, its flat surface joining on to the house; and in the soft shaded earth under it moles reveled, tossing up mounds of rich brown loam that, by standing still for a few moments, one could see grow suddenly larger, as some sturdy little fellow backed out of his runway, vigorously kicking earth behind him.
It so happened that we had a cat I had named Lightning. The word fitted her admirably, for she was quite the quickest four-footed thing I have ever seen — small, snow-white, and lean as a shadow; her long slim neck, sinewy flanks, and ever-lashing tail suggested Blake’s ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright.’ She was a most destructive creature among birds. Towhees (those poor defenseless things, always flirting their white-rimmed tails about the ground), sparrows, robins, quail, were hunted with a zest and skill that kept the lawn littered with feathers, and so depleted the song birds about the ranch that my fir grove, at one time pulsing with bird music, was as silent in mid-May as in January.
Loving birds as I did, I would have made short work of Lightning had it not been for the other members of the family. No small European state ever rested more secure under a nicely adjusted balance of power than did Lightning under the open pacts and secret alliances that went on in our household. For the mistress of the house, the cat was thought valuable as a mouser, the house being overrun every fall with mice from the surrounding fields; for the boy, she was fair game for a budding bull pup he was ‘educating’; for the little girl, a white satiny creature to decorate with ribbons and hold in loving embrace.
When birds were scarce, Lightning would lie under the grape arbor and watch the mounds of earth. As the brown greasy loam rose she would strike a paw into it with a speed the eye could not follow, tossing out earth and mole together, and then repair with her dazed but truculent victim to the open sward, to play with it after the immemorial custom of cats.
By mid-May the moles were beginning to forsake the grape arbor for the deep black soil of the adjacent bottom land, and Lightning found little to amuse her under the green mantle of vines. One morning I heard an excited twittering outside the entrance to the swallow household, and, stepping round, saw the cat on the top of the arbor, crouching low, and following with baleful green eyes the two swallows as they circled angrily about her. Once, as the excited bird swooped down toward her, she sprang high into the air at Rose Marie, but found the swallow quite as agile as herself.
In a few days the swallows learned that they could pass in and out of the opening with impunity, and the crouching cat, half buried in green leaves, was ignored; then one noon I saw Lightning on the roof of the sleeping porch, directly over the swallow’s runway. A facing strip two inches wide nailed along the end of the roofing boards was all that separated her from the two birds as they passed in and out. At that moment the two, each with a mouthful of flies, were circling about in front of the opening, afraid to enter.
My first impulse was to ignore the balance of power and shoot the murderous thing where she crouched; but sheer curiosity as to the outcome stayed my hand. The swallows ventured nearer and nearer, at last banking their wings and shooting straight up into the air within a foot of their would-be destroyer. Then Rose Marie circled back over the barn and shot into the hole. As she vanished, Lightning’s right paw made a swift circular motion, but it encountered only air.
II
During the week which followed this matching of wits between the cat and the birds, the drama enacted in front of that small opening so fascinated me that I stood and watched it through many a half-hour when I should have been at work among the raspberry canes. The persistence of the cat was terrible. Before it was fairly daylight she would be in her place, flat on her belly, her head projecting well over the edge of the roof, her tail slowly lashing, her deadly right paw extended, ready for action. Clearly she could hear the birds approaching the opening from within, for just before one shot out she would stiffen like a coil of steel springs, reach well over the side, and twitch the unsheathed claws spasmodically before striking at the violet-colored back that always just eluded her. It was a breath-taking thing to watch — the arrow-like exit of the swallows and the lightning-like sweep of the deadly paw. When I stood at right angles to the opening, the exit and the stroke seemed to occur at the same time, my eye and brain not functioning fast enough to record the two images separately.
But familiarity, even with the most deadly peril, at length breeds contempt, and in a few days the two swallows were passing in and out of the hole as if there were no claw-armed paw sweeping across their path within an inch of their bodies every time they came and went.
In the meantime, a brood of young swallows was hatched in the nest over my bed (I learned of the momentous happening when early one morning a fragile white eggshell fluttered down through the crack marked by white feathers), and the bustle of feeding hungry mouths began. As their nesting time was well ahead of the barn swallows, the couple had a virtual monopoly of the insect life that swarmed over the orchard and neighboring forest, and, judged by the many and generous mouthfuls brought in, those youngsters must have been veritable balls of fat.
How much I wanted to watch the bringing up of the family, conducted, I suspect, with a skill and finesse quite beyond anything that goes on in a human household. I am not sure how it would have been managed under normal conditions, with the nest, according to immemorial usage, situated in a hollow stump; but here in the perpetual twilight over my head there were many tender and coaxing calls, now and then what was clearly a scolding, and, judged by the occasional high-keyed squeaks of protest, chastisements for wrongdoing.
One Sunday morning as I lay longer than usual in bed, I detected the sound of tiny feet scratching over the boards, and surmised that preparations for flight were under way. Day after day the scratching grew louder, the encouraging call of Rose Marie more frequent. Doubtless they were trying their wings as they scampered about. Whether they all returned to the nest at dark and were covered by the maternal wings I have no means of knowing; but one night I heard a sudden cry of pain, followed by a great fluttering and commotion, and I suspected that a young bird had fallen victim to a prowling rat. But four young ones issued later from the hole, so that, if one perished, there must have been five in the hatch.
The bustle and excitement under the roof kept Lightning in a state akin to frenzy. She hunted no more in the surrounding bushes, and fell away in flesh to little more than a skeleton encased in white fur. As the happy family scurried about beneath her, she would turn first one ear and then the other to the roof, slowly moving a tail that suggested a serpent creeping stealthily upon its victim.
One noon, under a pale sky that arched high and empty over the sombre firs, Rose Marie and her mate grew so excited that their sharp twittering brought me out of the house. I found them dashing repeatedly at Lightning, trying to drive her away from her position over the hole, in which a young swallow with a grotesquely wide mouth, suggesting that of a severe old lady with tightly compressed lips, was sitting. The cat, a-tingle in every nerve, was clearly aware of its presence, and alert to strike, should it venture out. Rose Marie would rush straight as an arrow at the head of the crouching horror, and with something between a scream and a screech would come so near that the wonder is she was not stricken down by the ever-twitching paw before she banked her wings and shot up into the sky; but these fierce onrushes so disconcerted the cat that she shrank back at each swift approach, afraid to deliver what might have been a deadly counterstroke.
The young bird did not venture forth, perhaps because the signal, whatever it might be, was not given by the mother. After a time the little thing backed away into the darkness, and the parent birds swung off over the treetops in curves for which the expression ‘poetry of motion’ seems trite indeed.
III
Throughout the time when the stirring drama between the cat and the swallows was being enacted, two large hawks, no doubt attracted by the thousands of white Leghorn hens that were roaming about the cherry orchards, drifted up every afternoon from the adjacent Puyallup Valley, and for an hour or so circled high overhead in wide effortless sweeps that seemed to defy the law of gravitation. As these hawks seldom attack poultry, however much they are given to watching it from a safe distance, I paid little attention to this pair of hunters so deadly to rabbits and quail.
Occasionally I had seen one of them tip sideways and glide like a brown shadow down toward the farm buildings; but I had never associated this descent with the white cat upon the black roofing paper that covered the sleeping porch. I was coming from the barn to the house the next afternoon after Rose Marie’s futile attempt to bring her brood out into the open air, when the head of a young swallow again appeared in the opening, and the battle between the parent birds and the cat was renewed in all its fury. Lightning was stretched flat on the black paper, the right foreleg extending over the edge of the roof like a deadly scimitar, when something brown that seemed to annihilate time and space descended upon her back with a force that stunned her into insensibility. There was a brief readjusting of the powerful talons in the back of the neck, a couple of slow strokes of the wide-extended wings, and the hawk soared away over the giant firs, Lightning dangling limp beneath it.
That very afternoon Rose Marie, in all the full-blown beauty of young motherhood, had her four young on the peak of the cabin roof, from which vantage point they looked about in sheer delight at the brave new world that confronted them. As they turned their heads, now to this side, now to that, with an occasional upward glance at the sky, the mother kept up a soft musical twitter, as carefree as if there had never been a cat in the wide world.