And Condors Danced (6 page)

“Yeah?” Matt said. “Why?”

“Well,” Carly said, “it’s just that…” and then she stopped. She knew why. It was just hard to put into words. It was hard to explain why the idea of being able to look at things—simple, ordinary, everyday things—and be able to learn all kinds of secrets from them, was so terribly exciting. Exciting in some ways like being invisible would be exciting. Except that with being invisible you’d be able to see and hear everything because no one would know you were there. And with observing you could be right there, and people would be trying to hide all the most interesting secrets from you, just like always, and you’d be able to read all the answers from simple ordinary objects—like from a dirty fingernail, or a bit of blotting paper, or an old felt hat.

“Look,” Matt said suddenly, “there’s my house. Did you know you could see our place from here?”

They were on the ridge trail by now, high up on the side of the mountain, and below them was Grizzly Flats. Dan Kelly, Mart’s grandfather, had always dry-farmed wheat and barley in the high valley, when he wasn’t off tramping around in the wilderness prospecting for gold. According to Aunt M., who’d been a friend of the Kellys’ for years, he’d never found any gold and he’d not had much more luck with his farming. But he’d gone right on trying and he and his wife, Maggie, had raised their big family right there in the little house on the Flats. After their own children grew up and went away, Dan and Maggie were alone for a while, but then one of their daughters died and left a little motherless boy. So Matt had come to live with the Kellys, just about the time that Carly came to live with her own family at the ranch house.

Looking out over the Flats, Matt and Carly rested the donkeys and watched while far down below Maggie came out of the back door carrying a bucket and crossed the yard to the pigsty. After she went back into the house they went on up the steep, winding path toward the ridge.

By the time they finally reached the top, the donkeys were sweaty and winded again from the long climb. Matt and Barney had fallen behind, so Carly dismounted while she waited for them to catch up. Her legs felt a little bit stiff and achy, and very sticky. Reaching under her dress, she tugged at her underthings where they were stuck to her legs by donkey sweat. Then she shook first one leg and then the other and swished her skirt around to create a cooling breeze. Rosemary watched with a thoughtful expression on her pretty donkey face, and then she lowered her head and shook herself violently.

Carly scratched the shaggy, sweaty neck. “Poor Rosemary,” she whispered into the long gray ear. “You’re hot and tired too. Aren’t you?” Rosemary turned and rested her chin on Carly’s shoulder and puffed warm hay-scented breath across her face. “Okay,” Carly told her. “We’ll rest for a while.”

“Let’s have lunch here while the donkeys rest a little,” she said as Barney plodded up alongside.

“Lunch,” Matt said. “I thought we were going to eat at the spring. We got to have water. You can’t eat much of Grandpa’s jerky without something to drink.”

“We’ll have two lunches,” Carly said. “We’ll eat my lunch here and yours at the spring. All right?”

Matt shrugged.

It was nice on the crest. The wind was from the west and cooler, carrying a trace of ocean freshness, and the whole world seemed to be stretched out before them. Far below, in the center of the valley, sunlight glinted on the water that flowed down from Carlton Spring, while farther away to the south the rocky summit of the Mupu Hills rose up to meet the bright sky. Matt and Carly sat under a scraggly oak and sucked oranges and nibbled on cookies while the donkeys grazed around them, and Carly told Matt all about the Hound of the Baskervilles.

She’d just gotten to the scariest part when Tiger came circling back from his latest attempt to catch a jackrabbit and crashed through some bushes right behind them. They both jumped and Matt dropped the orange he was eating and then they began to laugh, because funny little old Tiger was such a long way from being a slavering, red-eyed hound. Tiger smelled the cookies and immediately decided to give up hunting in favor of begging. He went through all his tricks in rapid succession, sitting up, rolling over, and playing dead, while Man and Carly tossed him bits of cookie. They were still giggling when suddenly Matt grabbed Carly’s arm.

“Look!” he said, pointing out over the valley. “It’s a condor.”

An enormous bird, its huge black wings spread wide, was drifting down over the top of the Mupu Range directly toward the spot where they were sitting.

Grabbing Tiger, Carly dived into the bushes, but Matt sat still, staring as if in frozen fascination. A dark shadow swept over him and the air was suddenly full of a sound unlike anything Carly had ever heard, the dry rustling whisper of feathers in gigantic wings. Carly hid her face on Tiger’s back, expecting to feel sharp talons clutching her, or hear Mart’s screams as the condor carried him away. But nothing happened, and when she raised her head, fearfully, Matt was still there.

“Matt,” Carly whispered as soon as she could find her voice, “Hide. It’ll get you.”

Matt took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “No, it won’t,” he said. “Look.”

Carly turned loose the squirming Tiger and crawled to where she could peer out over the valley. The condor had turned northward and now it was gliding away from them toward the high mountains.

Carly gasped for air, and the hungry feeling in her lungs made her realize that she’d been forgetting to breathe. As the thudding of her heart began to ease, she slowly got to her feet to watch as the condor swept upward, glided over the mountain crest, and disappeared as suddenly as it had come.

“H
OW DO YOU
know they won’t eat you?” Carly yelled as she crawled back into the bushes. She found her deerstalker cap hanging from a twig and backed out again to where Matt was waiting. “How do you know?” she said again. She put the cap on and pulled it down low on her forehead. “They’re big enough to. Arthur says their wings are ten feet across.”

Matt was grinning his evil grin.

“What are you laughing at?” Carly said threateningly.

Matt stepped back out of range. Then he shrugged and said, “You look a sight, in that crazy cap. And your face is dirty as sin.”

She would probably have whacked him if her mind hadn’t been so completely full of condors. She took off the cap and wiped her face with it and put it back on.

“I asked you,” she said, “how you know so much about condors.”

“My grandpa told me,” Matt said. “He knows all about them. He says they only eat dead things. They might eat you if you were already dead, but they don’t kill anything. They don’t have the right kind of feet, or something. Killing birds have curved claws, like owls and eagles, and condors just have big old flat feet like a great big chicken. They’re”—he thought for a minute, and then nodded—“scavengers. They’re just scavengers, like buzzards, and like that.”

Carly wasn’t sure. “How come your grandpa knows so much about condors? Arthur says he knows all about them, and he told me they’re really fierce and dangerous. He says they can carry away a half-grown calf.”

Matt shook his head. “Naw! They can’t. My grandpa knows. He knows because he prospected way up in the mountains back of Sespe Creek and he used to spend a lot of time watching condors. He says they’re good things to have around and they don’t kill anything. He’ll be right pleased to hear we saw one. There used to be a lot more of them around here. Grandpa says they used to fly down this valley all the time on their way to the spring.”

“The spring. You mean our spring? Carlton Spring?”

“Sure. That’s why the old-timers called it Condor Spring. My grandpa still calls it that. Grandpa says that after the condors finished feeding, they used to go to the spring to drink and bathe themselves. He says he used to hide in the bushes and watch them kind of playing in the water like a bunch of overgrown blackbirds. And once he saw a couple of them doing a kind of dance-like, holding their wings way out and bobbing their heads up and down and shuffling their feet. I asked him why they did that and he laughed and said he guessed it was just kind of a condor hoedown.”

Carly stared at Matt in astonishment. Condors, according to everything she’d ever heard, were horrible creatures, huge and black with bare red heads and fierce blood-red eyes, monsters capable of killing and carrying away good-sized animals and, in some of the stories, even smallish people. “My goodness, Matt,” she said. “Sounds like your grandpa likes those awful things.”

“My grandpa,” Matt said, “says that condors are beautiful. He says there’s not anything in the world can hold a candle to them when it comes to flying. He says he’s seen one riding the wind for a whole hour, just soaring round and round over the hills, without having to flap its wings even one time.”

Carly turned to look out over the deep valley. She knew Dan Kelly wasn’t the kind to make up things that weren’t true. For a moment she tried to imagine the condor as she had seen it gliding in over the Mupu Ridge. She wished she’d taken a better look instead of diving under the bushes the way she had. Looking up the valley toward where the great black bird had sunk out of sight below the horizon, she found herself wishing it would come back again. Suddenly she ran to where Rosemary was grazing and threw the hackamore reins up over her neck. “Come on,” she yelled. “Let’s get going. I want to see where the condors dance.”

She had been to the Carlton Spring only once before, when Charles and Arthur had ridden up to clean out the spring pond. They’d taken Lila and Carly with them, because Arthur said it was a shame that they’d never even seen the spring that could put the whole family in the poorhouse if it dried up, or if old Quigley got his way. But her memory of it wasn’t very clear. If she’d known then about the condors, she’d have paid much more attention.

From the crest above Grizzly Flats the trail wound in and out along hillsides that fell steeply down to Carlton Creek. Here and there it dipped to cross the beds of barrancas that in winter added to the creek’s flow, but now in June were completely dry. And there were times when it was no more than a narrow ledge above sharp drops—dangerous, perhaps, to riders on mounts less surefooted than Barney and Rosemary.

But Carly wasn’t thinking of the trail, or even of Sherlock Holmes. Her mind was full of condors now—there’d be time for Sherlock Holmes on the way home—and whenever the trail widened, she pulled up and waited to bombard Matt with a new batch of condor questions. And nearly always Matt had answers, fascinating answers.

She learned that the condor they’d seen was probably young—a fledgling, Matt called it—a fact that could be determined by the amount of white showing under the wings.

“Didn’t you see the white?” Matt asked. “How it looked kind of speckled? Those places are bigger and pure white when they’re full grown.”

But she didn’t learn if it had been a he or a she. “No way of telling,” Matt said. “Not even up close.”

But Matt was able to tell her that a mother condor lays only one egg every two or three years and that it takes almost a year for the baby to learn to fly, and even after that the parents feed it for a long time. “They’re real good parents,” Matt said. “They take good care of their babies and they don’t fight or anything. Grandpa says human folks could learn a lot from condors about being good families.”

Carly pulled Rosemary to a complete stop and, of course, Barney stopped too. Matt’s eyes had a gleam to them, a shiny look like Father had when he quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson, or like Mama’s eyes when she talked about Maine.

“Grandpa says,” Matt said, “the condors have lived in California for thousands and thousands of years, and there used to be lots and lots of them, but if people don’t stop killing them and stealing their eggs there won’t be any left before too long. And that will be a bad thing for everybody.”

“Why?” Carly asked. “Why will it be bad for everybody?”

Matt shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. Grandpa says maybe the condors are like a sign to California, like the ravens in the Tower of London are a sign. Grandpa says there’s a foretelling that says ‘Woe to England’ when the ravens leave the Tower. And maybe it’s ‘Woe to California’ if we kill off our condors.”

“Woe to California,” Carly whispered, staring at Matt in wonder and surprise. The sound of it made her shoulders rise in a sudden shiver. “How come you never told me before?” she said. “How come you never said anything about condors and how your grandpa knows all about them and everything?”

Matt thought for a moment before he answered. “I don’t know. You never asked me, I guess.” Then he grinned. “Besides, you usually do all the talking.”

It wasn’t a very polite thing for Matt to say, even if there was some truth in it, but Carly wasn’t in the mood for an argument. Instead she only jerked up on the hackamore reins and urged Rosemary into a rapid trot. For the next half hour she maintained the pace, while behind her Matt kicked and yelled and occasionally managed to get Barney to trot too. The narrow trail twisted and turned across steep slopes covered with knee-high golden grasses, along the edges of rocky outcroppings and under clumps of oaks and sycamores. It wasn’t until the spring was in sight, a gleam of dark water in the shade of sheltering trees, that she pulled up and waited.

“Do you think they’ll be there?” she whispered as Barney plodded up beside Rosemary.

“The condors?” Matt sounded surprised. “Naw, I don’t reckon so. Grandpa says they don’t come into Carlton Valley much anymore. Too many hunters.”

“But we saw one.” Carly wasn’t going to give up the exciting possibility so easily. “It was flying this way. It might be there, don’t you think?”

“Naw,” Matt said stubbornly.

Carly set her chin. “I bet there is,” she said. “I bet there’s a condor there.” Without waiting for another “naw” she set Rosemary at the last slope that led down into the narrow valley, and as the donkey slid surefootedly down the steep incline, she kept her eyes peeled for the glint of sunlight on shiny black feathers. They had reached level ground and the spring was only a few yards away when she saw it, and her breath caught in her throat. There was indeed a condor at Carlton Spring, and for just a moment she thought it was dancing.