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if you can.
It scatters and gathers; it comes and goes. I might see a mon-
strous carp heave out of the water and disappear in a smack of
foam, I might see a trout emerge in a riffle under my dangling
hand, or I might see only a flash of back parts fleeing.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 189
It is the same all summer long, all year long, no matter what I
seek. Lately I have given myself over almost entirely to stalking
muskrats eye food. I found out the hard way that waiting is
better than pursuing; now I usually sit on a narrow pedestrian
bridge at a spot where the creek is shallow and wide. I sit alone
and alert, but stilled in a special way, waiting and watching for
a change in the water, for the tremulous ripples rising in intensity
that signal the appearance of a living muskrat from the underwa-
ter entrance to its den. Muskrats are cautious. Many, many
evenings I wait without seeing one. But sometimes it turns out
that the focus of my waiting is misdirected, as if Buddha had
been expecting the fall of an apple. For when the muskrats don t
show, something else does.
I positively ruined the dinner of a green heron on the creek last
week. It was fairly young and fairly determined not to fly away,
but not to be too foolhardy, either. So it had to keep an eye on
me. I watched it for half an hour, during which time it stalked
about in the creek moodily, expanding and contracting its incred-
ible, brown-streaked neck. It made only three lightning-quick
stabs at strands of slime for food, and all three times occurred
when my head was turned slightly away.
The heron was in calm shallows; the deepest water it walked
in went two inches up its orange legs. It would go and get
something from the cattails on the side, and, when it had eaten
it tossing up its beak and contracting its throat in great gulps it
would plod back to a dry sandbar in the center of the creek which
seemed to serve as its observation tower. It wagged its stubby
tail up and down; its tail was so short it did not extend beyond
its folded wings.
Mostly it just watched me warily, as if I might shoot it, or steal
its minnows for my own supper, if it did not stare me
190 / Annie Dillard
down. But my only weapon was stillness, and my only wish its
continued presence before my eyes. I knew it would fly away if
I made the least false move. In half an hour it got used to me as
though I were a bicycle somebody had abandoned on the bridge,
or a branch left by high water. It even suffered me to turn my
head slowly, and to stretch my aching legs very slowly. But fi-
nally, at the end, some least motion or thought set it off, and it
rose, glancing at me with a cry, and winged slowly away up-
stream, around a bend, and out of sight.
I find it hard to see anything about a bird that it does not want
seen. It demands my full attention. Several times waiting for
muskrats, however, I have watched insects doing various special
things who were, like the mantis laying her eggs, happily oblivi-
ous to my presence. Twice I was not certain what I had seen.
Once it was a dragonfly flying low over the creek in an unusual
rhythm. I looked closely; it was dipping the tip of its abdomen
in the water very quickly, over and over. It was flying in a series
of tight circles, just touching the water at the very bottom arc of
each circle. The only thing I could imagine it was doing was laying
eggs, and this later proved to be the case. I actually saw this, I
thought I actually saw a dragonfly laying her eggs not five feet
away.
It is this peculiar stitching motion of the dragonfly s abdomen
that earned it the name  darning needle  parents used to
threaten their children by saying that, if the children told lies,
dragonflies would hover over their faces as they slept and sew
their lips together. Interestingly, I read that only the great speed
at which the egg-laying female dragonfly flies over the water
prevents her from being  caught by the surface tension and pulled
down. And at that same great speed the dragonfly I saw that
day whirred away, downstream: a drone, a dot, and then gone.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 191
Another time I saw a water strider behaving oddly. When there
is nothing whatsoever to see, I watch the water striders skate over
the top of the water, and I watch the six dots of shade made by
their feet dimpling the water s surface slide dreamily over the
bottom silt. Their motion raises tiny ripples or wavelets ahead of
them over the water s surface, and I had noticed that when they
feel or see these ripples coming towards them, they tend to turn
away from the ripples source. In other words, they avoid each
other. I figure this behavior has the effect of distributing them
evenly over an area, giving them each a better chance at whatever
it is they eat.
But one day I was staring idly at the water when something
out of the ordinary triggered my attention. A strider was skating
across the creek purposefully instead of randomly. Instead of
heading away from ripples made by another insect, it was racing
towards them. At the center of the ripples I saw that some sort
of small fly had fallen into the water and was struggling to right
itself. The strider acted extremely  interested ; it jerked after the
fly s frantic efforts, following it across the creek and back again,
inching closer and closer like Eskimos stalking caribou. The fly
could not escape the surface tension. Its efforts were diminishing
to an occasional buzz; it floated against the bank, and the strider
pursued it there but I could not see what happened, because
overhanging grasses concealed the spot.
Again, only later did I learn what I had seen. I read that striders
are attracted to any light. According to William H. Amos,  Often
the attracting light turns out to be the reflections off the ripples
set up by an insect trapped on the surface, and it is on such
creatures that the striders feed. They suck them dry. Talk about
living on jetsam! At any rate, it will be easy enough to watch for
this again this summer. I especially want to see if the slow ripples [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]