The Magic of the Grouse

It’s interesting how a childhood experience can signify something entirely different decades later.

Perhaps your memory of a happy time turns out to be unsettling in later years. Or, as in this case, a frightening afternoon as a child turns out to be something wondrous and formative much later in life.

This happened to me on a snowy winter’s day, a Sunday in 1963, in West Vancouver. My best friend Daryl and I were seven years old. We met at his driveway and set out to see what we could see. Lunch was warm in our bellies; the white world beckoned us.

Vacant lots and forested land

Our neighbourhood was mostly new, consisting of modest middle-class homes just below the Upper Levels Highway. They were interspersed with vacant lots and forested land. You could catch cut-throat trout in the creek at the end of the street or swing through the forest on low-hanging cedar boughs. We knew all the neighbours. It was a kid’s paradise.

Instead of walking down to the creek, Daryl and I headed in the opposite direction, eastwards, along Queens Avenue. We threw snowballs at birds, trudged through the ditch past the Stephenson’s house, the McCoys, and the Lees. Large snowflakes drifted down from the sky.

We were warier in the next block. It was less familiar territory. At 22nd Street, Daryl lobbed a snowball at the Crossley house because that was where two of the neighbourhood bullies lived, a pair of brothers named John and Teddy. We didn’t wait for the snowball to land on the house’s roof and ran as fast as we could halfway down the next block. No one followed us. Daryl turned around and growled like a dog at the imaginary bullies, letting out a few barks. We’d gotten some revenge on those little tyrants, escaped their meanness, inflicted a snowball on their home.

We emerged on the other side

“The Dip” was an unpaved road that had just been cleared through some woods, across a creek, and opened into another neighbourhood. We ran through The Dip, down one side and up the other. It was dark at the bottom. We weren’t taking any chances in case cougars, bears, or gorillas were waiting for us.

When we emerged on the other side, we were in uncharted territory. The houses looked like the ones we lived in, but it was a different world. A few burly men were shovelling snow off driveways, cigarettes hanging off their lips. A car turned onto the street, spinning its wheels and spraying packed brown snow behind it. Some kids worked on a snowman in their front yard.

We turned down another street. There was a grove of alder trees at the far end of the block, where Daryl thought there might be trails and a creek or an abandoned fort that some kids had made. We were deep into the woods when my boot sunk through the snow and got stuck in a tangle of fallen tree branches and brambles.

I struggled to free myself, but it was futile. I was wedged in, a prisoner of the forest. We were just little kids. Too far from home in a cold, snowy world. I was panicked, and Daryl had no ideas. There was a simple solution, as my father later demonstrated, but it never occurred to us.

Flying monkeys

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“I’ll go back and get your dad or my dad, and we’ll come and rescue you!”

“How are you even going to find home?” I blubbered. “We’re lost!”

Saying those words clarified my situation: I was doomed! Daryl may never find his way home, or it might take hours to find his way back. I would freeze to death or starve. Or maybe the sky would fill with flying monkeys, and the Wicked Witch of the West would swoop down on her broom and snap me up! Mom would be heartbroken. She’d never see me again!

Despite having no idea how to get my boot and leg free, Daryl said he could easily find his way home, but it might be dark by the time he got back. In fact, our homes were less than a half hour away. But neither of us knew much about the passage of time. We really thought we were on the far side of the world.

Daryl marched off through the trees, and I was alone. I sat down in the snow and tugged my boot some more. Nothing budged.

Sitting in the silence

I was scared and humiliated, not sure I’d survive the ordeal. What would my father would say if I ever saw him again. I remembered a Tarzan movie where a lion stepped into a trap, got swallowed up in nets, and hoisted up off the ground, roaring and struggling. The gleeful white men jumped out of the bushes and pounded their chests triumphantly. Until Tarzan came along, freed the beast and scared off the arrogant trophy hunters.

I gave up struggling and sat still. I was struck by the silence. Sounds were muffled by snow that blanketed the barren branches and trunks. The snowfall thinned out, and I could see deeper into the forest.

At times I was hopeful I’d be rescued; other times frightened. I’d look up through the dark canopy of tree branches. It was daylight, but the sky was gray. There were clumps of salal and ferns and blackberry canes all about. And trees that creaked and groaned.

I was aware of the faintest sounds. A gust of wind might have whistled through the trees. A loud car might have roared by on a distant street. Children’s laughter came from the neighbourhood beyond the trees.

Goosebumps

At one point, I became alarmed at a barely perceptible sound that I thought must be animal footsteps. My heart raced; my back and neck tingled with goosebumps. I sat perfectly still and scanned the forest floor to see what was making the sound. What was it?

Then, I saw it! A stout-bodied bird with speckled feathers, white and brown, camouflaged and barely visible in the gloomy forest. It walked deliberately along the top of a log, a fallen tree, almost goose-stepping. It stopped every few steps and looked around. Frantically, it seemed.

At one point, the bird stiffened stretched out its neck and began flapping its wings. Slowly at first, then speeding up. It sounded a bit like a car starting. The feathers around its neck ruffled as it beat its wings against its body. When the flapping stopped, its body slumped, and it began its cautious walk along the log. I watched, still and silent, as the bird repeated this sequence of goose-step and wing-flapping.

When it reached the broken end of the log, it stopped, took one last look around, then flew off into the trees.

I’ve since learned this was a Ruffed Grouse. I’ve seen them at other times, with their tails fanned upwards, and the neck feathers ruffled out as they were this day. This video shows the wing-flapping or thumping sound the grouse made.

Magic of the grouse

I’d forgotten entirely about the grouse until just recently. For so long, it was about being alone in the forest, my fear, being cold and terrified, wondering if I might die or somehow find my way home.

But when the image of this thumping grouse came to me, a new dimension opened. The eerie sound of the bird walking through the snow and the other-worldly thumping sounds when it beat its wings against its body. Its ruffled neck and strange behaviour.

I can feel myself now as I write, thrilled as I sat in that forest. How could I have forgotten that beautiful image? Indeed, how could I have forgotten the quiet and majesty of the forest, which indeed registered in my seven-year-old consciousness?

When my father came through the trees, with Daryl at his side, I think I burst into tears. He was reassuring. Was I OK? He pulled my foot out of the boot and extracted it from the tree roots. He helped me up, re-fitted the boot and led us back to his car, a white 1961 Sunbeam Alpine.

Rescued and transformed

My freedom was as simple as that. My father bundled me into a blanket and sat me in the bucket seat beside him. Daryl squeezed into the back.

My parents seemed to think it all quite funny when we got home. Mom made hot chocolate for Daryl and me. We sat at the kitchen table, me still wrapped in the blanket. We laughed a little at our adventure, and when it was time for Daryl to go, Mom told me to thank him for helping me. And life returned to normal.

As time passed, the adventure made for some fun story-telling. The mild trauma of being trapped in the woods obscured the other part of my memory, the one about the grouse and the holy silence of the forest on that snowy day. Remembering transformed the experience into something more profound.

Daryl and I found ourselves in unknown territory that day. Terrifying at first, then humorous, and now sublime decades later.

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

From “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats

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