Part 10

Such a power seems mysterious, incredible, in a civilized world of sense and noise; but I fancy that every man and woman speaks silently to the brute without being conscious of the fact. “If you want to see game, leave your gun at home,” is an accepted saying among hunters; but the reason for the excellent admonition has not been forthcoming. When you have hunted six days in vain, and then on a quiet Sunday stroll come plump upon noble game that seems to have no fear, you are apt to think of the curiosities of luck, but even here also are you under the sway of psychological law and order. As you go quietly through the woods, projecting your own “aura” of peace or sympathy, it may be, in an invisible wave ahead of you, there is nothing disturbing or inharmonious in either your thoughts or your actions; and at times the wild animal seems curiously able to understand the one as well as the other, just as certain dogs know at first glance whether a stranger is friendly or hostile or afraid of them. When you are excited or lustful to kill, something of your emotional excitement seems to precede you; it passes over many wild birds and beasts, all delicately sensitive, before you come within their sense range; and when you draw near enough to see them you often find them restless, suspicious, though as yet no tangible warning of danger has floated through the still woods. At the first glimpse or smell of you they bound away, your action in hiding or creeping making evident the danger which thus far was only vaguely felt. But if you approach the same animals gently, without mental excitement of any kind, sometimes, indeed, they promptly run away, especially in a much-hunted region; but more frequently they meet you with a look of surprise; they move alertly here or there to get a better view of you, and show many fascinating signs of curiosity before they glide away, looking back as they go.

Such has been the illuminating experience of one man, at least, repeated a hundred times in the wilderness. I have been deep in the woods when my food-supply ran low, or was lost in the rapids, or went to feed an uninvited bear, and it was then a question of shoot game or go hungry; but the shooting was limited by the principle that a wild animal has certain rights which a man is bound to respect. I have always held, for example, that a hunter has no excuse for trying long shots that are beyond his ordinary skill; that it is unpardonable of him to “take a chance” with noble game or to “pump lead” after it, knowing as he does that the chances are fifty to one that, if he hits at all, he will merely wound the animal and deprive it of that gladness of freedom which is more to it than life. So when I have occasionally gone out to kill a buck (a proceeding which I heartily dislike) I have sometimes hunted for days before getting within close range of the animal I wanted. But when, in the same region and following the same trails, I have entered the big woods with no other object than to enjoy their stillness, their fragrance, their benediction, it is seldom that I do not find plenty of deer, or that I cannot get as near as I please to any one of them. More than once in the woods I have touched a wild deer with my hand (as recorded in another chapter) and many times I have had them within reach of my fishing-rod.

It is even so with bear, moose, caribou and other creatures—your best “shots” come when you are not expecting them, and it is not chance, but psychological law, which determines that you shall see most game when you leave your gun at home. A hunter must be dull indeed not to have discovered that the animal he approaches peaceably, trying to make his eyes or his heart say friendly things, is a very different animal from the one he stalks with muscles tense and eyes hard and death in the curl of his trigger finger.

I once met an English hunter, a forest officer in India, who told me that for the first year of his stay in the jungle he was “crazy” to kill a tiger. He dreamed of the creatures by night; he hunted them at every opportunity and in every known fashion by day; he never went abroad on forest business without a ready rifle; and in all that time he had just one glimpse of a running tiger. One day he was led far from his camp by a new bird, and as he watched it in a little opening, unarmed and happy in his discovery, a tiger lifted its huge head from the grass, not twenty steps away. The brute looked at him steadily for a few moments, then moved quietly aside, stopped for another look, and leaped for cover.

That put a new idea into the man’s head, and the idea was emphasized by the fact that the unarmed natives, who had no desire to meet a tiger, were frequently seeing the brutes in regions where he hunted for them in vain. As an experiment he left his rifle at home for a few months; he practised slipping quietly through the jungle without physical or mental excitement, as the natives go, and presently he, too, began to meet tigers. In one district he came close to four in as many months, and every one acted in the same half-astonished, half-inquisitive way. Then, thinking he understood his game, he began to carry his rifle again, and had what he called excellent luck. The beautiful tiger skins he showed me were a proof of it.

To me this man was a rare curiosity, being the only Indian or African hunter I ever met who went into the jungle alone, man fashion, and who did not depend on unarmed natives or beaters or trackers for finding his game. His excellent “luck” was, as I judge, simply a realization of the fact that human excitement may carry far in the still woods, and be quite as disturbing, as the man-scent or the report of a rifle.

Does all this sound strange or incredible to you, like a chapter from a dream-book? However it may sound, it is the crystallized conviction resulting from years of intimate observation of wild beasts in their native woods; and if you consider it a moment without prejudice, it may appear more natural or familiar, like a chapter from life. If the man who sits opposite you can send his good or evil will across a room, so that you feel his quality without words, or if he can so express himself silently when he enters your gate that certain dogs instantly take his measure and welcome or bite him, it is not at all improbable that the same man can project the same feelings when he goes afield, or that sensitive wild creatures can understand or “feel him out” at a considerable distance.

To weigh that probability fairly you must first get rid of your ancient hunting lore. Hunters are like the Medes and Persians in that they have laws which alter not; and I suppose if you met ancient Nimrod in the flesh, his admonition would be, “Keep to leeward and stalk carefully, breaking no twig, for your game will run away if it winds or hears you.” That is the first rule I learned for big-game hunting, and it is founded on fact. But there are two other facts I have observed these many years, which Nimrod will never mention: the first, that when you are keenly hunting, it often happens that game breaks away in alarm before it winds or sees or hears you; and the second, that when you are not hunting, but peaceably roving the woods, going carelessly and paying no attention to the wind, you often come very close to wild game, which stops to watch you curiously after it has seen you and heard your step or voice and sampled your quality in the air. These two facts, implying some kind of mental or emotional contact between the natural man and the natural brute, are probably not accidental or unrelated, and we are here trying to find the natural law or principle of which they are the occasional and imperfect expression.

This whole matter of silent communication may appear less strange if we remember that most wild creatures are all their lives accustomed to matters which sense-blinded mortals find mysterious or incredible. Why a caterpillar, which lives but a few hours when all the leaves are green, should make a cocoon of a single leaf and with a thread of silk bind that leaf to its stem before he wraps himself up in it, as if he knew that every leaf must fall; or why a spider, adrift for the first time on a chip, should immediately send out filaments on the air currents and, when one of his filaments cleaves to something solid across the water, pull himself and his raft ashore by it; or why a young bear, which has never seen a winter, should at the proper time prepare a den for his long winter sleep,—a thousand such matters, which are as A B C to natural creatures, are to us as incomprehensible as hieroglyphics to an Eskimo. That a sensitive animal should know by feeling (that is, by the reception of a silent message) whether an approaching animal is in a dangerous or a harmless mood is really no more remarkable than that he should know, as he surely does, when it is time for him to migrate or to make ready his winter quarters.

This amazing sensitiveness, resulting, I think, from the reception of a wordless message, was brought strongly home to me one day as I watched a flock of black mallards, forty or fifty of them, resting in the water-grass within a few yards of my hiding-place. A large hawk had appeared at intervals, circling over the marshes and occasionally over the pond; but, beyond turning an eye upward when he came too near, the ducks apparently paid no attention to him. He was their natural enemy; they had paid toll of their number to satisfy his hunger; but now, though plainly seen, he was no more regarded or feared than a dragon-fly buzzing among the reeds. Presently another hawk appeared in the distance, circling above the meadows. As a wider swing brought him over the pond a watchful duck uttered a single low quock! On the instant heads came from under wings; a few ducks shot into the open water for a look; others sprang aloft without looking, and the whole flock was away in a twinkling. I think the hawk did not see or suspect them till they rose in the air, for at the sudden commotion he swooped, checked himself when he saw that he was too late, and climbed upward where he could view the whole marsh again.

Now these two hawks were of the same species, and to my eyes they were acting very much alike. One was hungry, on the lookout for food; the other was circling for his own amusement after having fed; and though the eyes of birds are untrustworthy in matters of such fine distinction, in some way these ducks instantly knew or felt the difference between the mood of one enemy and that of another. Likewise, when I have been watching deer in winter, I have seen a doe throw up her head, cry an alarm and bound away; and her action became comprehensible a few moments later when a pack of hunting wolves broke out of the cover. But I have watched deer when a pack of wolves that were not hunting passed by in plain sight, and beyond an occasional lift of the head for an alert glance the timid creatures showed no sign of alarm, or even of uneasiness, in presence of their terrible enemies.

I say confidently that one wolf pack was hunting and the other not hunting because the northern timber-wolf naturally (that is, in a wild state and dealing with wild animals) hunts or kills only when he is hungry. I ran the trails of both packs, and one showed plainly that the wolves were in search of food; while the other said that the brutes were roaming the country idly, lazily; and when I ran the back trail of this second pack I found where they had just killed and eaten. The deer were not afraid of them because they were for the time quite harmless.

At first I thought that these ducks and deer perceived the mood of their enemies in a simple way through the senses; that they could infer from the flight of a hawk or the trot of a wolf whether he were peaceable or dangerous; and at times this is probably the true explanation of the matter. The eyes of most birds and beasts, strangely dull to objects at rest, are instantly attracted to any unusual motion. If the motion be quiet, steady, rhythmical, they soon lose interest in it, unless it be accompanied by a display of bright color; but if the motion be erratic, or if it appear and disappear, as when an approaching animal hides or creeps, they keep sharp watch until they know what the motion means or until timidity prompts them to run away. Thus, chickens or ducks show alarm when a kite slants up into the air; they lose interest when the kite sits in the wind, and become alert again when it begins to dive or swoop. It is noticeable, also, that on a windy day all game-birds and animals are uncommonly wild and difficult of approach, partly because the constant motion of leaves or grass upsets them, and partly (in the case of animals) because their noses are at fault, the air messages being constantly broken up and confused. But such a “sensible” explanation, suitable as it may be for times or places, no longer satisfies me, and simply because it does not explain why on a quiet day game should be unconcerned in presence of one hawk or wolf, and take to instant flight on the appearance of another enemy of the same species.

It should be noted here that these “fierce” birds and beasts are no more savage in killing grouse or deer than the grouse is savage in eating bugs, or the deer in seeking mushrooms at the proper season; that they simply seek their natural meat when they are hungry, and that they are not bloodthirsty or ferocious or wanton killers. Only men, and dogs trained or spoiled by men, are open to that charge. The birds and beasts of prey when not hungry (which is a large part of the time, since they feed but once a day or sometimes at longer intervals) live as peaceably as one could wish. After feeding they instinctively seek to be with their own kind and very rarely attempt to molest other creatures. At such times, when they are resting or playing or roving the woods, the smaller wood folk pay no more attention to them than to harmless fish-hawks or porcupines. Repeatedly I have watched game-birds or animals when their enemies were in sight, and have wondered at their fearlessness. The interesting question is, how do they know, as they seemingly do, when the full-fed satisfaction of their enemy changes to a dangerous mood? Why, for example, are deer alarmed at the yelp of a she-wolf calling her cubs to the trail, and why do they feed confidently in the dusk-filled woods, as I have seen them do, when the air shivers and creeps to the clamor of a wolf pack baying like unleashed hounds in wild jubilation?

I have no answer to the question, and no explanation except the one suggested by human experience: that the hunting animal, like the hunting man, probably sends something of his emotional excitement in a wave ahead of him, and that some animals are finely sensitive enough to receive this message and to be vaguely alarmed by it.

The mating of animals, especially the calling of an unseen mate from a great distance, brings us face to face with the same problem, and perhaps also the same answer. Sometimes the mating call is addressed to the outer ear, as in the drumming of a cock-grouse or the whine of a cow-moose; but frequently a mate appears when, so far as we can hear, there is no audible cry to call him. How do the butterflies, for example, know when or where to seek their other halves? That their meeting is by chance or blunder or accident is a theory which hardly endures an hour’s observation. In the early spring I take a cocoon from a certain corner of shrubbery and carry it to my house, and there keep it till the end softens, when I put it into a box with a screened top and hang it out under the trees. Presently a gorgeous moth crawls out of the cocoon; and hardly has she begun to wave her wings to dry them when the air over the screen is brilliant with dancing wings, the wings of her would-be mates. And the thing is more puzzling to me because I have never found a cocoon of that kind in my immediate neighborhood; nor have I seen a single cecropia this season until the captive called them.

How they find her so promptly is a problem that I cannot solve. It may be that the call is wholly physical or sensible, that some fine dust or aroma is sent forth on the air currents, and the sensitive nerves of other moths receive and respond to it; but it is still amazing that wind-blown creatures can follow an invisible air-trail through what must be to them a constant tempest and whirlwind of air currents, until they come unerringly to the one desired spot in a limitless universe. I have shown that pretty sight of dancing wings to many audiences, after predicting what would happen; and always they saw it with wonder, as if there were magic in it.

The moth mystery may be dissolved by some such purely physical formula; but what physical sense will explain the fact that when I turned a modest hen-pheasant loose in the spring, in a region where my wide-ranging setter and I never discovered a pheasant, she was immediately joined by a gloriously colored mate, and soon there was a hidden nest and then young pheasants to watch? Most birds and beasts are questing widely in the mating season, and their senses seem to be more keen at this time, or more concentrated on a single object. On grounds of what we thoughtlessly call chance, therefore, they would be more apt to find mates when they are keenly looking for them; but giving them every possible chance in a wide region where the species is almost extinct, and then multiplying that chance a hundred times, I still find it hard to believe that the meeting of two rare animals is either accidental or the result of ordinary sense-perception. Out of several examples that occur to me, here are two which especially challenge the attention:

One early spring a she-fox was caught in her den, some five miles from the village where I then harbored. She was carefully bagged, carried a few rods to an old wood road, placed in a wagon and driven over country highways to the village, where she was confined in a roomy pen in a man’s dooryard. A few nights later came a snowfall, and in the morning there were the tracks of a male fox heading straight to the vixen and making a path round about her pen. She was his mate, presumably, and when we found his tracks our first feeling of admiration at his boldness was soon replaced by the puzzling question of how he had found her so quickly and so surely. To answer that question, if possible, I followed his back trail.

Now the trail of a fox in the wilderness, where he is sometimes hunted by wolves or other hungry prowlers, is a bewildering succession of twistings and crisscrosses; in a settled region, where his natural enemies are extinct, his trail is bolder, more straightforward, easier to read; and in either case you can quickly tell by the “signs” whether your fox is male or female, whether hunting or roaming, or hungry or satisfied. Also you can tell whether he is just “projeckin’ around,” as Uncle Remus says, or whether his mind is set on going somewhere. In the latter event he almost invariably follows runways, or fox roads, which are as well known to him as are footpaths and stream-crossings to a country lad. But the trail of this particular fox was different from any other that I ever followed. That he was a male and was “going somewhere” was evident enough; but he was not following runways or paying any attention to them. He left no signs at places where any ordinary dog-fox would surely have left them, and he was stopping to listen or to ward himself at uncommonly frequent intervals. So, running it backward, I read the story of his journey mile after mile, till the oncoming trail changed to the devious, rambling trot of a questing fox; and beyond that I had no interest in it.

The place where the fox seemed to have found his bearings, or where he stopped his rambling to head straight for his mate, was some four miles distant from the captive in a bee-line. The course he took was entirely different from that taken by the man who brought the vixen home, thus excluding the theory that he followed the trail by scent; and the latter part of his way led through the outskirts of a village, where the track of a fox had not been seen for many years. From the distant hills he had come down through sheltering woods at a stealthy trot; across open pastures on the jump; over a bridge and along a highway, where he traveled behind a friendly stone wall; then very cautiously through lanes and garden fringes, where the scent of men and dogs met him at every turn; turning aside here for a difficulty or there for a danger, but holding his direction as true as if he followed a compass, till he came at last with delicate steps to where his mate was silently calling him. For except on the assumption that she called him, and with a cry that was soundless, I know not how to explain the fact that he found her in a place where neither he nor she had ever been before.

It is possible, you may reason, that this was not his first visit; that unknown to us, venturing among his human and canine enemies, he had by a lucky chance stumbled upon his mate on an evening when the bare ground did not betray his secret to our eyes; and that for his next visit he had cunningly laid out a different trail through manifold dangers. It was the latter trail, made without doubt or question of what lay at the end of it, which I had followed in the telltale snow.

That is a good armchair argument, but a very doubtful explanation of the fox action, since it calls for more reasoning power than we commonly find in a brute. Remember that this male fox was far away on his own affairs when his mate was captured, and he had no means of knowing where she had gone: he simply missed her from her accustomed haunts, and sought till he found her. Remember also that a male fox is never allowed to come near his mate’s den; that when she is heavy with young, as this vixen was when caught, he may join her of an evening and hunt for her, or bring her food that he has killed, but always, I think, at a distance from the place where she intends to bring forth her cubs. That the male, after missing his mate and yapping for her in vain through the woods, should at last seek her at the forbidden den, and there find the scent of men and conclude that they had taken her away; that he should follow the scent of a wagon-wheel over five miles of country roads, or else explore all the neighboring villages till he found what he sought; that he should then lay out a different trail, more secret and more reasonably safe, for his second visit,—all this is to me more ingenious, more unnatural and more incredible than that his mate should silently call him, as his mother had probably many times called him from the den when he was a cub, and that he should feel and answer her summons.

Such reasoning is purely speculative, but there are certain facts which we must keep in mind if we are to explain the matter. The first, a general fact which is open to observation, is that it is fox nature at certain seasons to come to a captive; for what reason or with what self-forgetful motive it would be hard to say. I have known mother foxes and mother wolves to come where their cubs were imprisoned by men. I have heard a straight record of one male wolf that appeared at a ranch the second night after his wounded mate was captured by the ranchman. And I have seen a male fox come to the rescue of a female when she was driven by dogs and too heavy with young to make a long run, and wait beside her trail till the dogs appeared, and then lead them off after him while she made her escape. The second fact, which may imply some power of silent communication, is that when snow fell about the pen of this captive fox, a few nights after she was taken, there were the tracks to show that her mate already knew where she was. That he found and came to her in the midst of his enemies may be quite as significant as how he found her, by way of giving a new direction or interest to our skin-and-bones study of natural history.

In this first example the fox was perhaps moved by the mating impulse, which sharpened his wit and encouraged his will; but at times a wild creature may seek and find his mate when no such “call of the blood” urges him, when he comes with his life in his hand in response to some finer or nobler motive, something perhaps akin to loyalty, which is the sum of all virtues. Witness the following:

A friend of mine was hunting one October day when his shot wing-tipped a quail, apparently the old female of the flock, which his dog caught and brought to him almost uninjured. What to do was the next question. It is easy, because thoughtless, to cut down a bird in swift flight; but when the little thing nestles down in your hand or tries to hide under your fingers; when you can feel its rapid heart-beat, and its eyes are big and wondrous bright,—well, then some hunters bite the head, and some wring the neck, and some would for the moment as lief be shot as to do either. So to avoid the difficulty my friend put the quail carefully away in a pocket of his hunting-coat, and brought her home with some vague idea of taming her, and some dream of trapping a mate in the spring and perhaps raising some little bob-whites of his own. At night he put the captive into a coop just inside the barn window, which was open wide enough to admit air but not a prowling cat; for he was already beginning to learn that a quail is a most lovable little pet, and he was bound that she should not again be hurt or frightened.

Before sunrise next morning he heard low, eager whistlings in the yard; and there was another quail, a male bob-white, where never one was seen before nor since. He was perched warily on the window-sill of the barn, looking in at his captive mate, telling her in the softest of quail tones (for there were enemies all about) that he had found her and was glad; while from within the barn came a soft piping and gurgling which seemed to speak welcome and reassurance. The opening of a door frightened him; he buzzed away to the orchard, and presently from an apple-tree came the exquisite quoi-lee! quoi-lee! the assembly-call of the bob-white family.

The first quail had been caught miles away from the man’s house; there were no other birds of her own kind within hearing distance, so far as my friend and his dog ever discovered, and it was not the mating-time, when quail are questing widely. By a process of elimination, therefore, one reaches the conclusion that the male bird was, in all probability, the father of the flock over which the captive presided; that he had helped to raise the young birds, as quail commonly do; that he had stood by his family all summer in loyal bob-white fashion, and that he went out to seek his vanished mate when she failed to answer his calling.