Part 12

Twice have I seen deer thus killed by thoughtless campers, the last victim being a splendid buck full grown. Two men saw him swimming an arm of Moosehead Lake, and launched a canoe with no unkinder purpose than to turn him back to shore, so that a party of sportsmen there might get a picture of him. The buck labored mightily; but the paddles were swift, and wherever he turned the danger appeared close in front of him. Suddenly he rose in the water, pawing the air, and heaved over on his side. When the canoe reached him he was dead; and the surprising thing is that dissection revealed no ruptured blood-vessel nor any other visible cause of his death. It was probably a matter of heart paralysis. Such an ending was unusual, I know; but undoubtedly many of these overwrought animals reach shore exhausted, spent to the limit, and lie down in the first good cover, never to rise again.

Moose and caribou are stronger swimmers than deer, and of tougher fiber; but it is still dangerous, I think, to chase them in the water. Once I saw a canoe following close behind a cow and a calf moose, the canoeists yelling wildly to hurry up the pace. Had they thought to look once into the eyes of the struggling brutes, they might have learned something which they ought to know. As the calf lagged farther and farther behind, the mother turned to come between him and the canoe, and remained there trying to urge and push the little fellow along. So they reached shallow water at last, found their footing, and plunged into the cover. The canoe turned away, and no doubt the incident was soon forgotten. I never saw the canoemen again, but I saw one of the moose. A few days later, in passing through the woods on that side of the lake, I found the calf stretched out dead where he had fallen, not fifty yards from the water’s edge.

Perhaps another “don’t” should here be memorized for the happy occasion when you find a fawn or a little cub in the woods, and are moved most kindly to pet him. If the mother is half-tame, or has lived near a clearing long enough to lose distrust of the man-scent, it may do no harm to treat her fawn or cub as you would a puppy; but to handle any wild little creature is to do him an injury. Until a fawn is strong enough to travel the rough country in which he was born, the doe often leaves him hidden in the woods, where he lies so close and still that you may pass without seeing him. Once you discover him, however, and he knows that he is seen, his beautiful eyes begin to question you with a great wonder. He has no fear of you whatever (this while he is very young, or before he begins to follow his mother); he will sometimes follow you when you go away, and he is such a lovable creature, so innocent and so appealing, that it is hard to keep your hands from him. Let him sniff your palm if he will, or lick it with his rough tongue for the faint taste of salt; but as you value his life don’t pet him or leave the scent of you on his delicate skin. A wild mother knows her own by the sense of smell chiefly; if she finds the startling man-scent where she expected a familiar odor, she becomes instantly alarmed, and then the little one is a stranger to her or a source of violent anger.

Once, before I learned better than to handle any helpless cub, I saw a doe drive her own fawn roughly away from her, out of my sight and hearing. I had petted the fawn a little (a very little, I am glad to remember) and looked with wonder on the mother’s anger, not understanding it till some time later, when I learned of a similar incident with a sadder ending. Not far from my camp a sportsman with his guide found a fawn hidden near the stream where they were fishing, and being completely won by the beautiful innocent, as most men are, they petted him to their hearts’ content. When an old doe, the mother presumably, appeared heading in their direction they thoughtfully withdrew, hiding at a distance to watch the family reunion. The doe seemed to hasten her steps when she saw that the fawn was on his feet, instead of lying close where she had left him; but when near him she suddenly stiffened, with the hair bristling on her neck. Two or three times she thrust out her nose, only to back away, and once she raised the harsh alarm-cry that a doe utters when she smells danger. Then, as the little fellow trotted up to her on his wabbly legs, she leaped upon him in fury and trampled him to death.

VIII

ON KEEPING STILL

To return to our first lesson, of quietude: it was impressed upon me unconsciously, like most good lessons, before I had any thought that I was learning the true way of the woods. The teacher was Nature herself (she seldom fails to quiet boy or man if left alone with him), and the school-room was a lonely berry-pasture surrounded by pine and hardwood forests. The berry-pickers, a happy and carefree lot, often let me go with them while I was yet too small to find my way among the tall swamp-blueberry bushes, and would leave me under a tree at the edge of the woods, with an armful of berry-laden branches to keep me busy while they wandered far away in search of the best picking. Sitting there in the breathing solitude, occupied with the task of filling my tin cup with berries and well content with my lot (for the woods always had a fascination for me, and seemed most friendly when I was alone), I would presently “feel” that something was watching me. There was never any suggestion of fear in the impression, only an awakening to the fact that I was not alone, that some living thing was near me. Then, as I looked up expectantly, I would almost always find a bird slipping noiselessly through the branches overhead, or a beastie creeping through the cover at my side; and in his bright eyes, his shy approach, his withdrawal to appear in another spot, I read plainly enough that he was asking who I was or what I was doing there. And by a whistled tune or a drumming on my cup, or by flashing a sunbeam into his eyes from a pocket glass, I always tried to hold him as long as I could.

This curious sense or feeling of being watched, by the way, is very real in some men, who do not regard it as a matter of chance or imagination. I have known of two elaborate courses of “laboratory” experiments which aimed to determine how far such a feeling is trustworthy, and both resulted in a neutral or fifty-fifty conclusion; but I wonder, if the experiments had been tried on Indians or natural men under natural conditions, whether the result might not have been quite different. The fact that the first fifty men you meet get lost or turned around in a trackless forest is significant for the fifty, and for the vast majority of others; but it means nothing to the one bushman who can go where he will without thought or possibility of being lost, because of his sure sense of direction.

So, possibly, with this feeling of being watched: it may be too intangible for experiment, or even for definition. Many times since childhood when I have been alone in the big woods, fishing or holding vigil by a wilderness lake, I have the feeling, at times vaguely and again definitely, that strange eyes were upon me. Occasionally, it is true, I have found nothing on looking around, either because no animal was there or because he was too well hidden to be seen; but much more often the feeling proved true to fact—so often, indeed, that I soon came to trust it without doubt or question, as Simmo my Indian still does, and a few other woodsmen I have known. It is possible that one’s ears or nose may account for the feeling; that some faint sound or odor may make itself felt so faintly that one has the impression of life without knowing through what channel the impression is received. Of that I am not at all sure; at the moment it seems that some extra sense is at work, more subtle than smell or hearing; and, whether rightly or wrongly, it is apparently associated with the penetrating stare of an animal’s eyes on your back.

To quote but a single incident, out of several that come to my memory: I was once sitting on the shore of a lake at twilight, wholly intent on following the antics of a bull moose I had called into the open. He was on the other side of a small bay, ranging up and down, listening, threshing the bushes with his antlers, blowing his penny-trumpet at intervals,—in a dozen impatient ways showing what a young and foolish moose he was. A veteran would have kept to the cover till he had located what he came for. I had ceased my bellowing when the bull first answered, had been thrilled by his rush through the woods, had cheered him silently when he burst into the open, grunting and challenging like a champion; now I was quietly enjoying his bewilderment at not finding the tantalizing cow he had just heard calling. He did not see or suspect me; I had the comedy all to myself, and was keenly interested to know how he would act when he rounded the bay, as he certainly would, and found me sitting in his path. Because he was big and truculent and a fool, I did not know what to expect; my canoe floated ready against the outer end of a stranded log, where a push would send it and me into deep water. I mention these details simply to show where my thoughts were.

As I watched the play in the hushed twilight, suddenly came the feeling that something was watching me. The bull had started around the bay in my direction; possibly his eyes had picked me out—but no, he was in plain sight, and the feeling is always associated with something unseen. Without changing position I looked carefully all about, searching the lake and especially the woods, which were already in deep shadow. Finding no bird or beast, no motion, nothing alarming, I turned to question the bull, who had halted to sound his ridiculous trumpet. He was perhaps fifty or sixty yards away. He had not yet seen me; I had no fear of him, no anxiety whatever; yet again came the feeling, this time insistent, compelling, as if some one had touched me and said, “Get away!” I did so promptly, jumping to my feet; and out of a fir thicket behind me charged another bull that I had not dreamed of calling.

By his size, his antlers, his fierce grunting, I recognized this brute on the instant. I had met him before, once on a trail, once on the lake shore, and had given him all the room he wanted. He was a grizzled old bull, morose and ugly, that seemed to have lost his native fear of man—from a galling wound, perhaps, or from living an outcast life by himself. He was a little crazy, I judged. That he was dangerous I knew from the fact that he had previously made an unprovoked attack upon my Indian. He, too, had heard the call; had approached it from behind as stealthily as a cat, and had no doubt watched me, puzzled by my stillness, till my first decided motion brought him out on the jump. But I am wandering away from the small boy getting his first lessons in the woods, and learning that the important thing is to hold perfectly still.

Later, when eight or nine years old, I went alone day after summer day to the wild berry-pastures. When my big pail would hold no more, I would make a bowl by bashing in the top of my hat, and fill it to the brim with luscious blueberries. These with a generous slice of bread made an excellent lunch, which I always ate within sight of a bird’s nest, or the den of a fox, or some other abode of life that I had discovered in the woods. And again, as I sat quiet in the solitude, the birds and small animals might be led by curiosity to approach as fearlessly as when I was too small to harm them. Now a vixen, finding me too near her den and cubs, would squall at me impatiently, like a little yellow dog with a cat’s voice; or again, a brooding bird that objected to my scrutiny would first turn her tail to me, and presently come round again, and finally get mad and flutter about my head, scolding loudly to chivvy me away. So it often happened that one had nearer or happier or more illuminating glimpses of wild life in that small hour of rest than would be possible in a month of roaming the woods with gun or collecting-box.

Once as I was eating my lunch under the pines, meanwhile watching a den I had found to see what might come out of it, a crow sailed in on noiseless wings and lit so near me that I hardly dared wink for fear he would notice the motion. My first thought was that he was nest-robbing (a crow is very discreet about that business), but he appeared rather to be listening, cocking his head this way or that; and from a lazy hawing in the distance I concluded he was satisfying himself that his flock was occupied elsewhere and that he was quite alone. Presently he hitched along the branch on which he stood and glided off to the crotch of a pine-tree, where he began to uncover what was hidden under a mat of brown needles. The first thing he took out was a piece of glass, which sparkled with rainbow colors in a stray glint of sunshine. Then came a bit of quartz with more sparkles, a shell, a silvery buckle, and some other glistening objects which I could not make out. He turned his treasures over and over, all the while croaking to himself in a pleased kind of way; then he put them all back, covered them again with needles, and slipped away without a sound. Having kept tame crows, I knew that they are forever stealing and hiding whatever bright objects they find about the house; and here in the pine woods was a thing to indicate that wild crows, perhaps all of them, have the same covetous habit.

Another day, a heavenly day when the budding woods were vocal and life stirred joyously in every thicket, I took a jews’-harp from my pocket and began to twang it idly. No, there was nothing premeditated in the act. I had been roving widely, following the winds or the bird-calls till a sunny opening invited me to rest, and had then fingered the music-maker with no more purpose than the poet’s boy, who “whistled as he went for want of thought.” The rhythmic, nasal twanging was a sound never heard in that place before or since, I think, and the first to come hurriedly to investigate was a bright-colored warbler, whose name I did not know; nor did I care to know it, feeling sure that by some note or sign he would presently suggest a name for himself, which would please me better than the barbarous jargon I might find in a bird-book. The alert little fellow lit on a branch within three feet of my face, turning his head so as to view me with one eye or the other when I kept quiet, or chirping his indignation when I twanged the jews’-harp. Next came a jay, officious as the town constable; then more birds, half concealing their curiosity under gentle manners; and a squirrel who had no manners at all, scolding everybody and scurrying about in a fashion which seemed dangerous to his excited head.

As I watched this little assembly, which seemed to be asking, “What’s up? What’s up?” the meaning of it suddenly dawned on me like a surprising discovery. When I entered the opening I knew simply that birds or beasts would draw near if they found me quiet; before I left it I had found the explanation: that all the wood folk are intensely curious, as curious as so many human gossips, but without any of their malice; that by inner compulsion they are drawn to any strange sight or sound, as a crowd collects when a man cuts a caper or throws a fit or raises a whoop or looks up into the air, or does anything else out of the ordinary. When you appear in the quiet woods every bird or beast within sight or hearing is agog to know about you; they are like the Nantucket-Islanders, who named their one public hack the “Who’s Come?” Because you are a stranger, and what you do is none of their business, they are all the more interested in you and your doings; you come to them with all the charm of the unknown, the unexpected; and they will gratify their curiosity, fearlessly and most pleasantly, so long as you know how to stimulate or play upon it and to hold still while enjoying it.

All that is natural enough, as natural as life; but it is not written in any book of natural history, and it came to me that day as a wonderful discovery. It suggested at once the right way to study birds or beasts, as living creatures; it has since led to many a fascinating glimpse of the wood-folk comedy, and to a lifelong pleasure which is too elusive to be set down in words. At the bottom of it, I suppose, is the fact that in every wild or natural creature is something, at once mysterious and familiar, which appeals powerfully to your interest or sympathy, as if you saw a faint shadow of your other self, or caught a fleeting memory of that vanished time when you lived in a child’s world of wonder and delight.

From the beginning, therefore, I met all birds and animals in a child’s impersonal way; which, strangely enough, ascribes personality to every living thing, yes, and honors it. These inquisitive little rangers of the wood or the berry-pasture, shy and exquisitely alert, were all individuals like myself, each one seeking the joy of life in his own happy way. My only regret was that I was too clumsy, too obtrusive, too ignorant of the way of the wild, and so frightened many a timid bird or beast that I would gladly have known.

All this, too, is perfectly natural; the instinctive attitude of a child, as of an animal, is one of curiosity rather than of fear or destruction. If left to his natural instincts, a child meets every living creature with a mixture of shyness or timidity and bright interest; he becomes an enemy of the wild, learning to frighten and harry and kill, not from nature but from the evil example of his elders. I could prove that beyond a peradventure, I think, if this were the place; but there is no need of any man’s demonstration. Go yourself to the big woods at twilight, leaving custom behind you; go alone and unarmed; hear that rustle of leaves, that tread of soft feet which brings you to an instant halt; see that strange beast which glides out into the trail and turns to look at you with luminous eyes. Then quickly examine your own mental state, and you will know the truth of a man’s natural or instinctive attitude toward the mystery of life.

Unfortunately the wild birds and beasts near our home have learned that man is unnatural, a creature to be feared, and their curiosity has given place to another motive. The young still display their natural bent freely; but the old have heard too many of our guns, have been too often disturbed by our meddlesome dogs or worthless cats, have suffered too much at the hands of outrageous egg-collectors or skin-collectors to be any longer drawn to us when we go afield. As you go farther away from civilization it becomes easier to play on the animals’ native curiosity; in the far North or the remote jungle, or wherever man is happily unknown, they still come fearlessly to investigate you, or to stand quiet, like the ptarmigan, watching with innocent eyes as you pass them by. In the intermediate regions, which are harried by sportsmen for a brief period in the autumn and then left to a long solitude, the animals are wild or tame according to season; and it has seemed to me, not always but on occasions, that in some subtle way they distinguish between man and man, taking alarm at the first sniff of a hunter, but stopping to show their interest in a harmless woods-rover.

This last is a mere theory, to be sure, and to some it may appear a fanciful one; but it rests, be assured, upon repeated experience. Thus, I came once at evening to a camp of hunters who were in a sorry plight. They were in a good deer country, and had counted largely on venison to supply their table; but for more than a week they had tasted no meat, and they were very hungry. The deer were wild as hawks, they assured me. They had hunted every day; but because of the game’s wildness and the dry weather, which made the leaves rustle loudly underfoot, it had proved impossible to approach near enough for a shot—all of which made me think that, if you want to see game, you should leave your gun at home. I had met about a dozen deer that day; most of them were within easy range, and a few of them stood with questioning eyes while a man might have made ready his camera and taken a picture of them.

The very next morning, and within a mile of the hunters’ camp, I witnessed a familiar but fascinating display of deer nature. At sunrise I approached a bog, bordering a stream where a few good trout might be found, and on the edge of the opening stood a doe and her well-grown fawn, not twenty yards away. The fawn, a little buck with the nubs of his first antlers showing, threw up his head as I appeared, and in the same instant I dropped to the ground behind a mossy log. No whistle or sound of alarm followed the action; so I scraped a mat of moss from the log, put it on for a bonnet, and cautiously raised my head.

The old doe was still feeding; the buck stood like a living statue, his whole attention fastened on the spot where I had disappeared. He had seen something, he knew not what, and was waiting for it to show itself again. When my bonnet appeared his eyes seemed to enlarge and flash as he caught the motion. Without changing his footing, for his surprise seemed to have rooted him in the ground, he began to sway his body to left or right, stretching his head high or dropping it low, taking a dozen graceful attitudes in order to view the queer bit of moss from different angles. Then he slowly raised a fore foot, put it down very gently, raised it again, stamped it down hard. Getting no response to his challenge, he sidled over to his mother, still keeping his eyes fastened on the log. At his touch or call she lifted her head, pointing her nose straight at me, as if he had somehow told her where to give heed.

It was a wonderful sight, the multicolored bog spread like a rug at the feet of the glorious October woods, and standing on the crimson fringe of it these two beautiful creatures, demanding with flashing eyes who the intruder might be. For a full minute, while I held motionless, the doe kept her eyes steadily on the log; then, “Nothing there, little buck; don’t worry,” she said in her own silent way, and went to feeding once more.

“But there is something; I saw it,” insisted the little buck, nudging his mother by swinging his head against her side. That was the first and only time, in that quick swing, when he took his eyes from what attracted them. The doe looked a second time, saw nothing uncommon, and had turned to feed along the edge of the opening when the little buck recalled her in some way. “Can’t you see it, that white thing like a face under the moss?” he was saying. “There! it moved again!”

The mother, whose back was turned to me, twisted her head around as if to humor him, and to interest her I swayed the moss bonnet to and fro like a pendulum. At that she whirled, surprise written large on her, and I dropped my head, leaving her staring. When I looked again both deer were coming nearer, the mother ahead, the fawn holding back as if to say, “Careful now! It’s big, and it’s hiding just behind that log.” So they drew on warily, stopping to stamp a fore foot, and every time they challenged I gave the bonnet an answering wag. When they were so near that I knew they must soon distinguish my eyes from the moss, I sank out of sight. I was listening for their alarm-call or for the thud of their flying feet when a gray muzzle slid over the log, and I laid my hand fair on the mother’s cheek before she bounded away.

Now there was nothing strange or new in all that; on the contrary, it was very much like what I had observed in other inquisitive deer. The only surprising part of the comedy was that the doe, though she had felt the touch of my hand and no doubt smelled the man behind it, stopped short after a few jumps and turned to stare at the log again. That she was still curious, still unsatisfied, was plain enough; what puzzles me to know is, whether she would have acted in the same way if one of the hungry hunters had been waiting in my shoes for the chance or moment to kill her.

AT CLOSE RANGE