Part 3

From such observations, and from others which I have not chronicled, I judge that the higher orders of birds and beasts have a few calls which stand for definite things, or mental images of things, but that their ordinary cries merely project an emotion or excitement in such a way that it stirs a similar emotion in other birds or beasts of the same species; just as the sound of hearty laughter invariably stirs the feeling of mirth in men who hear it, or any inarticulate cry of fear sets human feet in motion—toward the cry if the hearer be brave, or away from it if he be of cowardly disposition. Yet even among men, who by civilization have lost some of their natural virtues, the primal impulse still lives. Like the wolf or the raccoon, the man’s first impulse is to rush to his distressed or excited fellows. If he turns and runs the other way, it means simply that his artificial habit or training has deadened his natural instincts.

In speaking of “man” here I refer to the genus homo, not to the male specimen thereof. Among brutes most of the natural instincts are the same in both sexes; they vary in degree, not in kind, and the instincts of the female are commonly the stronger or keener. Yet I have noticed, or think I have noticed, this difference: when a cry of distress is uttered in the woods, the first bird or beast to appear is almost always a female; but the male is quicker on his toes at a battle-yell or a senseless clamor.

This last is a personal impression, and cannot well be verified. The only record I have which might pass for evidence in the matter comes from my observation of the crows. In the spring many of these questionable birds indulge their taste for eggs or tender flesh and soon become incurable nest-robbers; and for that reason I often shoot them, to save other and more useful birds. The method is very simple: one hides and calls, and takes the crows as they appear in swift flight, the number shot being commonly limited to one or two at a time. And I have observed repeatedly, at different times and in different localities, that when I use the distress-call of a young crow as a decoy, the first to appear over the tree-tops is a female. This is the common rule, with occasional exceptions to point or emphasize it. But whenever I clamor like a crow that has discovered an owl, or send forth a senselessly excited hawing, almost invariably the first crow to come whooping over is a long-winged and glossy old male.

Does it seem to you like thoughtless barbarity on my part to kill crows in this fashion? Perhaps it is barbarous; I do not quite know; but it certainly is not thoughtless. One cannot blame the crows for their taste in eggs or nestlings; but one must note that they destroy an enormous number of insectivorous birds, and that the harm they do in this respect outweighs their usefulness in destroying field-mice and beetles. I write this with regret; for I admire the crow, and consider him as, of all birds, the most intelligent and the most considerate of his own kind. I know that it is a moot question whether the crow does more harm or good, and that some naturalists have settled it in his favor; but I have too often caught him plundering nests in the springtime to be much impressed by his alleged usefulness at other seasons. I think that he may have been once useful in preserving the so-called balance of nature; but that balance is now dangerously unequal. The crow has flourished even in well-settled regions, thanks to his superior wit, while other useful birds have fearfully diminished, and this at a time when our orchards and gardens call more and more insistently for their help. Because of his disproportionate numbers the crow now appears to me, like our destructive and useless cats, as a positive menace in a country where he once occupied a modest or inconspicuous place—such a place as he still occupies in the wilderness, where I meet him but rarely, and where I am glad to leave him in peace, since he does not seriously interfere with his more beautiful or more useful neighbors. But we are wandering from the dim trail of animal communication, which we set out to follow.

The inarticulate but variously accented cries of which we have spoken constitute the only animal language to which our naturalists have thus far paid any attention; and doubtless some of them would object to the use of the word “language” in such a connection. In all matters of real natural history, however (real, that is, in the sense of dealing at first hand with individual birds or beasts), I am much more inclined to listen to old Tomah, who says, when I ask him whether animals can talk: “Talk? Course he kin talk! Eve’ting talk in hees own way. Hear me now make-um dat young owl talk.” And, stepping outside the circle of camp-fire light, Tomah utters a hoot, which is answered at a distance every time he tries it. After parleying with the stranger in this tentative fashion, Tomah sends forth a different call; and immediately, as if in ready acceptance of an invitation, a barred owl glides like a gray shadow into a tree over our heads. I have heard that same old Indian use horned-owl talk, wolf and beaver and woodpecker talk, and several other dialects of the wood folk, in the same fascinating and convincing way.

One must judge, therefore, that most cries of the day or night have their meaning, if only one knows how to hear them; yet they constitute but a part, and probably a very small part, of the animal’s habitual communication with his fellows. The bulk of it appears to be of that silent kind which passed between Don and Nip, and which, I have reason to believe, is the common language of the whole animal kingdom.

To prove such a matter is plainly impossible. Even to investigate it frankly is to enter a shadowy realm between the conscious and subconscious states, where no process can be precisely followed, and where the liability to error is always present. Let us therefore begin on familiar ground by examining certain phenomena which we cannot explain, to be sure, but which have been observed frequently enough to give us confidence that we are dealing with realities. I refer especially to that curious warning or “feeling” of impending danger, which is supposed (erroneously, I think) to depend upon the so-called sixth sense of animals and men.

III

CHUMFO, THE SUPER-SENSE

For the word chumfo I am indebted to a tribe of savages living near Lake Mweru, in Africa, and am grateful to them not only for naming a thing which has no name in any civilized language, but also for an explanation of its function in the animal economy. We shall come to the definition of the word presently, after we have some clear notion of the thing for which the word stands. As Thomas à Kempis says, if I remember correctly, “It is better to feel compassion than to know how to define it.”

By way of approach to our subject, let it be understood that chumfo refers in a general way to the animal’s extraordinary powers of sense perception, which I would call his “sensibility” had not our novelists bedeviled that good word by making it the symbol of a false or artificial emotionalism. Every wild creature is finely “sensible” in the true meaning of the word, his sensitiveness being due to the fact that there is nothing dead or even asleep in nature; the natural animal or the natural man is from head to foot wholly alive and awake. And this because every atom of him, or every cell, as a biologist might insist, is of itself sentient and has the faculty of perception. Not till you understand that first principle of chumfo will your natural history be more than a dry husk, a thing of books or museums or stuffed skins or Latin names, from which all living interest has departed.

I am sometimes asked, “What is the most interesting thing you find in the woods?” the question calling, no doubt, for the name of some bird or beast or animal habit that may challenge our ignorance or stir our wonder. The answer is, that whether you search the wood or the city or the universe, the only interesting thing you will ever find anywhere is the thrill and mystery of awakening life. That the animal is alive, and alive in a way you ought to be but are not, is the last and most fascinating discovery you are likely to make in nature’s kingdom. After years of intimate observation, I can hardly meet a wild bird or beast even now without renewed wonder at his aliveness, his instant response to every delicate impression, as if each moment brought a new message from earth or heaven and he must not miss it or the consequent enjoyment of his own sensations. The very sleep of an animal, when he seems ever on the thin edge of waking, when he is still so in touch with his changing world that the slightest strange sound or smell or vibration brings him to his feet with every sense alert and every muscle ready,—all this is an occasion of marvel to dull men, who must be called twice to breakfast, or who meet the violent clamor of an alarm-clock with the drowsy refrain:

Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, A little more folding of the hands to sleep!

You will better understand what I mean by the animal’s aliveness, his uncloying pleasure in the sensation of living, if you can forget any tragical theories or prejudices of animal life which you have chanced to read, and then frankly observe the first untrammeled creature you meet in the outdoor world. Here at your back door, for example, is a flock of birds that come trooping from the snowy woods to your winter feast of crumbs. See how they dart hither and yon between mouthfuls, as if living creatures could not be still or content with any one thing, even a good thing, in a world of endless variety. Look again, more closely, and see how they merely taste of the abundance on your table, and straightway leave it for a morsel that the wind blows from under their beaks, and that they are bound to have if it takes all winter. Every other minute they flit to a branch above the table, look about alertly, measure the world once more, make sure of the dog that he is asleep, and of the sky that it holds no hawk; then they wipe their bills carefully, using a twig for a napkin, and down to the table they go to begin all over again. So every bite is for them a feast renewed, a feast with all the spices of the new, the fresh, the unexpected and the adventurous in it.

Or again, when you enter the wilderness remote from men, here is a deer slipping shadow-like through the shadowy twilight, daintily tasting twenty varieties of food in as many minutes, and keeping tabs on every living or moving or growing thing while she eats; or a fox, which seems to float along like thistle-down in the wind, halting, listening, testing the air-smells as one would appreciate a varied landscape, playing Columbus to every nook or brush-pile and finding in it something that no explorer ever found before. Such is the natural way of a fox, which makes a devious trail because so many different odors attract him here or there.

In fine, to watch any free wild creature is to understand the singing lines from “Saul”:

How good is man’s life, the mere living, how fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!

It is to understand also the spirit of Browning, who is hardly a world poet, to be sure, but who has the distinction of being the only famous poet who is always alive and awake. Homer nods; Dante despairs and mourns; Shakespeare has a long period of gloom when he can write only terrible tragedies of human failure; other great poets have their weary days or melancholy hours, but Browning sings ever a song of abounding life. Even his last, the Epilogue to “Asolando,” is not a swan-song, like Tennyson’s; it is rather a bugle-call, and it sounds not the “taps” of earth, but the “reveille” of immortality. But we are wandering from our woodsy trail.

Those who make an ornithology of mere feathers, or who imagine they know an animal because they know what the scientists have said about him, see in this instant responsiveness of the wild creature only a manifestation of fear, and almost every book of birds or beasts repeats the story of terror and tragedy. Yet every writer of such books probably owns a dog that displays in less degree (because he is less alive) every single symptom of the wild creature, including his alleged fears; and the dog, far from leading a tragic or terror-governed life, is hilariously disposed to make an adventure or a picnic of every new excursion afield. Moreover, if one of these portrayers of animal fears or tragedies has ever had an adventure of his own; if he has penetrated a wild region on tiptoe, or run the white rapids in a canoe, or heard the wind sing in his ears on a breakneck gallop across country, or trailed a bear to his covert, or hunted bandits in the open, or followed the bugles when they blew for war,—then he must know well that these unforgetable moments, when a man’s senses all awaken and his nerves tingle and he treads the earth like a buck in spring, are the only times in a man’s dull life when he feels himself wholly alive and a man. That a naturalist should forget this when he sees an alert wild animal, and deny his dog and his own experience of life by confounding alertness with fear, is probably due not so much to his own blindness as to his borrowed notions, such as the “struggle for existence,” the “reign of terror,” and other hallucinations which have been packed into his head in the name of science or natural history.

Just to take a walk with your dog may be a revelation to you, as most simple matters are when you dare to view them for yourself without prejudice. In fact, what is any revelation or discovery but seeing things as they are? This daily walk over familiar ground, which bores you because you must take it for exercise, leaving out of it the fun which is the essential element of any exercise, is to your dog another joyous and expectant exploration of the Indes. He explored the same ground yesterday, to be sure, but all sorts of revolutions and migrations take place overnight; and if he be a real dog, not a spoiled pet, he will uncover more surprises on the familiar road than you uncover in the morning newspaper. Follow him sympathetically as he finds endlessly interesting things where you find little but boredom, and you may learn that there are three marked differences between you and a normal animal: first, that he keeps the spirit of play, which you have well-nigh lost; second, that he lives in his sensations and is happy, while you dwell mostly in your thoughts and postpone happiness for the future; and third, that he is alive now, every moment, and you used to be alive the day before yesterday.

In all this you are simply typical of our unnatural civilization, which begins to enumerate or describe us as so many thousand “souls,” doubtless because every single body of us is moribund or asleep. Consider our noses, for example. They are the seat of a wonderful faculty, more dependable than sight or hearing; they are capable of giving us sensations more varied than those of color, and almost as enjoyable as those of harmony; they can be easily trained so as to recognize every tree and plant and growing thing by its delicate fragrance; they would add greatly to our safety and convenience, as well as to our enjoyment, did we use them as nature intended; yet so thoroughly neglected are they, as a rule, that it takes a burning rag or a jet of escaping coal-gas to rouse them to the immense and varied world of odors in which an animal lives continually.

At present I am the alleged owner of a young setter, Rab, who has reached the stage of development when he thinks he owns me. For after you have properly trained a dog, there comes a brief time when he discovers with joy that he can make you do things for him; and then he is like a child who discovers that he can make you talk (that is, show some sign of life) by asking you questions. And this young setter has, I am convinced, a very low opinion of human aliveness, since there is never a day when he does not give me a hint that he considers me a poor cripple—excepting, perhaps, the rare days when I take him woodcock-hunting, when he mildly approves of me.

One night, after waiting a long time at my feet till I should become animate, Rab followed me hopefully into the dark kitchen, where he had never before been allowed to go. I heard his steps behind me only as far as the door, and thought he was afraid to enter; but when I turned on the light, there he stood in the doorway, “frozen” into a beautiful point, his head upturned to a bell and battery on the wall. Presently a mouse hopped from the battery into a waste-basket on the floor, and Rab pointed the thing stanchly, his whole body quivering with delight when a faint odor stole to his nostrils or a rustle of paper to his ears. From the basket the mouse streaked to the coal-hod, and Rab pointed that, too, and then a crack under a door, and a yawning closet drawer. “My bones!” he said, trying to claw the drawer open. “This is a good place; something is alive here!” Then he came over and sat in front of me, looking up in my face, his head twisted sideways, to demand why I had so long kept him out of the only part of the house that was not wholly dormant.

Though the adventure was twelve months ago, “age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety,” for every night Rab comes to me where I am reading, nudges my elbow, paws my book, sits in front of me to yawn hugely, gives me no peace, in short, till I follow him to the kitchen for another go at the waste-basket, the coal-hod and all the closet drawers. It is of no avail to leave the doors open; he will not go unless I join him in the enjoyment of something that lives. A short time since we flushed another mouse in the cellar, whither he followed me to look after the furnace; and now he pesters me by day as well as by night whenever he finds me, as he thinks, wrapped in unmanly lethargy.

With all his vivacity this young setter, who seems so alert among mere men, becomes a dull creature the moment you compare him with his wild kindred. He cannot begin to interpret the world through his senses as they instantly interpret it, and he would starve to death where they live on the fat of the land. Once on a forest trail I came upon him pointing stanchly at the edge of a little opening that lumbermen had made for yarding logs. Just across the opening, where a jumper road joined the yard, stood a noble buck, and he was “pointing,” too, for he was face to face with such a creature as he had never before seen. Both animals were like statues, so motionless did they stand; but there was this difference, that the dog rested solidly on earth and might have been carved from marble, while the buck seemed to rest on air and to be compounded of some ethereal essence. His eyes fairly radiated light and color. The velvet on his antlers seemed to grow as I looked upon it, like the velvet moss in which the fairies are said to rest. Every hair of him from nose to tail tip was gloriously alive. A moment only he stood, but long enough for me to carry a picture of him forever afterward; then he bounded up the old road, and Rab came running over to ask me what new thing he had discovered.

This marvelous alertness of the natural animal is commonly attributed to the fact that his physical senses are more acute than ours; but that is true only of some particular sense of a certain creature. The wolf’s nose, the deer’s ear, the vulture’s eye,—these are probably keener than any similar human organ; but, on the other hand, a man’s eye is very much keener for details than the eye of wolf or deer; his senses of touch and taste are finer than anything to be found among the lower orders, and the average of his five senses is probably the highest upon earth. Yet the animal is more responsive to impressions of the external world, and this is due, I think, to the fact that he lives more in his sensations; that he is not cumbered, as we are, by inner phenomena; that he is free from pain, care, fear, regret, anxiety and other mental complexities; that he is accustomed to hear (that is, to receive vibrations) through his feet or his skin quite as much as through his ears; and that his whole body, relaxed and at ease, often becomes a first-class receiving instrument for what we call sense impressions.

As an example of this last, note the wild creature’s response to every change of air pressure, a response so immediate and certain that one might accurately forestall the barometer by observing the action of birds, or even of chickens, which anticipate a storm long before your face has noted the moist wind or your eye the rain-cloud. In the winter woods I have often seen a deer feeding greedily (quite at variance with his usual dainty tasting) at an hour long before or long after his accustomed time, and as I traveled wider I would find other deer doing the same thing. I used to wonder at this, till I noticed that such unusual action was always followed by a storm—not an ordinary brief snowfall, to which deer pay little attention beyond seeking shelter while it lasts, but a severe storm or blizzard, during which most animals lie quiet for a whole day, or even two or three days, without stirring abroad for food.

Whether an element of forethought enters into this act of “stuffing” themselves before a storm, or whether it is wholly instinctive, like the bear’s change of diet before he dens for his winter sleep, is a question which does not concern us, since nobody can answer it. In either case the deer have felt, as surely as our most sensitive instruments, not only the decreasing pressure of the air but also its increasing moisture.