Part 7

In this case it is possible to limit the time of the wounded wolf’s seclusion, because the limping track that led from the den was but a few hours old when I found it, and the only track leading into the den was half obliterated by snow which had fallen two nights previously. How many devious miles the pack had traveled in the interim would be hard to estimate. I crossed their hunting or roaming trails at widely separate points, and once I surprised them in their day-bed; but I never found the limit of their great range. A few days later that same limping wolf left another den of his, under a windfall, and headed not for the buck, which was now frozen stiff, but for another deer which the same pack had killed in a different region, some eight or ten straight miles away, and perhaps twice that distance as wolves commonly travel.

If you contend that this wounded wolf must have known where the meat was by the howling of the pack when they killed, I grant that may be true in one case, but certainly not in the other. For by great good luck I was near the pack, following a fresh trail in the gray, breathless dawn, when the wolves killed the second deer; and there was not a sound for mortal ears to hear, not a howl or a trail cry or even a growl of any kind. They followed, killed and ate in silence, as wolves commonly do, their howling being a thing apart from their hunting. The wounded wolf was then far away, with miles of densely wooded hills and valleys between him and his pack.

Do you ask, “How was it possible to know all this?” From the story the snow told. At daybreak I had found the trail of a hunting pack, and was following it stealthily, with many a cautious détour and look ahead, for they are unbelievably shy brutes; and so it happened that I came upon the carcass of the deer only a few minutes after the wolves had fed and roamed lazily off toward their day-bed. I followed them too eagerly, and alarmed them before I could pick the big one I wanted; whereupon they took to rough country, traveling a pace that left me hopelessly far behind. When I returned to the deer, to read how the wolves had surprised and killed their game, I noticed the fresh trail of a solitary wolf coming in at right angles to the trail of the hunting pack. It was the limper again, who had just eaten what he wanted and trailed off by himself. I followed and soon jumped him, and took after him on the lope, thinking I could run him down or at least come near enough for a revolver-shot; but that was a foolish notion. Even on three legs he whisked through the thick timber so much easier than I could run on snow-shoes that I never got a second glimpse of him.

By that time I was bound to know, if possible, how the limper happened to find this second deer for his comfort; so I picked up his incoming trail and ran it clear back to his den under the windfall, from which he had come as straight as if he knew exactly where he was heading. His trail was from eastward; what little air was stirring came from the south; so that it was impossible for his nose to guide him to the meat even had he been within smelling distance, as he certainly was not. The record in the snow was as plain as any other print, and from it one might reasonably conclude that either the wolves can send forth a silent food-call, with some added information, or else that a solitary wolf may be so in touch with his pack-mates that he knows not only where they are, but also, in a general way, what they are doing.

In comparison with timber-wolves the caribou is rather a witless brute; but he, too, has his “uncanny” moods, and one who patiently follows him, with deeper interest in his anima than in his antlered head, finds him frequently doing some odd or puzzling thing which may indicate a perception more subtle than that of his dull eyes or keen ears or almost perfect nose. Here is one example of Megaleep’s peculiar way:

I was trailing a herd of caribou one winter day on the barrens (treeless plains or bogs) of the Renous River in New Brunswick. For hours I had followed through alternate thick timber and open bog without alarming or even seeing my game. The animals were plainly on the move, perhaps changing their feeding-ground; and when Megaleep begins to wander no man can say where he will go, or where stop, or what he is likely to do next. Once, after trailing him eight or ten miles, twice jumping him, I met him head-on, coming briskly back in his own tracks, as if to see what was following him. From the trail I read that there were a dozen animals in the herd, and that one poor wounded brute lagged continually behind the others. He was going on three legs; his right forefoot, the bone above it shattered by some blundering hunter’s bullet, swung helplessly as he hobbled along, leaving its pathetic record in the snow.

On a wooded slope which fell away to a chain of barrens, halting to search the trail ahead, my eye caught a motion far across the open, and through the field-glass I saw my herd for the first time, resting unsuspiciously on the farther edge of the barren, a full mile or more away. From my feet the trail led down through a dense fringe of evergreen, and then straight out across the level plain. A few of the caribou were lying down; others moved lazily in or out of the forest that shut in the barren on that side; and as I watched them two animals, yearlings undoubtedly, put their heads together for a pushing match, like domestic calves at play.

Hardly had I begun to circle the barren, keeping near the edge of it but always out of sight in the evergreens, when I ran upon a solitary caribou trail, the trail of the cripple, who had evidently wearied and turned aside to rest, perhaps knowing that his herd was near the end of its journey. A little farther on I jumped him out of a fir thicket, and watched him a moment as he hobbled deeper into the woods, heading away to the west. The course surprised me a little, for his mates were northward; and at the thought I quickly found an opening in the cover and turned my glass upon the other caribou. Already they were in wild alarm. For a brief interval they ran about confusedly, or stood tense as they searched the plain and the surrounding woods for the source of danger; then they pushed their noses out and racked away at a marvelous pace, crossing the barren diagonally toward me and smashing into the woods a short distance ahead, following a course which must soon bring them and their wounded mate together. If I were dealing with people, I might say confidently that they were bent on finding out what the alarm was about; but as I have no means of knowing the caribou motive, I can only say that the two trails ran straight as a string through the timber to a meeting-point on the edge of another barren to the westward.

If you would reasonably explain the matter, remember that these startled animals were far away from me; that the cripple and myself were both hidden from their eyes, and that I was moving upwind and silently. It was impossible that they should hear or see or smell me; yet they were on their toes a moment after the cripple started up, as if he had rung a bell for them. It was not the first time I had witnessed a herd of animals break away when, as I suspected, they had received some silent, incomprehensible warning, nor was it the last; but it was the only time when I could trace the whole process without break or question from beginning to end. And when, to test the matter to the bottom, I ran the trail of the herd back to where they had been resting, there was no track of man or beast in the surrounding woods to account for their flight.

One may explain this as a mere coincidence, which is not an explanation; or call it another example of the fact that wild animals are “queer,” which is not a fact; but in my own mind every action of the caribou and all the circumstances point to a different conclusion—namely, that the fear or warning or impulse of one animal was instantly transferred to others at a distance. I think, also, that the process was not wholly unconscious or subconscious, but that one animal sent forth his warning and the others acted upon it more or less intelligently. This last is a mere assumption, however, which cannot be proved till we learn to live in an animal’s skin.

It is true that the event often befalls otherwise, since you may jump one animal without alarming others of the same herd; and it is possible that the degree or quality of the alarm has something to do with its carrying power, as we feel the intense emotion of a friend more quickly than his ordinary moods. In this case the solitary caribou was tremendously startled; for I was very near, and the first intimation he had of me, or I of him, was when my snow-shoe caught on a snag and I pitched over a log almost on top of him. Yet the difficulty of drawing a conclusion from any single instance appears in this: that I have more than once stalked, killed and dressed an animal without disturbing others of his kind near at hand (it may be that no alarm was sent out, for the animal was shot before he knew the danger, and in the deep woods animals pay little attention to the sound of a rifle); and again, when I have been trying to approach a herd from leeward, I have seen them move away hurriedly, silently, suspiciously, in obedience to some warning which seemed to spread through the woods like a contagion.

The latter experience is common enough among hunters of big game, who are often at a loss to explain the sudden flight of animals that a moment ago, under precisely the same outward influences, were feeding or resting without suspicion. Thus, you may be stalking a big herd of elk, or wapiti, which are spread out loosely over half a mountainside. You are keen for the master bull with the noble antlers; nothing else interests you, more’s the pity; but you soon learn that the cunning old brute is hidden somewhere in the midst of the herd, depending on the screen of cow-elk to warn him of danger to his precious skin. Waiting impatiently till this vanguard has moved aside, you attempt to worm your way nearer to the hidden bull. You are succeeding beautifully, you think, when a single cow that you overlooked begins to act uneasily. She has not seen or heard you, certainly, and the wind is still in your favor; but there she stands, like an image of suspicion, head up, looking, listening, testing the air, till she makes up her mind she would as lief be somewhere else, when without cry or grunt or warning of any kind that ears can hear she turns and glides rapidly away.

Now if you value animal lore above stuffed skins, or experience above the babble of hunting naturalists, forget the big bull and his greed-stirring antlers; scramble quickly to the highest outlook at hand, and use your eyes. No alarm has been sounded; the vast silence is unbroken; yet for some mysterious reason the whole herd is suddenly on the move. To your right, to your left, near at hand or far away, bushes quiver or jump; alert brown forms appear or vanish like shadows, all silent and all heading in the direction taken by the first sentinel. One moment there are scores of elk in sight, feeding or resting quietly; the next they are gone and the great hillside is lifeless. The thrill of that silent, moving drama has more wisdom in it, yes, and more pleasure, than the crash of your barbarous rifle or the convulsive kicking of a stricken beast that knows not why you should kill him.

Such is the experience, known to almost every elk-hunter who has learned that life is more interesting than death; and I know nothing of deer nature to explain it save this—that the whole herd has suddenly felt and understood the silent impulse to go, and has obeyed it without a question, as the young wolf or fox cub obeys the silent return call of his watchful mother.

Such impulses seem to be more common and more dependable among the whales, which have rudimentary or imperfect sense-organs, but which are nevertheless delicately sensitive to external impressions, to the approach of unseen danger, to the movements of the tiny creatures on which they feed, to changes of wind or tide and to a falling barometer, as if nature had given them a first-class feeling apparatus of some kind to make up for their poor eyes and ears. Repeatedly have I been struck by this extraordinary sensitiveness when watching the monstrous creatures feeding with the tide in one of the great bays of the Newfoundland or the Labrador coast. If I lowered a boat to approach one of them, he would disappear silently before I could ever get near enough to see clearly what he was doing. That seemed odd to me; but presently I began to notice a more puzzling thing: at the instant my whale took alarm every other whale of the same species seemed to be moved by the same impulse, sounding when the first sounded, or else turning with him to head for the open sea.

A score of times I tried the experiment, and commonly, but not invariably, with the same result. I would sight a few leviathans playing or feeding, shooting up from the deep, breaching half their length out of water to fall back with a tremendous souse; and through my glasses I would pick up others here or there in the same bay. Selecting a certain whale, I would glide rapidly toward him, crouching low in the dory and sculling silently by means of an oar over the stern. By some odd channel of perception (not by sight, certainly, for I kept out of the narrow range of his eye, and a whale is not supposed to smell or hear) he would invariably get wind of me and go down; and then, jumping to my feet, I would see other whales in the distance catch the instant alarm, some upending as they plunged to the deeps, others whirling seaward and forging full speed ahead.

This observation of mine is not unique, as I supposed, for later I heard it echoed as a matter of course by the whalemen. Thus, when I talked with my friend, Captain Rule, about the ways of the great creatures he had followed in the old whaling-days, he said, “The queerest habit of a whale, or of any other critter I ever fell foul of, was this: when I got my boat close enough to a sperm-whale to put an iron into him, every other sperm-whale within ten miles would turn flukes, as if he had been harpooned, too.” But he added that he had not noticed the same contagion of alarm, not in the same striking or instantaneous way, when hunting the right or Greenland whale—perhaps because the latter is, as a rule, more solitary in its habits.

Wolves and caribou and whales are far from the observation of most folk; but the winter birds in your own yard may some time give you a hint, at least, of the same mysterious transference of an impulse over wide distances. When you scatter food for them during a cold snap or after a storm (it is better not to feed them regularly, I think, especially in mild weather when their proper food is not covered with snow) your bounty is at first neglected except by the house sparrows and starlings. Unlike our native birds, these imported foreigners are easily “pauperized,” seeking no food for themselves so long as you take care of them. They keep tabs on you, also, waiting patiently about the house, and soon learn what it means when you emerge from your back door on a snowy morning with a broom in one hand and a pan in the other. They are feeding greedily the moment your back is turned, and for a time they are the only birds at the table. When they have gorged themselves, for they have no manners, a few tree-sparrows and juncos flit in to eat daintily. Then suddenly the wilder birds appear—jays, chickadees, siskins, kinglets and, oh, welcome! a flock of bob-whites—coming from you know not where, in obedience to a summons which you have not heard. Some of these may have visited the yard in time past, and are returning to it now, hunger driven; but others you have never before met within the city limits, and a few have their accustomed dwelling in the pine woods, which are miles away. How did these hungry hermits suddenly learn that food was here?

The answer to that question is simple, and entirely “sensible” if you think only of birds that live or habitually glean in your neighborhood. Some of them saw you scatter the food, or else found it by searching, while others spied these lucky ones feeding and came quickly to join the feast. For birds that live wider afield there is also an explanation that your senses can approve, though it is probably wrong or only half right: from a distance they chanced to see wings speeding in the direction of your yard, and followed them expectantly because wings may be as eloquent as voices, the flight of a bird when he is heading for food being very different from the flight of the same bird when he is merely looking for food. But these most rare visitors, kinglets or pine-finches or grosbeaks or bob-whites, that never before entered your yard, and that would not be here now had you not thought to scatter food this morning,—at these you shake your head, calling it chance or Providence or mystery, according to your mood or disposition. To me, after observing the matter closely many times, the reasonable explanation of these rare visitors is that either wild birds know how to send forth a silent food-call or, more likely, that the excitement of feeding birds spreads powerfully outward, and is felt by other starving birds, alert and sensitive, at a distance beyond all possible range of sight or hearing. By no other hypothesis can I account for the fact that certain wild birds make their appearance in my yard at a moment when a number of other birds are eagerly feeding, and at no other time, though I watch for them from one year’s end to another.

Like every other explanation, whether of stars or starlings, this also leads to a greater mystery. The distance at which such a summoning call can be felt by others must be straitly limited, else would all the starving birds of a state be flocking to my yard on certain mornings; and the force by which the silent call is projected is as unknown as the rare mental ether which bears its waves or vibrations in all directions. Yet the problem need not greatly trouble us, since the answer, when it comes, will be as natural as breathing. If silent or telepathic communication exists in nature, and I think it surely does, the mystery before us is no greater than that which daily confronts the astronomer or the wireless operator. One measures the speed of light from Orion; the other projects his finger-touch across an ocean; but neither can tell or even guess the quality of the medium by which the light or the electric wave is carried to its destination.

THE SWARM SPIRIT

This is a chapter on the wing drill of birds, the swarming of bees, the panics and unseasonal migrations of larger or smaller beasts, and other curious phenomena in which the wild creatures of a flock or herd all act in unison, doing the same thing at the same time, as if governed by a single will rather than by individual motives. If it should turn out that the single will were expressed in a voice or cry, or even in a projected impulse, then are we again face to face with our problem of animal communication.

Of the fact of collective action there is no doubt, many naturalists having witnessed it; and there is also a strictly orthodox explanation. Thus, when you see a large flock of crows “drilling” in the spring or autumn, rising or falling or wheeling all together with marvelous precision, the ornithologists resolve the matter by saying that the many crows act as one crow because they follow a “collective impulse”; that is, because the same impulse to rise or fall or wheel seizes upon them all at precisely the same moment. And this they tell you quite simply, as if pointing out an obvious fact of natural history, when in reality they are showing you the rarest chimera that ever looked out of a vacuum.

Now the wonderful wing drill of certain birds has something in it which I cannot quite fathom or understand, not even with a miracle of collective impulse to help me; yet I have observed two characteristics of the ordered flight which may help to dispel the fog of assumption that now envelops it. The first is, that the drill is seen only when an uncommonly large number of birds of the same kind are gathered together, on a sunny day of early spring, as a rule, or in the perfection of autumn weather.

The starlings furnish us an excellent example of this peculiarity. For months at a stretch you see them about the house, first in pairs, next in family groups, then in larger companies, made up, I think, of birds raised in the same neighborhood and probably all more or less related; but though you watch these companies attentively from dawn to dusk, you shall never see them going through any unusual wing drill. Then comes an hour when flocks of starlings appear on all sides, heading to a common center. They gather in trees here or there about the edges of a great field or a strip of open beach, all jabbering like the blackbirds, which they imitate in their cries, flitting about in ceaseless commotion, but apparently keeping their family or tribal organization intact. Suddenly, as at a signal, they all launch themselves toward the center of the field; the hundred companies unite in one immense flock, and presto! the drill is on. The birds are no longer individuals, but a single-minded myriad, which wheels or veers with such precision that the ash of their ten-thousand wings when they turn is like the flicker of a signal-glass in the sun.

The same characteristic of uncommon numbers holds true of the crows and, indeed, of all other species of birds, save one, that ever practise the wing drill. Wild geese when in small companies, each a family unit, have a regular and beautiful flight in harrow-shaped formation; but I have never witnessed anything like a wing drill among them save on one occasion, when a thousand or more of the birds were gathered together for a few days of frolic before beginning the southern migration. Nor have I ever seen the drill among thrushes or warblers or sparrows or terns or seagulls, which sometimes gather in uncounted numbers, but which do not, apparently, have the same motive that leads crows or starlings to unite in a kind of rhythmic air-dance on periodic occasions.

A second marked characteristic of the wing drill is that it is invariably a manifestation of play or sport, and that the individual birds, though they keep the order of the play marvelously well, show in their looks and voices a suppressed emotional excitement. The drill is never seen when birds are migrating or feeding or fleeing from danger, though thousands of them may be together at such a time, but only when they assemble in a spirit of fun or exercise, and their bodily needs are satisfied, and the weather or the barometer is just right, and no enemy is near to trouble them. Whatever their motive or impulse, therefore, it is certainly not universal or even widespread among the birds, since most of them do not practise the drill; nor is it in the least like that mysterious impulse which suddenly sets all the squirrels of a region in migration, or calls the lemmings to hurry over plain and forest and mountain till they all drown themselves in the distant sea; for no sooner is the brief drill over than the companies scatter quietly, each to its own place, and the individual birds are again alert, inquisitive, well balanced, precisely as they were before.

The drill is seen at its best among the plover, I think; and, curiously enough, these are the only birds I know that practise it frequently, in small or large numbers and in all weathers. I have often watched a flock come sweeping in to my decoys, gurgling like a thousand fifes with bubbles in them; and never have I met these perfectly drilled birds, which stay with us but a few hours on their rapid journey from the far north to the far south, without renewed wonder at their wildness, their tameness, their incomprehensible ways. That you may visualize our problem before I venture an explanation, here is what you may see if you can forget your gun to observe nature with a deeper interest: