Part 9

That unanswered question does not immediately concern us, for in speaking of mind we commonly mean the conscious or reasoning human article, and we are dealing here with the subconscious mind, which seems to work after the same fashion whether it appears on two legs or four. A dog does not know why he becomes excited in a commotion that does not personally concern him, or why he feels impelled to hasten to an outcry from an unknown source, or why he looks up, contrary to all his habits, when everybody else is looking up; and neither does a man know why he does just such things. Man and brute both act in obedience to something deeper, more primal and more dependable than reason, and in this subconscious field they are akin; otherwise it would be impossible for a man ever to train or to understand a brute, and our companionable dogs would be as distant as the seraphim.

When, therefore, the same unreasoning actions that are attributed to a mysterious collective impulse among birds or animals are found among men to depend on a succession of individual impulses, it is good psychology as well as good natural history to dismiss the whole herd instinct as another thoughtless myth. The familiar social and imitative instincts, the contagion of excitement, the outward projection of emotional impulses, the sensitive bodily nature of an animal which enables him to respond to such impulses even when they are unaccompanied by a voice or cry,—these are comparatively simple and “sensible” matters which explain all the phenomena of flock or herd life more naturally and more reasonably.

WHERE SILENCE IS ELOQUENT

Looking back a moment on our trail of animal “talk” before following it onward, we see, first, that birds and beasts have certain audible cries which convey a more or less definite meaning of food or danger or assembly; and second, that they apparently have also some “telepathic” faculty of sending emotional impulses to others of their kind at a distance. The last has not been proved, to be sure; we have seen little more than enough to establish it as a working hypothesis; but whether we study science or history or an individual bird or beast, it is better to follow some integrating method or principle than to blunder around in a chaos of unrelated details. And the hypothesis of silent communication certainly “works,” since it helps greatly to clarify certain observed phenomena of animal life that are otherwise darkly mysterious.

When the same dimly defined telepathic power appears in a man or woman—so rarely that we are filled with wonder, as in the shadow of a great mystery or a great discovery—it is not a new but a very old matter, I think, being merely a survival or reappearance of a faculty that may have once been in common use among gregarious creatures. All men seem to have some hint or suggestion of telepathy in them, as shown by their ability to “speak with their eyes” or to influence their children by a look; and the few who have enough of it to be conspicuous receive it, undoubtedly, by some law or freak of heredity, such as enables one man in a million to wag his ears, or one in a thousand to follow a subconscious sense of direction so confidently that, after wandering about the big woods all day, he turns at nightfall and heads straight for his camp like a homing pigeon. The rest of us, meanwhile, by employing speech exclusively to express thought or emotion, and by habitually depending on five senses for all our impressions of the external world, have not only neglected but even lost all memory of the gift that once was ours. As an inevitable consequence Nature has taken her gift away, as she atrophies a muscle that is no longer used, or devitalizes the nerve of sight in creatures, such as the fishes of Mammoth Cave, that have lived long time in darkness.

In previous chapters we have noted, as rare examples of telepathy in human society, that a mother may at times know when an absent son or husband is in danger, or that an African savage often knows when a stranger is approaching his village hid in the jungle; but there is another manifestation of the same faculty which is much more common, and which we have thus far overlooked, leaving it as an odd and totally unrelated thing without explanation. I refer to the man, known in almost every village, who has some special gift for training or managing animals, who seems to know instinctively what goes on in a brute’s head, and who can send his own will or impulse into the lower mind. I would explain that unrelated man, naturally, by the simple fact or assumption that he has inherited more than usual of the animals’ gift of silent communication.

I knew one such man, a harmless, half-witted creature, who loved to roam the woods alone by day or night, and whom the wild birds and beasts met with hardly a trace of the fear or suspicion they manifest in presence of other human beings. He was always friendly, peaceable, childlike, and unconsciously or subconsciously, I think, he could tame or influence these wild spirits by letting them feel his own.

So also could an old negro, an ex-slave, with whom I used to go fox-hunting in my student days. He could train a dog or a colt in a tenth part of the time required by ordinary men, and he used no whip or petting or feeding, or any other device commonly employed by professional trainers. At times, indeed, his animals acted as if trained from the moment he touched or spoke to them. He had a mongrel lot of dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, cows and horses; but they were a veritable happy family (on a cold night his cats would sleep with a setting hen, if they could find one, or otherwise with the foxhounds), and to see them all running to meet “Uncle” when he came home, or following at his heels or doing what he told them, was to wonder what strange animal language he was master of.

At daybreak one winter morning I entered the old negro’s kitchen very quietly, and had a fire going and coffee sending forth its aroma before I heard him creaking down the stairs. I had traveled “across lots,” making no sound in the new-fallen snow, and, as I approached the house, had purposely kept its dark bulk between me and the dogs, which were asleep in their kennel some distance away. For a time all was quiet as only a winter dawn can be; but as we sat down to breakfast one of the hounds with a big bass voice suddenly broke out in an earth-shaking jubilation. The other hounds quickly caught up the clamor, yelling as if they had just jumped a fox, while two dogs of another breed were strangely silent; and then ’Poleon added his bit to the tumult by stamping, whinnying and finally kicking lustily on the boards of his stall. ’Poleon, by the way, was an old white horse that Uncle used to ride (he was “gittin’ too rheumaticky,” he said, to hunt with me afoot), and this sober beast was fair crazy to join the chase whenever a fox was afoot.

The negro paid no attention to the noise; but as it went on increasing, and ’Poleon whinnyed more wildly, and the big-voiced hound kept up a continuous bellow that might have roused the seven sleepers, the unseemly racket got on my nerves, so early in the day.

“What the mischief is the matter with Jum this morning?” I demanded.

“Matter? Mischief?” echoed Uncle, as if surprised I did not understand such plain animal talk. “Why, ol’ Jum’s a-gwine fox-huntin’ dis mawny. He reckons he knows what we-all’s up to: and now de yother dawgs an’ ’Poleon dey reckons dey knows it, too. Jum’s tole um. Dat’s all de matter an’ de mischief.”

“But how in the world should he know? You never go hunting now unless I tempt you, and none of the dogs saw or heard me come in,” I objected.

Uncle chuckled at that, chuckled a long time, as if it were a good joke. “Trust ol’ Jum ter know when we-all’s gwine fox-huntin’,” he said. “You jes’ trust him. I specks he kinder pick de idee outer de air soon’s we thunk it, same’s he pick a fox scent. ’Tain’t no use tryin’ ter lie ter Jum, ’cause you can’t fool ’im nohow. No, sir, when dat ol’ dawg’s eroun’, you don’ wanter think erbout nothin’ you don’ want ’im ter know.”

I had often marveled at Uncle, but now suddenly I thought I understood him. In his unconscious confession that he thought or felt with his animals, rather than spoke English to them, was probably the whole secret of his wonderful gift of training.

The same “secret” is shared by the few men who have the gift of managing horses, and who can do more by a word or even a look than another man by bit and harness. I have heard the gift described by a professional horse-trainer as the “power of the human eye”; but that is nonsense set to melodrama. An eye is a bit of jelly, and means nothing without a will or communicating impulse behind it. When the spirit of a horse is once broken (and most of them are broken rather than trained by our methods) almost anybody can manage him, the blind as well as the seeing; but when a horse keeps the spirit of his wild ancestors, their timidity, their flightiness, their hair-trigger tendency to shy or to bolt, then I envy the man who can cross the gulf of ages and put something of his own steadiness into the nervous brute.

This steadying process seems to be wholly a matter of spirit, so far as I have observed it, and whatever passes from man to brute passes directly, without need of audible speech. For example, a friend of mine, a very quiet man of few words, once brought home a magnificent “blooded” horse which he had bought for a song because “nobody could handle him.” The horse was not vicious in any way, but seemed to have a crazy impulse to run himself to death—an impulse so strong that even now, when he is past twenty years old, he cannot be turned loose for a moment in a farm pasture. He had never been driven save with a powerful curb; even so, he would drag the carriage along by the reins, and an hour of such driving left a strong man’s arms half paralyzed by the strain. Yet at the first trial his new owner put a soft rubber bit in his mouth, flipped the lines loosely across his back, and controlled him by a word.

Some years later I was riding behind that same horse, jogging quietly along a country road, when my friend, with an odd twinkle in his eye, said, “Take the reins a moment while I get out this robe.” I took them, and what followed seemed like magic or bedevilment. I had noticed that the reins were loose, just “feeling” the horse’s mouth; I shifted them to my hand very quietly, without stirring a hair, and blinders on the bridle prevented the horse from seeing the transfer. Yet hardly had I touched them when something from my hand (or from my soul, for aught I know) flowed along the leather and filled the brute with fire. He flung up his head, as if I had driven spurs into him, and was away like a shot.

Again, I was crossing the public square of Nantucket one morning when I saw a crowd of excited men and boys eddying at a safe distance around a horse—an ugly, biting brute that had once almost torn the side of my face off when I passed too close to him, minding my own affairs. Now he was having one of his regular tantrums, squealing, kicking, plunging or backing, while his driver, who had leaped to the ground, alternately lashed and cursed him. I heard an angry voice near me utter the single word “Fools!” and saw a stranger brush some men aside and stand directly in front of the horse, which grew quiet on the instant. The stranger went nearer, pulled the horse’s head down and laid his face against it; and there they stood, man and brute, like carved statues. It was as if one were whispering a secret, and the other listening. Then the man said, “Come along, boy,” and walked down the square, the horse following at his heels like a trained dog.

Watching the scene, my first thought was that the horse recognized a former and kinder master; but the man assured me, when I followed him up, that he had never spoken to the animal till that moment, and that he could do the same with any refractory horse he had ever met. “Try it with that one,” I said promptly, pointing to a nervous horse that, feeling the excitement of the recent affair, was jerking and frothing at his hitch-rope. The man smiled his acceptance of the challenge, stepped in front of the horse, and looked at him steadily. What he thought or willed, what feeling or impulse he sent out, I know not; but certainly some silent communication passed, which the horse recognized by forward-pointing ears and a low whinny of pleasure. Then the man unsnapped the rope from the bridle ring, turned away without a word, and the horse followed him across the square and back again to the hitching-post.

When I asked how the thing was done, the man answered with entire frankness that he did not know. It “just came natural” to him, he said, to understand horses, and he had always been able to make them do almost anything he wanted. But he had no remarkable power over other animals, so far as I could learn, and was uncommonly shy of dogs, even of little dogs, regarding them all alike as worthless or dangerous brutes.

Some of my readers may recall, in this connection, the shabby-genteel old man who used to amuse visitors in the public gardens of Paris by playing with the sparrows, some twenty-odd years ago. So long as he went his way quietly the birds paid no more attention to him than to any other stroller; but the moment he began to chirp some wild and joyous excitement spread through the trees. From all sides the sparrows rushed to him, alighting on his hat or shoulders, clamoring loudly for the food which they seemed to know was in his pockets, but which he would not at first give them. When he had a crowd of men and women watching him (for he was vain of his gift, and made a small living by passing his hat after an entertainment) he would single out a cock-sparrow from the flock and cry, “What! you here again, Bismarck, you scoundrel?” Then he would abuse the cock-sparrow, calling him a barbarian, a Prussian, a mannerless intruder who had no business among honorable French sparrows; and finally, pretending to grow violently angry, he would chase Bismarck from bench to bench and throw his hat at him. And Bismarck would respond by dodging the hat, chirping blithely the while, as if it were a good joke, and would fly back to peck at the crust of bread which the old man held between his lips or left sticking out of his pocket.

One might have understood this as a mere training trick if Bismarck were always the same; but he was any cock-sparrow that the man chanced to pick out of a flock. After playing with the birds till they wearied of it, he would feed them, pass the hat, and stroll away to repeat his performance with another flock in another part of the gardens. That these wary and suspicious birds, far more distrustful of man than the sparrows of the wilderness, understood his mental attitude rather than his word or action; that he could make them feel his kindliness, his camaraderie, his call to come and play, even while he pretended to chase them,—this was the impression of at least one visitor who watched him again and again at his original entertainment.

Some kind of communication must have passed silently between the actor and one of his audience; for presently, though I never spoke to the old man, but only watched him keenly, he picked me out for personal attention. Whereupon I cultivated his acquaintance, invited him to dine and fed him like a duke, and thought I had gained his confidence by taking him to see a big wolf of mine that might well have puzzled any student of birds or beasts. The wolf was one of a wild pack that had recently arrived at the zoo from Siberia, where they had been caught in a pit and shipped away with all their savagery in them. Through some freak of nature this one wolf had attached himself to me, like a lost dog; by some marvelously subtle perception he would recognize my coming at a distance, even in a holiday crowd, and would thrust his grim muzzle against the bars of his cage to howl or roar till I came and stretched out a hand to him, though he was as wild and “slinky” as the rest of the pack to everybody else, even to the keeper who fed him. That interested the sparrow-tamer, of course; but he was silent or too garrulous whenever I approached the thing I wanted to know. He would not tell me how he won the birds, but made a mystery and hocus-pocus of the natural gift by which he earned a precarious living.

The same “mystery” cropped out later, amid very different scenes, in the interior of Newfoundland. Coming down beside a salmon river one day, my Indian, a remarkable man with an almost uncanny power of calling wild creatures of every kind, pointed to a hole high on the side of a stub, and said, “Go, knock-um dere; see if woodpecker at home.” I went and knocked softly, but nothing happened. “Knock-um again, knock-um little louder,” said Matty. I knocked again, more lustily, and again nothing happened. Then the Indian came and rapped the tree with his knuckles, while I stood aside; and instantly a woodpecker that was brooding her eggs stuck her head out of the hole and looked down at her visitor inquisitively.

The next day at the same place we repeated the same performance precisely, after our morning fishing; and again the interesting thing to me was, not the bird’s instant appearance at the Indian’s summons, but the curiously intent way in which she turned her head to look down at him. When he showed his craft again and again, at the doors of other woodpeckers that were not interested in my knocking, I demanded, “Now, Matty, tell me how you do it.”

But Matty only laughed. When we are alone in the woods he has a fine sense of humor, though grim enough at other times. “Oh, woodpecker know me; he look down at me,” he said; and that was all I could ever get out of him.

So, though I have seen the gift in operation several times, I have not yet found the man who had it and who could or would give me any explanation. There is no doubt in my own mind, however, that the negro, the Frenchman, and the Indian, and all others who exercise any unusual influence over animals, do so by reason of their subconscious power to “talk” or to convey impulses without words, as gregarious wild creatures commonly talk among themselves. At least, I can understand much of what I see among birds and brutes by assuming that they talk in this fashion.