The Kindred of the Wild: a Book of Animal Life

Part 1

The Kindred of the Wild A Book of Animal Life

The Haunters of the Silences $2.00 Red Fox 2.00 The Watchers of the Trails 2.00 The Kindred of the Wild 2.00 Earth’s Enigmas 1.50 The Heart of the Ancient Wood 1.50 The Heart That Knows 1.50 The Prisoner of Mademoiselle 1.50 Barbara Ladd 1.50 The Forge in the Forest 1.50 A Sister to Evangeline 1.50 By the Marshes of Minas 1.50 Cameron of Lochiel (translated) 1.50 The Young Acadian .50 The Cruise of the Yacht “Dido” .50 The Haunter of the Pine Gloom .50 The Lord of the Air .50 The King of the Mamozekel .50 The Watchers of the Camp-fire .50 The Return to the Trails .50 The Little People of the Sycamore .50

L. C. Page & Company New England Building, Boston, Mass.

THE · KINDRED OF · THE · WILD

A · BOOK · OF · ANIMAL · LIFE · by CHARLES · G · D · ROBERTS Author of The Heart of the Ancient Wood The Forge in the Forest A Sister to Evangeline Poems etc—

With many illustrations by CHARLES LIVINGSTON BULL

L · C · PAGE · & · COMPANY PUBLISHERS . . . BOSTON

Copyright, 1900, 1901, 1902, by The Outing Publishing Company Copyright, 1901, 1902, by Frank Leslie Publishing House Copyright, 1896, by H. S. Stone & Company Copyright, 1902, by The Criterion Publication Company Copyright, 1902, by Charles Scribner’s Sons

Copyright, 1902, by L. C. Page & Company (INCORPORATED) All rights reserved

Published, May, 1902 Tenth Impression, July, 1907

Colonial Press Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co. Boston, Mass., U.S.A.

To My People

Contents of the Book

PAGE The Animal Story 15 The Moonlight Trails 33 The Lord of the Air 55 Wild Motherhood 93 The Homesickness of Kehonka 117 Savoury Meats 143 The Boy and Hushwing 159 A Treason of Nature 181 The Haunter of the Pine Gloom 199 The Watchers of the Camp-Fire 241 When Twilight Falls on the Stump Lots 273 The King of the Mamozekel 287 In Panoply of Spears 349

Included by permission of the University Society

A List of the Full-Page Drawings in the Book

PAGE The Animal Story 13 “The sniffings of the baffled bear or tiger” 17 “The inscrutable eyes of all the cats” 25 The Moonlight Trails 31 “All the players were motionless, with ears one way” 37 “It was beyond his reach” 49 The Lord of the Air 53 “He saw his wide-winged mate, too, leave the nest” 57 “Holding the fish firmly in the clutch of one great talon” 65 “Helplessly intertangled in the meshes” 79 “They flocked blackly about with vituperative malice” 83 Wild Motherhood 91 “Led his herd off northward” 95 “Stood for a moment to sniff the air” 99 “Around its rim circled the wary mother” 105 The Homesickness of Kehonka 115 “He would stand motionless, his compact, glossy head high in air” 125 “Fell with a great splash into the channel of the Tantramar” 133 “The discourager of quests darted stealthily forth” 137 Savoury Meats 141 “Two green eyes, close to the ground” 153 The Boy and Hushwing 157 “He struck the empty air” 165 “Settled himself, much disconcerted, on the back of an old haircloth sofa” 171 A Treason of Nature 179 “He gave answer at once to the summons” 187 “Started in mad haste down the shore” 189 “He dug his claws deeper into the bark, and bared his fangs thirstily” 191 The Haunter of the Pine Gloom 197 “The big beast little imagined himself observed” 203 “A great lynx landed on the log” 207 “Presently the lucifee arose and began creeping stealthily closer” 213 “A silent gray thunderbolt fell upon him” 217 “Yawned hugely, and stretched herself like a cat” 223 “Mounted the carcass with an air of lordship” 229 The Watchers of the Camp-Fire 239 “His big, spreading paws carried him over its surface as if he had been shod with snow-shoes” 243 “He pushed the ball again, very, very delicately” 249 “Stole noiselessly toward the shining lovely thing” 259 When Twilight Falls on the Stump Lots 271 “She struggled straight toward the den that held her young” 281 The King of the Mamozekel 285 “The calf stood close by, watching with interest” 293 “The mother mallard would float amid her brood” 301 “But they fell short of their intended mark” 309 “Thick piled the snows about the little herd” 319 “Was off through the underbrush in ignominious flight” 335 “It was fear itself that he was wiping out” 343 In Panoply of Spears 347 “The bear eyed him for some moments” 353 “A weasel glided noiselessly up to the door of the den” 369

The Kindred of the Wild

Introductory The Animal Story

Alike in matter and in method, the animal story, as we have it to-day, may be regarded as a culmination. The animal story, of course, in one form or another, is as old as the beginnings of literature. Perhaps the most engrossing part in the life-drama of primitive man was that played by the beasts which he hunted, and by those which hunted him. They pressed incessantly upon his perceptions. They furnished both material and impulse for his first gropings toward pictorial art. When he acquired the kindred art of telling a story, they supplied his earliest themes; and they suggested the hieroglyphs by means of which, on carved bone or painted rock, he first gave his narrative a form to outlast the spoken breath. We may not unreasonably infer that the first animal story—the remote but authentic ancestor of “Mowgli” and “Lobo” and “Krag”—was a story of some successful hunt, when success meant life to the starving family; or of some desperate escape, when the truth of the narrative was attested, to the hearers squatted trembling about their fire, by the sniffings of the baffled bear or tiger at the rock-barred mouth of the cave. Such first animal stories had at least one merit of prime literary importance. They were convincing. The first critic, however supercilious, would be little likely to cavil at their verisimilitude.

Somewhat later, when men had begun to harass their souls, and their neighbours, with problems of life and conduct, then these same animals, hourly and in every aspect thrust beneath the eyes of their observation, served to point the moral of their tales. The beasts, not being in a position to resent the ignoble office thrust upon them, were compelled to do duty as concrete types of those obvious virtues and vices of which alone the unsophisticated ethical sense was ready to take cognisance. In this way, as soon as composition became a métier, was born the fable; and in this way the ingenuity of the first author enabled him to avoid a perilous unpopularity among those whose weaknesses and defects his art held up to the scorn of all the caves.

These earliest observers of animal life were compelled by the necessities of the case to observe truly, if not deeply. Pitting their wits against those of their four-foot rivals, they had to know their antagonists, and respect them, in order to overcome them. But it was only the most salient characteristics of each species that concerned the practical observer. It was simple to remember that the tiger was cruel, the fox cunning, the wolf rapacious. And so, as advancing civilisation drew an ever widening line between man and the animals, and men became more and more engrossed in the interests of their own kind, the personalities of the wild creatures which they had once known so well became obscured to them, and the creatures themselves came to be regarded, for the purposes of literature, as types or symbols merely,—except in those cases, equally obstructive to exact observation, where they were revered as temporary tenements of the spirits of departed kinsfolk. The characters in that great beast-epic of the middle ages, “Reynard the Fox,” though far more elaborately limned than those which play their succinct rôles in the fables of Æsop, are at the same time in their elaboration far more alien to the truths of wild nature. Reynard, Isegrim, Bruin, and Greybeard have little resemblance to the fox, the wolf, the bear, and the badger, as patience, sympathy, and the camera reveal them to us to-day.

The advent of Christianity, strange as it may seem at first glance, did not make for a closer understanding between man and the lower animals. While it was militant, fighting for its life against the forces of paganism, its effort was to set man at odds with the natural world, and fill his eyes with the wonders of the spiritual. Man was the only thing of consequence on earth, and of man, not his body, but his soul. Nature was the ally of the enemy. The way of nature was the way of death. In man alone was the seed of the divine. Of what concern could be the joy or pain of creatures of no soul, to-morrow returning to the dust? To strenuous spirits, their eyes fixed upon the fear of hell for themselves, and the certainty of it for their neighbours, it smacked of sin to take thought of the feelings of such evanescent products of corruption. Hence it came that, in spite of the gentle understanding of such sweet saints as Francis of Assisi, Anthony of Padua, and Colomb of the Bees, the inarticulate kindred for a long time reaped small comfort from the Dispensation of Love.

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