Part 22

Without pretending to decide upon what the mental or emotional state under such circumstances really was, both the natural character of these beasts, and certain well-known devices, not only of theirs, but of allied species, suggest another explanation. One of the most common means for defence resorted to by this family at large, is an assumption of anger, and the pretence of attack--they try to frighten intruders whom they suspect of an intention to do them harm. When a puma crouches and bares its teeth it is not always enraged, but very frequently does this for the reason that it is uneasy, or dislikes what you are doing and wishes to put an end to something disagreeable by terrifying the objectionable person. It might then happen that a cougar would, when startled by an accidental meeting of this kind, assume an offensive attitude with the intention of intimidating the person met. If it succeeded, apprehension might easily give place for a time to its propensity towards torture, and the beast would then behave much in the same manner, apart from actual violence, as if in the course of its pursuit of prey this had been overtaken. Such situations, however, present none of the conditions that tend towards permanence. In default of speedy rescue, the partially aroused tendencies of the puma would soon become fully awakened, and its impulses break out in acts of bloodshed.

Various references have been made to that part of the education of feline beasts by which they are taught not to kill their human associates. One may read a great deal without finding much information on this subject. Most all of the professional trainers whom the writer has exchanged ideas with on this point were of opinion that fear alone would prevent these creatures from becoming dangerous; and it is customary to proceed upon this principle. As soon, however, as any single rule is attempted to be fitted to all cases, it becomes plain that it will not apply. The personality of a cat is not to be compared with that of a man; nevertheless, if one is reared without taking this into account, it will be ruined. Such beings differ so greatly in disposition and temper, in capacity, and the power and willingness to learn, that to force them all alike into a mould, causes mental and moral deformity with the same certainty that a similar proceeding would cause distortion of their bodies if the means used were material restraints to physical development. The system of terrorism is based upon the false assumption that fear is the only feeling which will affect the Felidæ deeply and permanently, and that this can only be excited in one way; namely, by severity.

The intercourse of an average keeper with the animals he has in charge is in most instances of the most limited description. His observations, if he makes any, are more likely to relate to their behavior as either submission or otherwise, than to their general conduct towards himself, and usually, all he has to communicate possesses little interest except to the visiting public, who are easily satisfied, and ready to believe anything. A trainer or tamer, although often an interesting person in virtue of his experiences, is not always an instructive one. As a rule, all that he knows is confined to what has presented itself in the course of a few simple instructions. Experiments are rarely resorted to, both the knowledge of how to conduct them, and the attainments by which their results could be properly interpreted, being from the nature of the case most generally wanting.

A young savage of the cat kind will naturally bite and scratch when enraged, and the only means of discouraging such practices are those of punishment, and a clear demonstration that its hostile attempts are unavailing. No creature belonging to this class could comprehend the difference between right and wrong in an abstract form. But notwithstanding that what is bad in itself is hidden from them, things forbidden come to be quickly learned, and this malum prohibitum no doubt influences their minds in much the same way that, allowing for the inequalities, ceremonial observances and rites affect those of savages. The latter are largely occupied in performing and avoiding a number of actions because they expect personal advantages to accrue in one case, and condign vengeance to be visited upon malpractice in the other. They are superstitious, and so is the brute. Over and above the benefits or penalties these know of, there are others which they imagine but do not know.

To become even in a measure acquainted with pumas, one must take a reasonably good-natured and intelligent specimen in its infancy, and train it as consistently as if it were a child; make it feel the folly and futility of violence towards its tutor, impress it with the constant experience that its tricks and stratagems always fail before that friendly but invincible being who watches over its life and sees everything. Excite the animal’s curiosity and wonder, show it the difference between yourself and others, be just and firm and calm. It will never be anything but a wild beast; but if this is done, it will be such an one as cannot otherwise be met with. Above all, if the interest of this occupation is not enough to affect the risk necessarily incurred, if such a pursuit cannot be followed without apprehension, give it up at once. A loose beast of prey is not a fit associate for a nervous man.

THE WOLF

The wolf represents the typical form among Canidæ, and it possesses all the ordinary characters belonging to this group in their highest degree of development. There is but one family in the Cynoidea, that of the dogs, and all species of his group fall within the limits of a single genus. “Canidæ display likenesses in structure nearly as great as those which the cats exhibit,” remarks W. N. Lockington (“Riverside Natural History”). Professor Huxley has broken up the aggregate into two groups, dog-like or Thoöid animals, and the Alopecoids--those which most resemble wolves. These are marked off from each other by peculiarities of the base of the skull and those parts developed around it. Canis, moreover, is a genus which, while it varies very greatly among its included forms, is physiologically so nearly identical that, as Lockington observes, “there is no proof that any species of this family is infertile with any other.”

Wolves are among the wildest, wariest, and most widely removed from human association of all animals. The question whether all kinds--red, black, white, and gray--are of one species or many, may be dismissed at once. Nobody is able to say what specific characteristics really are. Canis lupus is one of the most widely distributed of living forms. His range encircles the world within the arctic zone, and it extends southward into the tropics in America; wolves roam over nearly all Asia, and at one time they were found throughout Europe.

“The common wolf,” says Lockington, “is the largest and fiercest animal of the group, and the only one that is dangerous to man.” Its average length is about four feet six inches, it stands rather more than two feet high at the shoulder, and it is a little higher behind than before. These dimensions vary in geographical varieties; the French wolf being smaller than the German, the Scandinavian larger, heavier, and deeper in the shoulder than the Russian; while wolves on this continent are not so large as those of the Old World. All Asiatic forms north of the Altai Mountains are modifications of the common wolf of Europe, and the same is true of black wolves in the Pyrenees and highlands of France, Spain, Italy, and Russia, as well as of the white, lead-color, black, and dull-red varieties of America. As a rule, the wolf dwindles and degenerates within the tropics. Canis pallipes, the Indian form, approaches the jackal, according to Huxley, more closely than the members of any other climatic group, and as Professor Baird remarks, the coyote--Canis latrans, replaces the jackal in the New World.

Finally, the wolf, though a flesh-eater and beast of prey, possesses traits of structure which distinguish carnivora less highly specialized than Felidæ. Unlike the cats, its limbs are long and less united with the body; freer in their movements, and adapted to running rather than to the short, bounding rush and spring of the latter. Wolves are very powerful animals in proportion to their size; active, hardy, with strong and formidably armed jaws. Their senses are all extremely well developed, their speed is great, and the tireless gallop of the wolf has given rise to stereotyped phrases and comparisons in many languages.

Leaving now the zoölogical relations of wolves, their habits, character, and capacity present themselves for consideration. At the commencement of such an inquiry we find sources of information upon some of these points which are valuable in themselves, and in their general tenor conclusive.

Cuvier (“Règne Animal”) asserts that the wolf is “the most mischievous of all the carnivora of Europe,” and it would have been possible to know this from the folk-lore of those countries alone. In mythology and minstrelsy, in fireside story and local legend, wolves stand foremost among wild beasts in nations of the Celtic and Teutonic stocks. Their fierce visages look out from all the darker superstitions of the Old World, and echoes of their unearthy cry linger in the saddest of its surviving expressions of dread, foreboding, and despair. Hans Sachs called them “the hunting dogs of the Lord”; but this is a conception restricted to a single religion, and nearly everywhere from Greece to Norway, the wolf has been an object of horror and hate, an incarnation of evil, the emblem, agent, or associate of those unseen beings under whose forms terror personified unknown and destructive forces.

All this is not meaningless; great masses of men do not combine to give a “bad eminence” to anything that is insignificant. They do not often fear harmless objects, and they never do so when these are familiar. Cuvier says in his description of the wolf, that “its courage is not in proportion to its strength.” But it is certain that packs once howled at night around Paris, and tore people to pieces in her streets; that they ravaged, and killed man and beast, in every part of Western Europe, made public highways unsafe, and put travellers by forest roads in constant peril of their lives. When the traditions and myths referred to were formed, things were much worse in this respect than in Cuvier’s time, and we may be absolutely sure that these animals’ reputation rests on a strong foundation of fact. It was not the accident of an idle fancy that pictured gaunt gray wolves, dripping with blood, that bore the spirits of death upon northern battle-fields. Geri and Freki, the wolves of Woden, battened on the fallen in Valhalla. On earth and on high, fantasy grouped its most tragic conceptions around “the dark gray beast” of early Sagas; and it was believed that chained in hell, the Fenris wolf awaited that day when the demons of the underworld should be loosed, and with the bursting of the vault of heaven, “the twilight of the gods” would come.

Very little good has ever been said about a wolf. But on the Western Continent there is an almost complete absence of evidence to show that imagination was affected by this creature in the same manner as was common among European nations.

Henry R. Schoolcraft (“Indian Tribes of North America”) remarks that “the turtle, the bear, and the wolf appear to have been primary and honored totems in most tribes.... They are believed to have more or less prominence in the genealogies of all who are organized upon the totemic principle.” None knew wolves better than the aborigines of this country, and it is most improbable that beasts which so powerfully affected the thoughts and feelings of men in a similar social phase elsewhere, failed to conduct themselves similarly here. The cause for this striking difference is probably to be found in the peoples and not in the animals; more especially as every element was present in the situation where the former were placed, that would have fostered the growth of superstition. “The Indian dwelling or wigwam,” says Schoolcraft, “is constantly among wild animals, ... whether enchanted or unenchanted, spirits or real beings, he knows not. He chases them by day, and dreams of them by night.... A dream or a fact is equally potent in the Indian mind. He is intimate with the habits, motions, and characters of all animals, and feels himself peculiarly connected at all times with the animal creation. By the totemic system, he identifies his personal and tribal history and existence with theirs; he thinks himself the peculiar favorite of the Great Spirit, whenever they exist abundantly in his hunting-grounds, and when he dies, the figure of the quadruped, bird, or reptile which has guarded him through life, is put in hieroglyphics on his grave post.”

This is not an exaggerated statement, and the fact is that the wolf was not only a tutelar of gentes and emblem of their confraternity, but also, as in case of the fabled founders of Rome, a protector of helpless innocence. In the cycle of legends and myths that gather around the culture-hero Hiawatha, we find the pretty tale of the “Wolf-brother.” When the orphan child had been forsaken by all who were bound through natural affection to cherish it, wolves admitted the deserted little creature to their company, and gave the food that supported its life.

With southern tribes the coyote takes the place of the northern wolf; and how it happened that this “miserable little cur of an animal,” as Colonel Dodge calls it (“Plains of the Great West”), became the guardian of anybody or anything, passes understanding, unless it be due to the fact that there is more cunning and rascality wrapped up in its skin than exists in that of any other creature whatever. Nevertheless, it is true that this jackal of the West undoubtedly occupies the position spoken of. Dr. Washington Mathews (“Gentile System of the Navajo Indians”) has shown that a coyote is the tutelar of at least three gentes in this great tribe, and Captain John G. Bourke (“Gentile Organization of the Apaches of Arizona”) traced this animal in the same capacity through several branches of the Tinneh family. He found coyote gentes in the Apache, Apache-Mojave, Maricopa tribes, and among the Pueblo Indians as well; at Zuñi, San Filipe, Santana, Zia, and other places. In his “Notes on the Apache Mythology,” Captain Bourke gives a clue to the undeserved honors which this beast has received. His researches make it plain that these natives fully appreciated its astuteness. The coyote made a bet with the bear and won it; and by its means, also, men were provided with fire. There was nothing Prometheus-like in his conduct on this occasion; not a trace of the spirit which prompted the Titan. Far from it; he stole a brand the celestial squirrel dropped, and set fire to the world.

Like other wild beasts, the wolf has suffered at the hands of those who have described him. Men who, according to their own showing, had the most limited opportunities for learning anything about them have so often pronounced authoritatively upon the character of this race, and have so constantly confounded observation with inference, that closet zoölogists are now provided with a body of extemporaneous natural history in which the real animal has become as purely conventional as an Assyrian carving.

Perhaps the only accusation which has not been made against this much abused creature is that of stupidity. Nobody ever suspected a wolf of want of sense; although Buffon (“Histoire Naturelle”) says, “il devient ingénieux par besoin,” as if he knew of other and more gifted animals who exerted their minds without any need for doing so.

The common representation which people make to themselves of wolves, and which they are most apt to see in pictures, is that of a pack. There is little doubt, however, that packs are accidental and temporary aggregates. They are not composed of family groups. Their members merely unite for an especial purpose, and disperse when this is at an end. Moreover, it is exceptional to find large numbers together in America under any circumstances. Wolves consort in pairs or small detached bands, and pack temporarily and rarely.

Captain James Forsyth (“Highlands of Central India”), speaking of Canis pallipes, an animal whose specific identity with the common form Sir Walter Elliot and Horsfield deny, while Blyth and Jerdon very properly insist upon it, remarks that it is a relatively small and slender beast with comparatively delicate teeth. He gives a narrative of his personal experience which is utterly subversive of many sweeping assertions which have been made upon the subject of their habits and temper.

In the provinces referred to, wolves are very numerous, and are “a plain-loving species.” They “unite in parties of five or six to hunt,” and so far as his observations go, more than these have not been seen together. “Most generally they are found singly or in couples.” The domestic animals upon which these chiefly prey are dogs and goats. “They are the deadly foes of the former, and will stand outside of a village or travellers’ camp, and howl until some inexperienced cur sallies forth to reply, when the lot of that cur will probably be to return no more....

“The loss of human life from these hideous brutes has recently been ascertained to be so great, that a heavy reward is now offered for their destruction. Though not generally venturing beyond children ... yet when confirmed in the habit of man-eating, they do not hesitate to attack, at an advantage, full-grown women, and even adult men. A good many instances occurred during the construction of the railway through the low jungles of Júbbulpúr, of laborers on the works being so attacked, and sometimes killed and eaten. The assault was commonly made by a pair of wolves, one of whom seized the victim by the neck from behind, preventing outcry, while the other, coming swiftly up, tore out the entrails in front. These confirmed man-eaters are described as having been exceedingly wary, and fully able to discriminate between a helpless victim and an armed man.

“In 1861, I was marching through a small village on the borders of the Damoh district, and accidentally heard that for months past a pair of wolves had carried off a child from the centre of the village, in broad daylight. No attempt whatever had been made to kill them, though their haunts were perfectly well known, and lay not a quarter of a mile from the town. A shapeless stone, representing the goddess Devi, under a neighboring tree, had been daubed with vermilion instead, and liberally propitiated with cocoanuts and rice. Their plan of attack was uniform and simple. The village stood on the slope of a hill, at the foot of which was the bed of a stream thickly fringed with grass and bushes. The main street, where children were always at play, ran down the slope of this hill, and while one of the wolves, that one which was smaller than the other, concealed itself among some low bushes between the village and the bottom of the declivity, the other would go round to the top, and, watching for an opportunity, would race down through the street, picking up a child by the way, and make off with it to the thick cover in the nálá. At first the people used to pursue, and sometimes made the marauder drop his prey; but finding, as they said, that in this case the companion wolf usually succeeded in carrying off another of their children in the confusion, while the first was so injured as to be beyond recovery, they ended, like impassive Hindus as they were, by just letting the wolves take away as many of their offspring as they wanted.

“A child of a few years of age had thus been carried off the morning of my arrival. It is scarcely credible that I could not at first get enough beaters to drive the cover where these atrocious brutes were gorging on their unholy meal. At last a few of those outcast helots, who act as village drudges in these parts, were induced to take sticks and accompany my horse keeper, with a hog spear, and my Sikh orderly, with his sword, through the belt of grass, while I posted myself, with a double rifle, behind a tree at the other end. In about five minutes the pair walked leisurely out into the open space within twenty yards of me. They were evidently mother and son; the latter about three parts grown, with a reddish-yellow, well-furred coat, and plump appearance; the mother, a lean and grizzled hag, with hideous pendant dugs, and slaver dropping from her jaws. I gave her the benefit of my first barrel, and she dropped with a shot through both shoulders. The whelp started off, but the second barrel stopped him also, with a bullet in the neck.”

Whenever wolves hunt in numbers, it is that one part may lie in ambush, and the other drive the game, or because they design to assail enemies they are well aware a few could not overcome. These packs only hold together for a short time, and their formation depends upon the accidental presence of several separate bands in the same vicinity who are attracted by a common object, or follow each other’s motions like carrion birds. This is what happens in the neighborhood of remote and isolated settlements in Northern Europe, when human beings are the game they pursue. Within Russian forests and those which lie near lonely villages in Sweden, Norway, and Swedish-Lapland, small packs form as darkness veils the weird, melancholy, desolate beauty of winter landscapes. They meet irregularly, with the vague, fierce feelings of an excited mob. The band is brought together by howlings, and it sweeps outward into the open on an indefinite quest. Woe betide the wolf who gives out during this wild gallop, or slips his shoulder on the frozen crust. Desperation may enable him to conceal the accident for a few strides, but discovery is certain, and he is instantly torn to pieces and devoured. If a fresh trail be found, the pack follows it. Human voices or the sound of sleigh-bells brings down the wolves like a storm-driven cloud. Men often go out with drags fastened to sledges, and as their purpose is simply to kill, and they are prepared, and do not venture too far from the villages, these hunters generally succeed in their undertaking. But not always; many a sleighing party of this kind has not returned, neither men nor horses. Many a belated wayfarer and party of travellers have never reached their journey’s end. A fleet horse will for a time outrun wolves, even when by stealthy approaches they have almost closed around him, and this the author knows from experience; but it will not answer to go far, for in that case the fugitive will certainly be caught.

Turning now to the most celebrated, as well as the largest and fiercest member of this family, we find that the Scandinavian wolf is in many places increasing in numbers, despite the various means which are made use of for its destruction. L. Lloyd (“Scandinavian Adventures”) ascribes this to immigration from Russia and Finland. However this may be, recent writers still echo the lamentations of Olaus Magnus, and of quaint old Bishop Pontappidan (“Natural History of Norway”) to the effect that the country is overrun by them. Thus Von Grieff asserts that in many localities “the wolf taxes the peasant higher than the crown,” and J. A. Strom expresses himself to much the same effect.

A wolf will eat any sort of flesh, irrespective of its kind or condition, and when pressed by hunger he consumes vegetable substances also. Pontappidan says that one was killed whose “stomach was filled with moss from the cliffs and birch tops.” Humboldt states that famishing wolves swallow earth like the Otomac Indians on the Orinoco.