Chapter IV: Part 4

I have found one or two strange winter dens of Mooween, and have followed his trail uncounted miles through the snow when he had been driven out of one _hibernaculum_ and was seeking another in the remote fastnesses, making an unending trail with the evident intention of tiring out any hunter who should attempt to follow him. I have found his bathing pools repeatedly, and watched him in midsummer when he sought out cool retreats--a muddy eddy in a trout brook under the alders, a mossy hollow under the north side of a great sheer ledge--to escape the flies and heat. But none of them compare with this lumberman's ice house which his wits had appropriated, and which, from many signs about the place, he was accustomed to use daily for his nap when the sun was hottest; and none of his many queer traits ever appealed to me quite so strongly as the humorous cunning which prompted him to take the jug with him into his den. It was safe there, whether Mooween were at home or not, for no bear will ever enter another's den unless the owner first show him in; and while other bears were in the hot camp, trying to find a satisfactory bite of salt pork and dry flour, Mooween was lying snug in his ice house licking the molasses jug that represented his own particular share of the plunder.

KINGFISHER'S KINDERGARTEN

Koskomenos the kingfisher still burrows in the earth like his reptile ancestors; therefore the other birds call him outcast and will have nothing to do with him. But he cares little for that, being a clattering, rattle-headed, self-satisfied fellow, who seems to do nothing all day long but fish and eat. As you follow him, however, you note with amazement that he does some things marvelously well--better indeed than any other of the Wood Folk. To locate a fish accurately in still water is difficult enough when one thinks of light refraction; but when the fish is moving, and the sun glares down into the pool and the wind wrinkles its face into a thousand flashing, changing furrows and ridges,--then the bird that can point a bill straight to his fish and hit him fair just behind the gills must have more in his head than the usual chattering gossip that one hears from him on the trout streams.

This was the lesson that impressed itself upon me when I first began to study Koskomenos; and the object of this little sketch, which records those first strong impressions, is not to give our kingfisher's color or markings or breeding habits--you can get all that from the bird books--but to suggest a possible answer to the question of how he learns so much, and how he teaches his wisdom to the little kingfishers.

Just below my camp, one summer, was a trout pool. Below the trout pool was a shaded minnow basin, a kind of storehouse for the pool above, where the trout foraged in the early and late twilight, and where, if you hooked a red-fin delicately on a fine leader and dropped it in from the crotch of an overhanging tree, you might sometimes catch a big one.

Early one morning, while I was sitting in the tree, a kingfisher swept up the river and disappeared under the opposite bank. He had a nest in there, so cunningly hidden under an overhanging root that till then I had not discovered it, though I had fished the pool and seen the kingfishers clattering about many times. They were unusually noisy when I was near, and flew up-stream over the trout pool with a long, rattling call again and again--a ruse, no doubt, to make me think that their nest was somewhere far above.

I watched the nest closely after that, in the intervals when I was not fishing, and learned many things to fill one with wonder and respect for this unknown, clattering outcast of the wilderness rivers. He has devotion for his mate, and feeds her most gallantly while she is brooding. He has courage, plenty of it. One day, under my very eyes, he drove off a mink and almost killed the savage creature. He has well-defined fishing regulations and enforces them rigorously, never going beyond his limits and permitting no poaching on his own minnow pools. He also has fishing lore enough in his frowsy head--if one could get it out--to make Izaak Walton's discourse like a child's babble. Whether the wind be south or northeast, whether the day be dull or bright, he knows exactly where the little fish will be found, and how to catch them.

When the young birds came, the most interesting bit of Koskomenos' life was manifest. One morning as I sat watching, hidden away in the bushes, the mother kingfisher put her head out of her hole and looked about very anxiously. A big water-snake lay stretched along a stranded log on the shore. She pounced upon him instantly and drove him out of sight. Just above, at the foot of the trout pool, a brood of sheldrake were croaking and splashing about in the shallows. They were harmless, yet the kingfisher rushed upon them, clattering and scolding like a fishwife, and harried them all away into a quiet bogan.

On the way back she passed over a frog, a big, sober, sleepy fellow, waiting on a lily-pad for his sun-bath. Chigwooltz might catch young trout, and even little birds as they came to drink, but he would surely never molest a brood of kingfishers; yet the mother, like an irate housekeeper flourishing her broom at every corner of an unswept room, sounded her rattle loudly and dropped on the sleepy frog's head, sending him sputtering and scrambling away into the mud, as if Hawahak the hawk were after him. Then with another look all round to see that the stream was clear, and with a warning rattle to any Wood Folk that she might have overlooked, she darted into her nest, wiggling her tail like a satisfied duck as she disappeared.

After a moment a wild-eyed young kingfisher put his head out of the hole for his first look at the big world. A push from behind cut short his contemplation, and without any fuss whatever he sailed down to a dead branch on the other side of the stream. Another and another followed in the same way, as if each one had been told just what to do and where to go, till the whole family were sitting a-row, with the rippling stream below them and the deep blue heavens and the rustling world of woods above.

That was their first lesson, and their reward was near. The male bird had been fishing since daylight; now he began to bring minnows from an eddy where he had stored them, and to feed the hungry family and assure them, in his own way, that this big world, so different from the hole in the bank, was a good place to live in, and furnished no end of good things to eat.

The next lesson was more interesting, the lesson of catching fish. The school was a quiet, shallow pool with a muddy bottom against which the fish showed clearly, and with a convenient stub leaning over it from which to swoop. The old birds had caught a score of minnows, killed them, and dropped them here and there under the stub. Then they brought the young birds, showed them their game, and told them by repeated examples to dive and get it. The little fellows were hungry and took to the sport keenly; but one was timid, and only after the mother had twice dived and brought up a fish--which she showed to the timid one and then dropped back in a most tantalizing way--did he muster up resolution to take the plunge.

A few mornings later, as I prowled along the shore, I came upon a little pool quite shut off from the main stream, in which a dozen or more frightened minnows were darting about, as if in strange quarters. As I stood watching them and wondering how they got over the dry bar that separated the pool from the river, a kingfisher came sweeping up-stream with a fish in his bill. Seeing me, he whirled silently and disappeared round the point below.

The thought of the curious little wild kindergarten occurred to me suddenly as I turned to the minnows again, and I waded across the river and hid in the bushes. After an hour's wait Koskomenos came stealing back, looked carefully over the pool and the river, and swept down-stream with a rattling call. Presently he came back again with his mate and the whole family; and the little ones, after seeing their parents swoop, and tasting the fish they caught, began to swoop for themselves.

The first plunges were usually in vain, and when a minnow was caught it was undoubtedly one of the wounded fish that Koskomenos had placed there in the lively swarm to encourage his little ones. After a try or two, however, they seemed to get the knack of the thing and would drop like a plummet, bill first, or shoot down on a sharp incline and hit their fish squarely as it darted away into deeper water. The river was wild and difficult, suitable only for expert fishermen. The quietest pools had no fish, and where minnows were found the water or the banks were against the little kingfishers, who had not yet learned to hover and take their fish from the wing. So Koskomenos had found a suitable pool and stocked it himself to make his task of teaching more easy for his mate and more profitable for his little ones. The most interesting point in his method was that, in this case, he had brought the minnows alive to his kindergarten, instead of killing or wounding them, as in the first lesson. He knew that the fish could not get out of the pool, and that his little ones could take their own time in catching them.

When I saw the family again, weeks afterwards, their lessons were well learned; they needed no wounded or captive fish to satisfy their hunger. They were full of the joy of living, and showed me, one day, a curious game,--the only play that I have ever seen among the kingfishers.

There were three of them, when I first found them, perched on projecting stubs over the dancing riffles, which swarmed with chub and "minnies" and samlets and lively young red-fins. Suddenly, as if at the command go! they all dropped, bill first, into the river. In a moment they were out again and rushed back to their respective stubs, where they threw their heads back and wriggled their minnows down their throats with a haste to choke them all. That done, they began to dance about on their stubs, clattering and chuckling immoderately.

It was all blind to me at first, till the game was repeated two or three times, always starting at the same instant with a plunge into the riffles and a rush back to goal. Then their object was as clear as the stream below them. With plenty to eat and never a worry in the world, they were playing a game to see which could first get back to his perch and swallow his fish. Sometimes one or two of them failed to get a fish and glided back dejectedly; sometimes all three were so close together that it took a deal of jabber to straighten the matter out; and they always ended in the same way, by beginning all over again.

Koskomenos is a solitary fellow, with few pleasures, and fewer companions to share them with him. This is undoubtedly the result of his peculiar fishing regulations, which give to each kingfisher a certain piece of lake or stream for his own. Only the young of the same family go fishing together; and so I have no doubt that these were the same birds whose early training I had watched, and who were now enjoying themselves in their own way, as all the other Wood Folk do, in the fat, careless, happy autumn days.

PEKOMPF'S CUNNING

Pekompf the wildcat is one of the savage beasts that have not yet vanished from the haunts of men. Sometimes, as you clamber up the wooded hillside above the farm, you will come suddenly upon a fierce-looking, catlike creature stretched out on a rock sunning himself. At sight of you he leaps up with a snarl, and you have a swift instant in which to take his measure. He is twice as big as a house-cat, with round head and big expressionless eyes that glare straight into yours with a hard, greenish glitter. His reddish-brown sides are spotted here and there, and the white fur of his belly is blotched with black--the better to hide himself amid the lights and shadows. A cat, sure enough, but unlike anything of the kind you have ever seen before.

As you look and wonder there is a faint sound that you will do well to heed. The muscles of his long thick legs are working nervously, and under the motion is a warning purr, not the soft rumble in a contented tabby's throat, but the cut and rip of ugly big claws as they are unsheathed viciously upon the dry leaves. His stub tail is twitching--you had not noticed it before, but now it whips back and forth angrily, as if to call attention to the fact that Nature had not altogether forgotten that end of Pekompf. Whip, whip,--it is a tail--k'yaaaah! And you jump as the fierce creature screeches in your face.

If it is your first wildcat, you will hardly know what to do,--to stand perfectly quiet is always best, unless you have a stick or gun in your hand,--and if you have met Pekompf many times before, you are quite as uncertain what he will do this time. Most wild creatures, however fierce, prefer to mind their own business and will respect the same sentiment in you. But when you stumble upon a wildcat you are never sure of his next move. That is because he is a slinking, treacherous creature, like all cats, and never quite knows how best to meet you. He suspects you unreasonably because he knows you suspect him with reason. Generally he slinks away, or leaps suddenly for cover, according to the method of your approach. But though smaller he is naturally more savage than either the Canada lynx or the panther, and sometimes he crouches and snarls in your face, or even jumps for your chest at the first movement.

Once, to my knowledge, he fell like a fury upon the shoulders of a man who was hurrying homeward through the twilight, and who happened to stop unawares under the tree where Pekompf was watching the runways. The man had no idea that a wildcat was near, and he probably never would have known had he gone steadily on his way. As he told me afterwards, he felt a sudden alarm and stopped to listen. The moment he did so the savage creature above him thought himself discovered, and leaped to carry the war into Africa. There was a pounce, a screech, a ripping of cloth, a wild yell for help; then the answering shout and rush of two woodsmen with their axes. And that night Pekompf's skin was nailed to the barn-door to dry in the sun before being tanned and made up into a muff for the woodsman's little girl to warm her fingers withal in the bitter winter weather.

Where civilization has driven most of his fellows away, Pekompf is a shy, silent creature; but where the farms are scattered and the hillsides wild and wooded, he is bolder and more noisy than in the unpeopled wilderness. From the door of the charcoal-burner's hut in the Connecticut hills you may still hear him screeching and fighting with his fellows as the twilight falls, and the yowling uproar causes a colder chill in your back than anything you will ever hear in the wilderness. As you follow the trout stream, from which the charcoal man daily fills his kettle, you may find Pekompf stretched on a fallen log under the alders, glaring intently into the trout pool, waiting, waiting--for what?

It will take many seasons of watching to answer this natural question, which every one who is a follower of the wild things has asked himself a score of times. All the cats have but one form of patience, the patience of quiet waiting. Except when hunger-driven, their way of hunting is to watch beside the game paths or crouch upon a big limb above the place where their game comes down to drink. Sometimes they vary their programme by prowling blindly through the woods, singly or in pairs, trusting to luck to blunder upon their game; for they are wretched hunters. They rarely follow a trail, not simply because their noses are not keen--for in the snow, with a trail as plain as a deer path, they break away from it with reckless impatience, only to scare the game into a headlong dash for safety. Then they will crouch under a dwarf spruce and stare at the trail with round unblinking eyes, waiting for the frightened creatures to come back, or for other creatures to come by in the same footprints. Even in teaching her young a mother wildcat is full of snarling whims and tempers; but now let a turkey gobble far away in the woods, let Musquash dive into his den where she can see it, let but a woodmouse whisk out of sight into his hidden doorway,--and instantly patience returns to Pekompf. All the snarling ill-temper vanishes. She crouches and waits, and forgets all else. She may have just fed full on what she likes best, and so have no desire for food and no expectation of catching more; but she must still watch, as if to reassure herself that her eyes are not deceived and that Tookhees is really there under the mossy stone where she saw the scurry of his little legs and heard his frightened squeak as he disappeared.

But why should a cat watch at a trout pool, out of which nothing ever comes to reward his patience? That was a puzzling question for many years. I had seen Pekompf many times stretched on a log, or lying close to a great rock over the water, so intent on his watching that he heard not my cautious approach. Twice from my canoe I had seen Upweekis the lynx on the shore of a wilderness lake, crouched among the weather-worn roots of a stranded pine, his great paws almost touching the water, his eyes fixed with unblinking stare on the deep pool below. And once, when trout fishing on a wild river just opposite a great jam of logs and driftwood, I had stopped casting suddenly with an uncanny feeling of being watched by unseen eyes at my solitary sport.

It is always well to heed such a warning in the woods. I looked up and down quickly; but the river held no life above its hurrying flood. I searched the banks carefully and peered suspiciously into the woods behind me; but save for the dodging of a winter wren, who seems always to be looking for something that he has lost and that he does not want you to know about, the shores were wild and still as if just created. I whipped out my flies again. What was that, just beyond the little wavelet where my Silver Doctor had fallen? Something moved, curled, flipped and twisted nervously. It was a tail, the tip end that cannot be quiet. And there--an irrepressible chill trickled over me as I made out the outlines of a great gray beast stretched on a fallen log, and caught the gleam of his wild eyes fixed steadily upon me. Even as I saw the thing it vanished like a shadow of the woods. But what was the panther watching there before he watched me?

The answer came unexpectedly. It was in the Pemigewasset valley in midsummer. At daybreak I had come softly down the wood road to the trout pool and stopped to watch a mink dodging in and out along the shore. When he passed out of sight under some logs I waited quietly for other Wood Folk to show themselves. A slight movement on the end of a log--and there was Pekompf, so still that the eye could hardly find him, stretching a paw down cautiously and flipping it back with a peculiar inward sweep. Again he did it, and I saw the long curved claws, keen as fish-hooks, stretched wide out of their sheaths. He was fishing, spearing his prey with the patience of an Indian; and even as I made the discovery there was a flash of silver following the quick jerk of his paw, and Pekompf leaped to the shore and crouched over the fish that he had thrown out of the water.

So Pekompf watches the pools as he watches a squirrel's hole because he has seen game there and because he likes fish above everything else that the woods can furnish. But how often must he watch the big trout before he catches one? Sometimes, in the late twilight, the largest fish will move out of the pools and nose along the shore for food, their back fins showing out of the shallow water as they glide along. It may be that Pekompf sometimes catches them at this time, and so when he sees the gleam of a fish in the depths he crouches where he is for a while, following the irresistible impulse of all cats at the sight of game. Herein they differ from all other savage beasts, which, when not hungry, pay no attention whatever to smaller animals.

It may be, also, that Pekompf's cunning is deeper than this. Old Noel, a Micmac hunter, tells me that both wildcat and lynx, whose cunning is generally the cunning of stupidity, have discovered a remarkable way of catching fish. They will lie with their heads close to the water, their paws curved for a quick grab, their eyes half shut to deceive the fish, and their whiskers just touching and playing with the surface. Their general color blends with that of their surroundings and hides them perfectly. The trout, noticing the slight crinkling of the water where the long whiskers touch it, but not separating the crouching animal from the log or rock on which he rests, rise to the surface, as is their wont when feeding, and are snapped out by a lightning sweep of the paws.

Whether this be so or not I am not sure. The raccoon undoubtedly catches crabs and little fish in this way; and I have sometimes surprised cats--both wildcats and Canada lynxes, as well as domestic tabbies--with their heads down close to the water, so still that they seemed part of the log or rock on which they crouched. Once I tried for five minutes to make a guide see a big lynx that was lying on a root in plain sight within thirty yards of our canoe, while the guide assured me in a whisper that he could see perfectly and that it was only a stump. Then, hearing us, the lynx rose, stared, and leaped for the brush.

Such hiding would easily deceive even a trout, for I have often taken my position at the edge of a jam and after lying perfectly still for ten minutes have seen the wary fish rise from under the logs to investigate a straw or twig that I held in my fingers and with which I touched the water here and there, like an insect at play.

So Old Noel is probably right when he says that Pekompf fishes with his whiskers, for the habits of both fish and cats seem to carry out his observations.

But deeper than his cunning is Pekompf's inborn suspicion and his insane fury at being opposed or cornered. The trappers catch him, as they catch his big cousin the lucivee, by setting a snare in the rabbit paths that he nightly follows. Opposite the noose and attached to the other end of the cord is a pole, which jumps after the cat as he starts forward with the loop about his neck. Were it a fox, now, he would back away out of the snare, or lie still and cut the cord with his teeth and so escape. But, like all cats when trapped, Pekompf flies into a blind fury. He screeches at the unoffending stick, claws it, battles with it, and literally chokes himself in his rage. Or, if he be an old cat and his cunning a bit deeper, he will go off cautiously and climb the biggest tree he can find, with the uncomfortable thing that he is tied to dangling and clattering behind him. When near the top he will leave the stick hanging on one side of a limb while he cunningly climbs down the other, thinking thus to fool his dumb enemy and leave him behind. One of two things always happens. Either the stick catches in the crotch and Pekompf hangs himself on his own gibbet, or else it comes over with a sudden jerk and falls to the ground, pulling Pekompf with it and generally killing him in the fall.

It is a cruel, brutal kind of device at best, and fortunately for the cat tribe has almost vanished from the northern woods, except in the far Northwest, where the half-breeds still use it for lynx successfully. But as a study of the way in which trappers seize upon some peculiarity of an animal and use it for his destruction, it has no equal.

That Pekompf's cunning is of the cat kind, suspicious without being crafty or intelligent like that of the fox or wolf, is curiously shown by a habit which both lynx and wildcat have in common, namely, that of carrying anything they steal to the top of some lofty evergreen to devour it. When they catch a rabbit or fish fairly themselves, they generally eat it on the spot; but when they steal the same animal from snare or cache, or from some smaller hunter, the cat suspicion returns--together with some dim sense of wrongdoing, which all animals feel more or less--and they make off with the booty and eat it greedily where they think no one will ever find them.

Once, when watching for days under a fish-hawk's nest to see the animals that came in shyly to eat the scraps that the little fish-hawks cast out when their hunger was satisfied, this cat habit was strikingly manifest. Other animals would come in and quietly eat what they found and slip away again; but the cats would seize on a morsel with flashing eyes, as if defying all law and order, and would either growl horribly as they ate or else would slink away guiltily and, as I found out by following, would climb the biggest tree at hand and eat the morsel in the highest crotch that gave a foothold. And once, on the Maine coast in November, I saw a fierce battle in the tree-tops where a wildcat crouched, snarling like twenty fiends, while a big eagle whirled and swooped over him, trying to take away the game that Pekompf had stolen.

By far the most curious bit of Pekompf's cunning came under my eyes, one summer, a few years ago. Until recently I had supposed it to be a unique discovery; but last summer a friend, who goes to Newfoundland every year for the salmon fishing, had a similar experience with a Canada lynx, which emphasizes the tendency of all cats to seek the tree-tops with anything that they have stolen; though curiously enough I have never found any trace of it with game that they had caught honestly themselves. It was in Nova Scotia, where I was trout fishing for a little season, and where I had no idea of meeting Pekompf, for the winters are severe there and the wildcat is supposed to leave such places to his more powerful and longer-legged cousin, the lynx, whose feet are bigger than his and better padded for walking on the snow. Even in the southern Berkshires you may follow Pekompf's trail and see where he makes heavy weather of it, floundering belly-deep like a domestic tabby through the soft drifts in his hungry search for grouse and rabbits, and lying down in despair at last to wait till the snow settles. But to my surprise Pekompf was there, bigger, fiercer, and more cunning than I had ever seen him; though I did not discover this till after a long search.

I had fished from dawn till almost six o'clock, one morning, and had taken two good trout, which were all that the stream promised to yield for the day. Then I thought of a little pond in the woods over the mountain, which looked trouty when I had discovered it and which, so far as I knew, had never been fished with a fly. Led more by the fun of exploring than by the expectation of fish, I started to try the new waters.

The climb through the woods promised to be a hard one, so I left everything behind except rod, reel, and fly-book. My coat was hung on the nearest bush; the landing-net lay in the shade across a rock, the end of the handle wedged under a root, and I dropped my two trout into that and covered them from the sun with ferns and moss. Then I started off through the woods for the little pond.

When I came back empty-handed, a few hours later, trout and landing-net were gone. The first thought naturally was that some one had stolen them, and I looked for the thief's tracks; but, save my own, there was not a footprint anywhere beside the stream up or down. Then I looked beside the rock more carefully and found bits of moss and fish-scales, and the pugs of some animal, too faint in the gravel to make out what the beast was that made them. I followed the faint traces for a hundred yards or more into the woods till they led me to a great spruce tree, under which every sign disappeared utterly, as if the creature had suddenly flown away net and all, and I gave up the trail without any idea of what had made it.

For two weeks that theft bothered me. It was not so much the loss of my two trout and net, but rather the loss of my woodcraft on the trail that had no end, which kept me restless. The net was a large one, altogether too large and heavy for trout fishing. At the last moment before starting on my trip I found that my trout net was rotten and useless, and so had taken the only thing at hand, a specially made forty-inch net which I had last used on a scientific expedition for collecting specimens from the lakes of northern New Brunswick. The handle was long, and the bow, as I had more than once tested, was powerful enough to use instead of a gaff for taking a twenty-five pound salmon out of his pool after he had been played to a standstill; and how any creature could drag it off through the woods without leaving a plain trail for my eyes to follow puzzled me, and excited a most lively curiosity to know who he was and why he had not eaten the fish where he found them. Was it lynx or stray wolf, or had the terrible Injun Devil that is still spoken of with awe at the winter firesides returned to his native woods? For a week I puzzled over the question; then I went back to the spot and tried in vain to follow the faint marks in the moss. After that whenever I wandered near the spot I tried the trail again, or circled wider and wider through the woods, hoping to find the net or some positive sign of the beast that had stolen it.

One day in the woods it occurred to me suddenly that, while I had followed the trail three or four times, I had never thought to examine the tree beneath which it ended. At the thought I went to the big spruce and there, sure enough, were flecks of bright brown here and there where the rough outer shell had been chipped off. And there also, glimmering white, was a bit of dried slime where a fish had rested for an instant against the bark. The beast, whatever he was, had climbed the tree with his booty; and the discovery was no sooner made than I was shinning up eagerly after him.

Near the scraggy top I found my net, its long handle wedged firmly in between two branches, its bow caught on a projecting stub, its bag hanging down over empty space. In the net was a big wildcat, his round head driven through a hole which he had bitten in the bottom, the tough meshes drawn taut as fiddle-strings about his throat. All four legs had clawed or pushed their way through the mesh, till every kick and struggle served only to bind and choke him more effectually.

From marks I made out at last the outline of the story. Pekompf had found the fish and tried to steal them, but his suspicions were roused by the queer net and the clattering handle. With true lynx cunning, which is always more than half stupidity, he had carried it off and started to climb the biggest tree he could find. Near the top the handle had wedged among the branches, and while he tried to dislodge it net and fish had swung clear of the trunk. In the bark below the handle I found where he had clung to the tree boll and tried to reach the swinging trout with his paw; and on a branch above the bow were marks which showed where he had looked down longingly at the fish at the bottom of the net, just below his hungry nose. From this branch he had either fallen or, more likely, in a fit of blind rage had leaped into the net, which closed around him and held him more effectually than bars of iron. When I came under for the first time, following his trail probably crouched on a limb over my head watching me steadily; and when I came back the second time he was dead.

That was all that one could be sure about. But here and there, in a torn mesh, or a tuft of fur, or the rip of a claw against a swaying twig, were the marks of a struggle whose savage intensity one could only imagine.

ANIMAL SURGERY

Most people have seen a sick cat eat grass, or an uneasy dog seek out some weed and devour it greedily to make his complaining stomach feel better. Some few may have read John Wesley's directions on the art of keeping well--which have not, however, found their way into his book of discipline for the soul--and have noted with surprised interest his claim that many medicines in use among the common people and the physicians of his time were discovered by watching the animals that sought out these things to heal their diseases. "If they heal animals they will also heal men," is his invincible argument. Others may have dipped deep into Indian history and folk-lore and learned that many of the herbs used by the American tribes, and especially the cures for rheumatism, dysentery, fever, and snake bites, were learned direct from the animals, by noting the rheumatic old bear grub for fern roots or bathe in the hot mud of a sulphur spring, and by watching with eager eyes what plants the wild creatures ate when bitten by rattlers or wasted by the fever. Still others have been fascinated with the first crude medical knowledge of the Greeks, which came to them from the East undoubtedly, and have read that the guarded mysteries of the Asclepiades, the healing cult that followed Æsculapius, had among them many simple remedies that had first proved their efficacy among animals in a natural state; and that Hippocrates, the greatest physician of antiquity, whose fame under the name of Bokrat the Wise went down through Arabia and into the farthest deserts, owes many of his medical aphorisms to what he himself, or his forebears, must have seen out of doors among the wild creatures. And all these seers and readers have perhaps wondered how much the animals knew, and especially how they came to know it.

To illustrate the matter simply and in our own day and generation: A deer that has been chased all day long by dogs, and that has escaped at last by swimming an icy river and fallen exhausted on the farther shore, will lie down to sleep in the snow. That would mean swift death for any human being. Half the night the deer will move about at short intervals, instead of sleeping heavily, and in the morning he is as good as ever and ready for another run. The same deer shut up in a warm barn to sleep overnight, as has been more than once tested with park animals, will be found dead in the morning.

Here is a natural law of healing suggested, which, if noted among the Greeks and Indians, would have been adopted instantly as a method of dealing with extreme cold and exhaustion, or with poisoning resulting in paralysis of the muscles. Certainly the method, if somewhat crude, might still have wrought enough cures to be looked upon with veneration by a people who unfortunately had no knowledge of chemical drugs, or Scotch whisky, or sugar pellets with an ethereal suggestion of intangible triturations somewhere in the midst of them.

That the animals do practice at times a rude kind of medicine and surgery upon themselves is undeniable. The only question about it is, How do they know? To say it is a matter of instinct is but begging the question. It is also three-fourths foolishness, for many of the things that animals do are beyond the farthest scope of instinct. The case of the deer that moved about and so saved his life, instead of sleeping on heavily to his death, may be partly a case of instinct. Personally it seems to me more a matter of experience; for a fawn under the same circumstances, unless his mother were near to keep him moving, would undoubtedly lie down and die. More than that, it seems to be largely a matter of obedience to the strongest impulse of the moment, to which all animals are accustomed or trained from their birthday. And that is not quite the same thing as instinct, unless one is disposed to go to the extreme of Berkeley's philosophy and make instinct a kind of spirit-personality that watches over animals all the time. Often the knowledge of healing or of primitive surgery seems to be the discovery or possession of a few rare individual animals, instead of being spread widecast among the species, as instincts are. This knowledge, or what-you-may-call-it, is sometimes shared, and so hints at a kind of communication among animals, of whose method we catch only fleeting glimpses and suggestions--but that will be the subject of another article. The object of this is, not to answer the questions of how or whence, but simply to suggest one or two things I have seen in the woods as the basis for further and more detailed observations.

The most elemental kind of surgery is that which amputates a leg when it is broken, not always or often, but only when the wound festers from decay or fly-bite and so endangers the whole body. Probably the best illustration of this is found in the coon, who has a score of traits that place him very high among intelligent animals. When a coon's foot is shattered by a bullet he will cut it off promptly and wash the stump in running water, partly to reduce the inflammation and partly, no doubt, to make it perfectly clean. As it heals he uses his tongue on the wound freely, as a dog does, to cleanse it perhaps, and by the soft massage of his tongue to reduce the swelling and allay the pain.

So far this may or may not be pure instinct. For I do not know, and who will tell me, whether a child puts his wounded hand to his mouth and sucks and cleanses the hurt by pure instinct, or because he has seen others do it, or because he has had his hurts kissed away in childhood, and so imitates the action unconsciously when his mother is not near?

Most mother animals tongue their little ones freely. Now is that a caress, or is it some hygienic measure begun at birth, when she devours all traces of the birth-envelopes and licks the little ones clean lest the nose of some hungry prowler bring him near to destroy the family? Certainly the young are conscious of the soft tongue that rubs them fondly, and so when they lick their own wounds it may be only a memory and an imitation,--two factors, by the way, which lie at the bottom of all elemental education. That explanation, of course, leaves the amputated leg out of the question; and the surgery does not stop here.

When a boy, and still barbarian enough to delight in trapping, partly from a love of the chase that was born in me, and partly to put money into a boy's empty pocket, I once caught a muskrat in a steel trap that slid off into deep water at the first pull and so drowned the creature mercifully. This was due to the careful instructions of Natty Dingle, at whose feet I sat to learn woodcraft, and who used the method to save all his pelts; for often an animal, when caught in a trap, will snap the bone by a twist of his body and then cut the leg off with his teeth, and so escape, leaving his foot in the trap's jaws. This is common enough among fur-bearing animals to excite no comment; and it is sad now to remember that sometimes I would find animals drowned in my traps, that had previously suffered at the hands of other trappers.

I remember especially one big musquash that I was going to shoot near one of my traps, when I stopped short at noticing some queer thing about him. The trap was set in shallow water where a path made by muskrats came up out of the river into the grass. Just over the trap was a turnip on a pointed stick to draw the creature's attention and give him something to anticipate until he should put his foot on the deadly pan beneath. But the old musquash avoided the path, as if he had suffered in such places before. Instead of following the ways of his ancestors he came out at another spot behind the trap, and I saw with horrible regret that he had cut off both his fore legs, probably at different times, when he had been twice caught in man's abominable inventions. When he came up out of the stream he rose on his hind legs and waddled through the grass like a bear or a monkey, for he had no fore feet to rest upon. He climbed a tussock beside the bait with immense caution, pulled in the turnip with his two poor stumps of forearms, ate it where he was, and slipped back into the stream again; while the boy watched with a new wonder in the twilight, and forgot all about the gun as he tended his traps.

It does not belong with my story, but that night the traps came in, and never went out again; and I can never pass a trap now anywhere without poking a stick into it to save some poor innocent leg.

All this is digression; and I have almost forgotten my surgery and the particular muskrat I was talking about. He, too, had been caught in some other fellow's trap and had bitten his leg off only a few days before. The wound was not yet healed, and the amazing thing about it was that he had covered it with some kind of sticky vegetable gum, probably from some pine-tree that had been split or barked close to the ground where Musquash could reach it easily. He had smeared it thickly all over the wound and well up the leg above it, so that all dirt and even all air and water were excluded perfectly.

An old Indian who lives and hunts on Vancouver Island told me recently that he has several times caught beaver that had previously cut their legs off to escape from traps, and that two of them had covered the wounds thickly with gum, as the muskrat had done. Last spring the same Indian caught a bear in a deadfall. On the animal's side was a long rip from some other bear's claw, and the wound had been smeared thickly with soft spruce resin. This last experience corresponds closely with one of my own. I shot a big bear, years ago, in northern New Brunswick, that had received a gunshot wound, which had raked him badly and then penetrated the leg. He had plugged the wound carefully with clay, evidently to stop the bleeding, and then had covered the broken skin with sticky mud from the river's brink, to keep the flies away from the wound and give it a chance to heal undisturbed. It is noteworthy here that the bear uses either gum or clay indifferently, while the beaver and muskrat seem to know enough to avoid the clay, which would be quickly washed off in the water.

Here are a few incidents, out of a score or more that I have seen, or heard from reliable hunters, that indicate something more than native instinct among animals. When I turn to the birds the incidents are fewer but more remarkable; for the birds, being lower in the scale of life, are more subject to instinct than are the animals, and so are less easily taught by their mothers, and are slower to change their natural habits to meet changing conditions.

This is, of course, a very general statement and is subject to endless exceptions. The finches that, when transported to Australia from England, changed the style of their nests radically and now build in a fashion entirely different from that of their parents; the little goldfinch of New England that will build a false bottom to her nest to cover up the egg of a cow-bird that has been left to hatch among her own; the grouse that near the dwellings of men are so much wilder and keener than their brethren of the wilderness; the swallows that adopt the chimneys and barns of civilization instead of the hollow trees and clay banks of their native woods,--all these and a score of others show how readily instinct is modified among the birds, and how the young are taught a wisdom that their forefathers never knew. Nevertheless it is true, I think, that instincts are generally sharper with them than with animals, and the following cases suggest all the more strongly that we must look beyond instinct to training and individual discovery to account for many things among the feathered folk.

The most wonderful bit of bird surgery that has ever come to my attention is that of the woodcock that set his broken leg in a clay cast, as related in a previous chapter; but there is one other almost as remarkable that opens up a question that is even harder to answer. One day in the early spring I saw two eider-ducks swimming about the Hummock Pond on the island of Nantucket. The keen-eyed critic will interfere here and say I was mistaken; for eiders are salt-water ducks that haunt only the open sea and are supposed never to enter fresh water, not even to breed. That is what I also supposed until I saw these two; so I sat down to watch a while and find out, if possible, what had caused them to change their habits. At this time of year the birds are almost invariably found in pairs, and sometimes a flock a hundred yards long will pass you, flying close to the water and sweeping around the point where you are watching, first a pretty brown female and then a gorgeous black-and-white drake just behind her, alternating with perfect regularity, female and male, throughout the whole length of the long line. The two birds before me, however, were both females; and that was another reason for watching them instead of the hundreds of other ducks, coots and sheldrakes and broadbills that were scattered all over the big pond.

The first thing noticed was that the birds were acting queerly, dipping their heads under water and keeping them there for a full minute or more at a time. That was also curious, for the water under them was too deep for feeding, and the eiders prefer to wait till the tide falls and then gather the exposed shellfish from the rocks, rather than to dive after them like a coot. Darkness came on speedily to hide the birds, who were still dipping their heads as if bewitched, and I went away no wiser for my watching.

A few weeks later there was another eider, a big drake, in the same pond, behaving in the same queer way. Thinking perhaps that this was a wounded bird that had gone crazy from a shot in the head, I pushed out after him in an old tub of a boat; but he took wing at my approach, like any other duck, and after a vigorous flight lit farther down the pond and plunged his head under water again. Thoroughly curious now, I went on a still hunt after the stranger, and after much difficulty succeeded in shooting him from the end of a bushy point. The only unusual thing about him was that a large mussel, such as grow on the rocks in salt water, had closed his shells firmly on the bird's tongue in such a way that he could neither be crushed by the bird's bill nor scratched off by the bird's foot. I pulled the mussel off, put it in my pocket, and went home more mystified than before.

That night I hunted up an old fisherman, who had a big store of information in his head about all kinds of wild things, and asked him if he had ever seen a shoal-duck in fresh water. "Once or twice," he said; "they kept dipping their heads under water, kinder crazy like." But he had no explanation to offer until I showed him the mussel that I had found on the duck's tongue. Then his face lightened. "Mussels of that kind won't live in fresh water," he declared at a glance; and then the explanation of the birds' queer actions flashed into both our heads at once: the eiders were simply drowning the mussels in order to make them loosen their grip and release the captive tongues.

This is undoubtedly the true explanation, as I made sure by testing the mussels in fresh water and by watching the birds more closely at their feeding. All winter they may be found along our coasts, where they feed on the small shellfish that cover the ledges. As the tide goes down they swim in from the shoals, where they rest in scattered flocks, and chip the mussels from the ledges, swallowing them shells and all. A score of times I have hidden among the rocks of the jetty with a few wooden decoys in front of me, and watched the eiders come in to feed. They would approach the decoys rapidly, lifting their wings repeatedly as a kind of salutation; then, angered apparently that they were not welcomed by the same signal of uplifted wings, they would swim up to the wooden frauds and peck them savagely here and there, and then leave them in disgust and scatter among the rocks at my feet, paying little attention to me as long as I kept perfectly still. For they are much tamer than other wild ducks, and are, unfortunately, slow to believe that man is their enemy.

I noticed another curious thing while watching them and hoping that by some chance I might see one caught by a mussel. When a flock was passing high overhead, any sudden noise--a shout, or the near report of a gun--would make the whole flock swoop down like a flash close to the water. Plover have the same habit when they first arrive from Labrador, but I have hunted in vain for any satisfactory explanation of the thing.