The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals Part 17

Intellectually the ruminants are not as high as the apes and monkeys, bears, wolves, foxes and dogs, the domestic horses and the elephants. They are handicapped by feet that are good for locomotion and defense, but otherwise are almost as helpless as so many jointed sticks. This condition closes to the ruminants the possibility of a long program of activities which the ruminant brain might otherwise develop. The ruminant hoof and leg is well designed for swift and rough travel, for battles with distance, snow, ice, mud and flood, and for a certain amount of fighting, but they are inept for the higher manifestations of brain power.

Because of this unfortunate condition, the study of ruminants in captivity does not yield a great crop of results. The free wild animals are far better subjects, and it is from them that we have derived our best knowledge of ruminant thoughts and ways. It is not possible, however, to set forth here any more than a limited number of representative species.

THE BISON AND WILD CATTLE. The American Bison.--Through the age- long habit of the American bison to live in large herds, and to feel, generation after generation, the sense of personal security that great numbers usually impart, the bison early acquired the reputation of being a stolid or even a stupid animal. Particularly was this the case in the days of the greatest bison destruction, when a still-hunter could get "a stand" on a bunch of buffaloes quietly grazing at the edge of the great ma.s.s, and slowly and surely shoot down each animal that attempted to lead that group away from the sound of his rifle.

During that fatal period the state of the buffalo mind was nothing less than a tragedy. "The bunch" would hear a report two hundred yards away, they would see a grazing cow suddenly and mysteriously fall, struggle, kick the air, and presently lie still. The individuals nearest dully wondered what it was all about. Those farthest away looked once only, and went on grazing. If an experienced old cow grew suspicious and wary, and quietly set out to walk away from those mysterious noises, "bang!" said the Mystery once more, and she would be the one to fall. On this murderous plan, a lucky and experienced hunter could kill from twenty to sixty head of buffaloes, mostly cows, on a s.p.a.ce of three or four acres. The fatal trouble was that each buffalo felt that the presence of a hundred or a thousand others feeding close by was an insurance of _security_ to the individual, and so there was no stampede.

But after all, the bison is not so big a fool as he looks. He can think; and he can _learn._

In 1886, when we were about to set out for Montana to try to find a few wild buffaloes for the National Museum, before the reckless cowboys could find, kill and waste absolutely the last one, a hilarious friend said:

"Pshaw! You don't need to take any rifles! Just get a rusty old revolver, mount a good, sensible horse, ride right up alongside the lumbering old beasts, and shoot them down at arm's length."

We went; but not armed with "a rusty old revolver." We found a few buffaloes, but ye G.o.ds! How changed they were from the old days!

Although only two short years had elapsed since the terminal slaughter of the hundreds of thousands whose white skeletons then thickly dotted the Missouri-Yellowstone divide, _they had learned fear of man,_ and also how to preserve themselves from that dangerous wild beast. They sought the remotest bad lands, they hid in low grounds, they watched sharply during every daylight hour, and whenever a man on horseback was sighted they were off like a bunch of racers, for a long and frantic run straight away from the trouble-maker. Even at a distance of two miles, or as far as they could see a man, they would run from him,--not one mile, or two, but five miles, or seven or eight miles, to another wild and rugged hiding-place.

To kill the buffalo specimens that we needed, three cowboys and the writer worked hard for nearly three months, and it was all that we could do to outwit those man-scared bison, and to get near enough to them to kill what we required. Many a time, when weary from a long chase, I thought with bitter scorn of my friend with the rusty-old-revolver in his mind. No deer, mountain sheep, tiger, bears nor elephants,--all of which I have pursued (and sometimes overtaken!)--were ever more wary or keen in self- preservation than those bison who _at last_ had broken out from under the fatal spell of herd security. I am really glad that this strange turn of Fortune's wheel gave me the knowledge of the true scope of the buffalo mind before the last chance had pa.s.sed.

What did a wild buffalo do when he found himself with a broken leg, and unable to travel, but otherwise sound? Did he go limping about over the landscape, to attract enemies from afar, and be quickly shot by a man or torn to pieces by wolves? Not he! With the keen intelligence of the wounded wild ruminant, he chose the line of least resistance, and on three legs fled downhill. He went on down, and kept going, until he reached the bottom of the biggest and most tortuous coulee in his neighborhood. And then what? Instead of coming to rest in a reposeful little valley a hundred feet wide, he chose the most rugged branch he could find, the one with the steepest and highest banks, and up that dry bed, with many a twist and turn, he painfully limped his way. At last he found himself in a snug and safe ditch, precisely like a front line trench seven feet wide, with perpendicular walls and zig- zagging so persistently that the de'il himself could not find him save by following him up to close quarters, and landing upon his horns. There, without food or water, the wounded animal would stand for many days,--in fact, until hunger would force him back to the valley's crop of gra.s.s. His wild remedy was to _keep still,_ and give that broken leg its chance to knit and grow strong.

I have seen in buffalo skeletons healed bone fractures that filled us with wonder. One case that we shot was a big and heavy bull whose hip socket had been utterly smashed, femur head and all, by a heavy rifle ball; but the bull had escaped in spite of his wound, and he had nursed it until it had healed in _good working order._ We can testify that he could run as well as any of the bisons in his bunch.

Of course young bisons can be tamed, and to a certain extent educated. "Buffalo" Jones broke a pair of two-year-old bulls to work under a yoke, and pull a light wagon. He tried them with bridles and bits, but the buffaloes refused to work with them.

With tight-fitting halters, and the exercise of much-muscle, he was able for a time to make them "gee" and "haw." But not for long. When they outgrew his ability in free-hand drawing, he rigged an upright windla.s.s on each side of his wagon-box, and firmly attached a line to each. When the team was desired to "gee," he deftly wound up the right line on its windla.s.s, and vice versa for "haw."

But even this did not last a great while. The motor control was more tentative than absolute. Once while driving beside a creek on a hot and thirsty day, the super-heated buffaloes suddenly espied the water, twenty feet or so below the road. Without having been bidden they turned toward it, and the windla.s.s failed to stop them. Over the cut bank they went, wagon, man and buffalo bulls, "in one red burial blent." Although they secured their drink, their reputation as draught oxen was shattered beyond repair, and they were cashiered the service.

Elsewhere I have spoken of the bison's temper and temperament.

THE WILD SHEEP.--It takes most newly-captured adult mountain sheep about six months in palatial zoo quarters to get the idea out of their heads that every man who comes near them, even including the man who feeds and waters them, is going to kill them, and that they must rush wildly to and fro before it occurs. But there are exceptions.

At the same time, wild herds soon learn the large difference between slaughter and protection, and thereafter accept man's hay and salt with dignity and persistence. The fine big-horn photographs that have been taken of _wild_ sheep herds on public highways just outside of Banff, Alberta, tell their own story more eloquently than words can do. The photograph of wild sheep, after only twenty-seven years of protection, feeding in herds in the main street of Ouray, Colorado, is an object lesson never to be forgotten by any student of wild animal psychology.

And can any such student look upon such a picture and say that those animals have not thought to some purpose upon the important question of danger and safety to sheep?

Is there anyone left who still believes the ancient and bizarre legend that mountain sheep rams jump off cliffs and alight upon their horns? I think not. People now know enough about anatomy, and the mental traits of wild sheep, to know that nothing of that kind ever occurred save by a dreadful accident, followed by the death of the sheep. No spinal column was ever made by Nature or developed by man that could endure without breaking a headforemost fall from the top of a cliff to the slide-rock bottom thereof.

In Colorado, in May 1907, the late Judge D. C. Beaman of Denver saw a big-horn ram which was pursued by dogs to the precipitous end of a mountain ridge, take a leap for life into s.p.a.ce from top to bottom. The distance straight down was "between twenty and twenty-five feet." The ram went down absolutely upright, with his head fully erect, and his feet well apart. He landed on the slide rock on his feet, broke no bones, promptly recovered himself and dashed away to safety. Judge Beaman declared that "the dogs were afraid to approach even as near as the edge of the cliff at the point from which the sheep leaped off."

John Muir held the opinion that the legend of horn-landing sheep was born of the wild descent of frightened sheep down rocks so steep that they _seemed_ perpendicular but were not, and the sheep, after touching here and there in the wild pitch sometimes landed in a heap at the bottom,--quite against their will. To me this has always seemed a reasonable explanation.

The big-horn sheep has one mental trait that its host of ardent admirers little suspect. It does not like pinnacle rocks, nor narrow ledges across perpendicular cliffs, nor dangerous climbing.

It does not "leap from crag to crag," either up, down or across.

Go where you will in sheep hunting, nine times out of ten you will find your game on perfectly safe ground, from which there is very little danger of falling.

In spirit and purpose the big-horns are great pioneers and explorers. They always want to see what is on the other side of the range. They will sight a range of far distant desert mountains, and to see what is there will travel by night across ten or twenty miles of level desert to find out.

It was in the Pinacate Mountains of northwestern Mexico, on the eastern sh.o.r.e of the head of the Gulf of California, that we made our most interesting observations on wild big-horn sheep. On those black and blasted peaks and plains of lava, where nature was working hard to replant with desert vegetation a vast volcanic area, we found herds of short-haired, undersized big-horn sheep, struggling to hold their own against terrific heat, short food and long thirst. It is a burning shame that since our discovery of those sheep hunters of a dozen different kinds have almost exterminated them.

We saw one band of seventeen sheep, close to Pinacate Peak, all so utterly ignorant of the ways of men that they practically refused to be frightened at our presence and our silent guns. We watched them a long time, forgetful of the flight of time. They were not shrewdly suspicious of danger. They fed, and frolicked, and dozed, as much engrossed in their indolence as if the world contained no dangers for them.

One day Mr. John M. Phillips and I shot two rams, for the Carnegie Museum; and the next morning I had the most remarkable lesson that I ever learned in mountain sheep psychology.

Early on that November morning Mr. Jeff Milton and I left our chilly lair in a lava ravine, and most foolishly left both our rifles at our camp. Hobbling along on foot we led a pack mule over half a mile of rough and terrible lava to a dead sheep. There we quickly skinned the animal, packed the skin and a horned head upon the upper deck of our mule, and started back to camp, leading our a.s.sistant. Half way back we looked westward across an eighth of a mile of rough, black lava, and saw standing on a low point a fine big-horn ram. He stood in a statuesque att.i.tude, facing us, and fixedly gazing at us. He was trying to make out what we were, and to determine why a perfectly good pair of sheep horns should grow out of the back of a sorrel mule! Ethically he had a right to be puzzled.

Mr. Milton and I were greatly annoyed by the absence of our rifles; and he proposed that we should leave the mule where he stood, go back to our camp, get our guns, and kill the sheep. Now, even then I was quite well up on the subject of curiosity in wild animals, and I knew to a minute what to count upon as the standing period of sheep, goat or deer. As gently as possible I informed Milton that _no_ sheep would ever stand and look at a sorrel mule for the length of time it would take us to foot it over that lava to camp, and return.

But my companion was optimistic, and even skeptical.

"Maybe he will, now!" he persisted. "Let's try it. I think he may wait for us."

Much against my judgment, and feeling secretly rebellious at the folly of it all, I agreed to his plan,--solely to be "a good sport," and to play his game. But _I_ knew that the effort would be futile, as well as exhausting. Jeff tied the mule, for the sheep to contemplate.

We went and got those rifles. We were gone fully twenty minutes.

When we again reached the habitat of the mule, _that ram was still there!_ Apparently he had not moved a muscle, nor stirred a foot, nor even batted an eye. Talk about curiosity in a wild animal! He was a living statue of it.

He continued to hold his pose on his lava point while we stalked him under cover of a hillock of lava, and shot him,--almost half an hour after we first saw him. He had been overwhelmingly puzzled by the uncanny sight of a pair of curling horns like his own, growing out of the back of a long-eared sorrel mule which he felt had no zoological right to wear them. He did his level best to think it out; he became a museum specimen in consequence, and he has gone down in history as the Curiosity Ram.

Mental Att.i.tude of Captured Big-Horn Sheep. In 1906 an enterprising and irrepressible young man named Will Frakes took the idea into his head that he must catch some mountain sheep alive, and do it alone and single-handed. Presently he located a few _Ovis nelsoni_ in the Avawatz Mountains near Death Valley, California. Finding a water hole to which mountain sheep occasionally came at night to drink, he set steel traps around it.

One by one he caught five sheep of various ages, but chiefly adults. The story of this interesting performance is told in _Outdoor Life_ magazine for March, April and May, 1907.

I am interested in the mental processes of those sheep as they came in close contact with man, and were compelled by force of circ.u.mstances to accept captivity. Knowing, as all animal men do, the fierce resistance usually made by adult animals to the transition from freedom to captivity, I was prepared to read that those nervous and fearsome adult sheep fought day by day until they died.

But not so. Those sheep showed clear perceptive faculties and good judgment. They were quick to learn that they were conquered, and with amazing resignation they accepted the new life and its strange conditions. In describing the chase on foot in thick darkness of a big old male mountain sheep with a steel trap fast on his foot, Mr. Frakes says:

"A sheep's token of surrender is to lie down and lie still. Once he 'possums, no matter what you do, or how badly you may hurt him, he will never flinch. And when this sheep ("Old Stonewall") was thrown down by the trap, he evidently thought that he was captured, and lay still for a few minutes before he found out the difference, which gave me time to come up with him.... So I went to camp, got a trap clamp and some sacks, made a kind of sled and dragged him in. It was just midnight when I got him tied down, and just sun-up when I got to camp with him. I fixed him up the best I could, stood him up beside the other big-horn and took their pictures. He looked so "rough and ready" that I named him "Old Stonewall." But for all his proud, defiant bearing he has always been a good sheep, _and never tried to fight me._ Still he can hit quick and hard when he wants to, and I have to keep him tied up all the time to keep him from killing the other bucks."

Now, I know not what conclusion others will draw from the above clear and straightforward recital, but to me it established in _Ovis nelsoni_ a reputation for quick thinking, original reasoning and sound conclusions. In an incredibly short period those animals came up to the status of tame animals. The five sheep caught by Mr. Frakes were suddenly confronted by new conditions, such as their ancestors had never even dreamed of meeting; and _all of them reacted in the same way._ That was more than "animal behavior." It was Thought, and Reason!

THE GOATS. White Mountain Goat.--I never have had any opportunity to study at length, in the wilds, the mental traits of the markhors, ibexes, gorals or serows. I have however, enjoyed rare opportunities with the white Rocky Mountain goat, on the summits of the Canadian Rockies as well as in captivity.

Where we were, on the Elk River Mountains of East Kootenay, the goats had little fear of man. They did not know that we were in the group of the world's most savage predatory animals, and we puzzled them. Fourteen of them once leisurely looked down upon us from the edge of a cliff, and silently studied us for a quarter of an hour. An hour later three of them ran through our camp. One morning an old billy calmly lay down to rest himself on the mountain side about 300 feet above our tents. At last, however, he became uneasy, and moved away.

This goat is not a timid and fearsome soul, ready to go into a panic in the presence of danger. The old billy believes that the best defense is a vigorous offense. On the spot where Cranbrook, B. C., now stands, an old billy was caught unawares on an open plain and surrounded by Indians, dogs and horses. In the battle that ensued he so nearly whipped the entire outfit that a squaw rushed wildly to the rescue with a loaded rifle, to enable the Red army to win against the one lone goat.

In those mountains the white goat, grizzly bear, mountain sheep, mule deer and elk all live together, in perfect liaison, and never but once have I heard of the goat getting into a fight with a joint-tenant species. A large silver-tip grizzly rashly attacked a full-grown billy, and managed to inflict upon him mortal injuries.

Before he fell, however, the goat countered by driving his little skewer-sharp black horns into the vitals of the grizzly with such judgment and precision that the dead grizzly was found by Mr. A.

B. Fenwick quite near the dead goat.

We know that the mountain goat is a good reasoner in certain life- or-death matters affecting himself.

He knows no such thing as becoming panic-stricken from surprise or fear. An animal that looks death in the face every hour from sunrise until sunset is not to be upset by trifles. We have seen that if a dog and several men corner a goat on a precipice ledge, and hem him in so that there is no avenue of escape, he does not grow frantic, as any deer or most sheep would do, and plunge off into s.p.a.ce to certain death. Not he. He stands quite still, glares indignantly upon his enemies, shakes his head, occasionally grits his teeth or stamps a foot, but otherwise waits. His att.i.tude and his actions say:

"Well, it is your move. What are you going to do next?"

Most captive ruminants struggle frantically when put into crates for shipment. White goats very rarely do so. They recognize the inevitable, and accept it with resignation. Captive antelopes and deer often kill themselves by dashing madly against wire fences, but I never knew a white goat to injure itself on a fence. Many a wild animal has died from fighting its shipping crate; but no wild goat ever did so. A white goat will walk up a forty-five degree plank to the roof of his house, climb all over it, and joyously perch on the peak; but no mountain sheep or deer of ours ever did so. _They are afraid!_ Only the Himalayan tahr equals the white goat in climbing in captivity, and it will climb into the lower branches of an oak tree, just for fun.

Of all the ruminant animals I know intimately, the white mountain goat is the philosopher-in-chief. Were it not so, how would it be possible for him to live and thrive, and attain happiness, on the savage and fearsome summits that form his chosen home? We must bear in mind that the big-horn does not dare to risk the haunts and trails of his white rivals. Hear the Cragmaster of the Rockies:

[Ill.u.s.tration with caption: THE STEADY-NERVED AND COURAGEOUS MOUNTAIN GOAT He refused to be stampeded off his ledge by men or dog. Photographed at eight feet by John M. Phillips (1905).]