The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals Part 18

"On dizzy ledge of mountain wall, above the timber-line I hear the riven slide-rock fall toward the stunted pine. Upon the paths I tread secure no foot dares follow me, For I am master of the crags, and march above the scree."

In other chapters I have referred to the temperament and logic of this animal, the bravest mountaineer of all America.

THE DEER.--In nervous energy the species of the Deer Family vary all the way from the nervous and hysterical barasingha to the sensible and steady American elk that can successfully be driven in harness like a horse. As I look over the deer of all nations I am bound to award the palm for sound common-sense and reasoning power to the elk.

A foolishly nervous deer seldom takes time to display high intelligence. Naturally we dislike men, women, children or wild animals who are always ready to make fools of themselves, stampede, and disfigure the landscape.

The Axis Deer is quietly sensible,--so long as there is no catching to be done. Try to catch one, and the whole herd goes off like a bomb. Many other species are similar. No wild deer could act more absurdly than does the axis, the barasingha and fallow, even after generations have been bred in captivity.

The Malay Sambar Deer of the Zoological Park have one droll trait.

The adult bucks bully and browbeat the does, in a rather mild way, so long as their own antlers are on their heads. But when those antlers take their annual drop, "O, times! O, manners! What a change!" The does do not lose a day in flying at them, and taking revenge for past tyranny. They strike the hornless bucks with their front feet, they b.u.t.t them, and they bite out of them mouthfuls of hair. The bucks do not seem, to know that they can fight without their antlers, and so the tables are completely turned. This continues until the new horns grow out, the velvet dries and is rubbed off,--and then quickly the tables are turned again.

No other deer species of my personal acquaintance has ever equalled the American elk of Wyoming in recognizing man's protection and accepting his help in evil times. It is not only a few wise ones, or a few half-domestic bands, but vast wild herds of thousands that every winter rush to secure man's hay in the Jackson Hole country, south of the Yellowstone Park. No matter how shy they _all_ are in the October hunting season, in the bad days of January and February they know that the annual armistice is on, and it means hay for them instead of bullets. They swarm in the level Jackson Valley, around S. N. Leek's famous ranch and others, until you can see a square mile of solid gray-yellow living elk bodies. Mr. Leek once caught about 2,500 head in one photograph, all hungry. They crowd around the hay sleds like hungry horses. In their greatest hunger they attack the ranchmen's haystacks, just as far as the stout and high log fences will permit them to go, and many a kind-hearted ranchman has robbed his own haystacks to save the lives of starving and despairing elk.

The Yellowstone Park elk know the annual shooting and feeding seasons just as thoroughly as do the men of Jackson Hole.

Once there was a bold and hardy western man who trained a bunch of elk to dive from a forty-foot high platform into a pool of water.

I say that he "trained" them, because it really was that. The animals quickly learned that the plunge did nothing more than to shock and wet them, and so they submitted to the part they had to play, with commendable resignation. Some deer would have fought the program every step of the way, and soon worn themselves out; but elk, and also horses, learn that the diving performance is all in the day's work; which to me seems like good logic. A few persons believe that such performances are cruel to the animals concerned, but the diving alone is not necessarily so.

Some deer have far too much curiosity, too much desire to know "What is that?" and "What is it all about?" The startled mule deer leaps out, jumps a hundred feet or more at a great pace, then foolishly stops and looks back, to gratify his curiosity. That is the hunter's chance; and that fatal desire for accurate information has been an important contributory cause to the extermination of the mule deer, or Rocky Mountain "black-tail,"

throughout large areas. In the Yellowstone Park the once-wild herds of mule deer have grown so tame under thirty years of protection that they completely overrun the parade ground, the officers' quarters, and even enter porches and kitchens for food.

Several authors have remarked upon the habits of the elephant, llama and guanaco in returning to the same spot; and this reminds me of a coincidence in my experience that few persons will believe when I relate it.

In the wild and weird bad-lands of h.e.l.l Creek, Montana, I once went out deer hunting in company with the original old hermit wolf-hunter of that region, named Max Sieber. With deep feeling Max told me of a remarkable miss that he had made the previous year in firing at a fine mule deer buck from the top of a small b.u.t.te; for which I gave him my sympathy.

In the course of our morning's tramp through the very bad-lands that were once the ancestral home of the giant carnivorous dinosaur, yclept _Tyrannosaurus rex,_ we won our way to the foot of a long naked b.u.t.te. Then Sieber said, very kindly:

"If you will climb with me up to the top of this b.u.t.te I will show you where I missed that big buck."

It was not an alluring proposition, and I thought things that I did not speak. However, being an Easy Mark, I said cheerfully, "All right, Max. Go ahead and show me."

We toiled up to a much-too-distant point on the rounded summit, and as Max slowed up and peered down the farther side, he pointed and began to speak.

"He was standing right down there on that little patch of bare-- why!" he exclaimed. "_There's a dee-er there now!_ But it's a doe! Get down! Get down!" and he crouched. Then I woke up and became interested.

"It is _not_ a doe, Max. I see horns!"--Bang!

And in another five seconds a fine buck lay dead on the very spot where Sieber's loved and lost buck had stood one year previously.

But that was only an unbelievable coincidence,--unbelievable to all save old Max.

The natural impulse of the mule deer of those bad-lands when flushed by a hunter is to _run over a ridge,_ and escape over the top; but that is bad judgement and often proves fatal. It would be wiser for them to run _down,_ to the bottoms of those gashed and tortuous gullies, and escape by zig-zagging along the dry stream beds.

The White-Tailed, or Virginia Deer is the wisest member of the Deer Family in North America, and it will be our last big-game species to become extinct. It has reduced self-preservation to an exact science.

In areas of absolute protection it becomes very bold, and breeds rapidly. Around our bungalow in the wilds of Putman County, New York, the deer come and stamp under our windows, tramp through our garden, feed in broad daylight with our neighbor's cattle, and jauntily jump across the roads almost anywhere. They are beautiful objects, in those wild wooded landscapes of lake and hill.

But in the Adirondacks, what a change! If you are keen you may see a few deer in the closed season, but to see in the hunting season a buck with good horns you must be a real hunter. As a skulker and hider, and a detector of hunters, I know no deer equal to the white-tail. In making a safe get-away when found, I will back a buck of this species against all other deer on earth. He has no fatal curiosity. He will not halt and pose for a bullet in order to have a look at you. What the startled buck wants is more s.p.a.ce and more green bushes between the Man and himself.

The Moose is a weird-looking and uncanny monster, but he knows one line of strategy that is startling in its logic. Often when a bull moose is fleeing from a long stern chase,--always through wooded country,--he will turn aside, swing a wide semicircle backward, and then lie down for a rest close up to leeward of his trail.

There he lies motionless and waits for man-made noises, or man scent; and when he senses either sign of his pursuer, he silently moves away in a new direction.

The Antelopes of the Old World. The antelopes, gazelles, gnus and hartebeests of Africa and Asia almost without exception live in herds, some of them very large. Owing to this fact their minds are as little developed, individually, as the minds of herd animals generally are. The herd animal, relying as it does upon its leaders, and the security that large numbers always seem to afford, is a creature of few independent ideas. It is not like the deer, elk, sheep or goat that has learned things in the hard school of solitude, danger and adversity, with no one on whom to rely for safety save itself. The basic intelligence of the average herd animal can be summed up in one line:

"Post your sentinels, then follow your leader."

Judging from what hunters in Africa have told me, the hunting of most kinds of African antelopes is rather easy and quiet long- range rifle work. In comparison with any sheep, goat, ibex, markhor and even deer hunting, it must be rather mild sport. A level gra.s.sy plain with more or less bushes and small trees for use in stalking is a tame scenario beside mountains and heavy forests, and it seems to me that this sameness and tameness of habitat naturally fails to stimulate the mental development of the wild habitants. In captivity, excepting the keen kongoni, or c.o.ke hartebeest, and a few others, the old-world antelopes are mentally rather dull animals. They seem to have few thoughts, and seldom use what they have; but when attacked or wounded the roan antelope is hard to finish. In captivity their chief exercise consists in rubbing and wearing down their horns on the iron bars of their indoor cages, but I must give one of our brindled gnus extra credit for the enterprise and thoroughness that he displayed in wrecking a powerfully-built water-trough, composed of concrete and porcelain. The job was as well done as if it had been the work of a big-horn ram showing off. But that was the only exhibition of its kind by an African antelope.

The Alleged "Charge" of the Rhinoceros. For half a century African hunters wrote of the a.s.saults of African rhinoceroses on caravans and hunting parties; and those accounts actually established for that animal a reputation for pugnacity. Of late years, however, the evil intentions of the rhinoceros have been questioned by several hunters. Finally Col. Theodore Roosevelt firmly declared his belief that the usual supposed "charge" of the rhinoceros is nothing more nor less than a movement to draw nearer to the strange man-object, on account of naturally poor vision, to see what men look like. In fact, I think that most American sportsmen who have hunted in Africa now share that view, and credit the rhino with very rarely running at a hunter or a party in order to do damage.

The Okapi, of Central Africa, inhabits dense jungles of arboreal vegetation and they are so expert in detecting the presence of man and in escaping from him that thus far, so far as we are aware, no white man has ever shot one! The native hunters take them only in pitfalls or in nooses. Mr. Herbert Lang, of the American Museum of Natural History, diligently hunted the okapi, with native aid, but in spite of all his skill in woodcraft the cunning of the okapi was so great, and the brushy woods were so great a handicap to him, that he never shot even one specimen.

In skill in self-preservation the African bongo antelope seems to be a strong rival of the okapi, but it has been killed by a few white men, of whom Captain Kermit Roosevelt is one.

XIV

MENTAL TRAITS OF A FEW RODENTS

Out of the vast ma.s.s of the great order of the gnawing animals of the world it is possible here to consider only half a dozen types.

However, these will serve to blaze a trail into the midst of the grand army.

The White-Footed Mouse, or Deer Mouse. On the wind-swept divides and coulees of the short-gra.s.s region of what once were the Buffalo Plains of Montana, only the boldest and most resourceful wild mice can survive. There in 1886 we found a white-footed mouse species (_Peromyscus leucopus_), nesting in the brain cavities of bleaching buffalo skulls, on divides as bare and smooth as golf links.

In 1902, while hunting mule deer with Laton A. Huffman in the wildest and most picturesque bad-lands of central Montana, we pitched our tent near the upper waterhole of h.e.l.l Creek.

[Footnote: A few months later, acting upon the information of our fossil discoveries that we conveyed to Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, an expedition from the American Museum of Natural History ushered into the scientific world the now famous h.e.l.l Creek fossil bed, and found, about five hundred feet from the ashes of our camp-fire, the remains of _Tyrannosaurus rex._]For the benefit of our camp-fire, our cook proceeded to hitch his rope around a dry cottonwood log and snake it close up to our tent.

When it was cut up, we found snugly housed in the hollow, a nest, made chiefly of feathers, containing five white-footed mice.

Packed close against the nest was a pint and a half of fine, clean seed, like radish seed, from some weed of the Pulse Family. While the food-store was being examined, and finally deposited in a pile upon the bare ground near the tent door, the five mice escaped into the sage-brush. Near by stood an old-fashioned buggy, which now becomes a valuable piece of stage property.

The next morning, when Mr. Huffman lifted the cushion of his buggy-seat, and opened the top of the shallow box underneath, the five mice, with their heads close together in a droll-looking group, looked out at him in surprise and curiosity, and at first without attempting to run away. But very soon it became our turn to be surprised.

We found that these industrious little creatures had gathered up every particle of their nest, and every seed of their winter store, and carried all of it up into the seat of that buggy! The nest had been carefully re-made, and the seed placed close by, as before. Considering the number of journeys that must have been necessary to carry all those materials over the ground, plus a climb up to the buggy seat, the industry and agility of the mice were amazing.

By way of experiment, we again removed the nest, and while the mice once more took to the sage-brush, we collected all the seed, and poured it in a pile upon the ground, as before. During the following night, those indomitable little creatures _again_ carried nest and seed back into the buggy seat, just as before!

Then we gathered up the entire family of mice with their nest and seed, and transported them to New York.

Now, the reasoning of those wonderful little creatures, in the face of new conditions, was perfectly obvious, (1) Finding themselves suddenly deprived of their winter home and store of food, (2) they scattered and fled for personal safety into the tall gra.s.s and sage-brush. (3) At night they a.s.sembled for a council at the ruins of their domicile and granary. (4) They decided that they must in all haste find a new home, close by, because (5) at all hazards their store of food must be saved, to avert starvation. (6) They explored the region around the tent and camp-fire, and (7) finally, as a last resort, they ventured to climb up the thills of the buggy. (8) After a full exploration of it they found that the box under the seat afforded the best winter shelter they had found. (9) At once they decided that it would do, and without a moment's delay or hesitation the whole party of five set to work carrying those seeds up the thills--a fearsome venture for a mouse--and (10) there before daybreak they deposited the entire lot of seeds. (11) Finding that a little time remained, they carried up the whole of their nest materials, made up the nest anew, and settled down within it for better or for worse.

Now, this is no effort of our imagination. It is a story of actual facts, all of which can be proven by three competent witnesses.

How many human beings similarly dispossessed and robbed of home and stores, act with the same cool judgment, celerity and precision that those five tiny creatures then and there displayed?

The Wood Rat, Pack Rat, or Trading Rat. Although I have met this wonderful creature (_Neotoma_) in various places on its native soil, I will quote from another and perfectly reliable observer a sample narrative of its startling mental traits. At Oak Lodge, east coast of Florida, we lived for a time in the home of a pair of pack rats whose eccentric work was described to me by Mrs.

C. F. Latham, as follows:

First they carried a lot of watermelon seeds from the ground floor upstairs, and hid them under a pillow on a bed. Then they took from the kitchen a tablespoonful of cuc.u.mber seeds and hid them in the pocket of a vest that hung upstairs on a nail. In one night they removed from box number one, eighty five pieces of bee-hive furniture, and hid them in another box. On the following night they deposited in box number one about two quarts of corn and oats.