herbs--interlace underneath the tree; and within sight the dandelion
blooms, and perfects its juices for some torpid liver; while under the
fence the wild sage puts forth its gray leaves, gathering subtile
influences from earth and air to give increase of wisdom and longevity.
If the motherly old prophetess of other days--she who had such faith in
God and simples--would come this way, she might gather herbs enough to
cure no small part of this disordered world.
Take it all in all, one might go a long way and not find another more
perfect landscape. The dim, encircling mountains--one with the ragged
edges of an extinct volcano still visible; the warm hill-sides, where
vine, and fig, and olive blend; the natural park in the foreground,
begirt with clear waters which break through a canyon above--the home of
trout, grown too cunning for the hook, except on cloudy days; the line
of perpetual green which the rivulet carries a mile farther down, and
loses it at the fretting shore line; the village, with its smart
obtrusiveness toned by distance; and the infinite reach of the ocean
beyond--these all enter into the composition. Well, if one has a "stake
in the soil" just here, what is the harm in coming to drive it a little
once a year, and to enjoy the luxury of wiping out such scores as are
run up on the debit side of the account? Farming for dividends is a
prosy business; but farming with a discount may have a world of
sentiment in it.
Have you quite answered the question yet, whether the instinct of
certain animals is not reason? Here are a dozen quadrupedal friends that
can demonstrate the fact that they have something more than instinct.
There is that honest old roan horse coming from the side-hill for his
lump of sugar. He knows well enough that he is not entitled to it now.
He is only coming to try his chances. But give him an hour under the
saddle, then turn him out and see if he will not get it. Forgetting once
to give him his parting lump, he came back again at midnight from the
field, and, thrusting his head into an open window, whinnied such a
blast that every inmate of the farm-house bolted from bed. He got his
sugar, but with a look of injured innocence; and ever since has been
dealt with in good faith. Charley is something of a sportsman, in his
way. In the autumn you have only to get on his back with a gun, and he
trudges off to places where the quails come out from covert by hundreds
into the little openings in the chaparral. The horse will edge up very
near to them; when he drops his head, that is his signal to fire. If
lithe enough, you will pick them up without leaving the saddle. If you
get down to gather up the game he will wait. He will go on in his own
way, and discover the birds long before you can, dropping his head as a
signal at just the right moment. You may call this horse sense, but it
is horse reason--so near akin to human reason that there might be some
trouble in tracing the dividing line. So much for this old cob, who
smuggles his honest head under your coat for sugar, knowing well enough
that he has not earned it.
Another horse, now dead and happy, I hope, in the other world, stopped
one dark night, when half-way down a steep and dangerous hill. There was
a neighbor, with wife and babies, in the carriage. The horse would not
budge an inch (not under the whip), but turned his head around,
declaring, as plainly as a horse could, that there was danger. The
hold-back straps had broken, and the pressure of the carriage against
his haunches, which sustained the entire load from the top of the hill,
had started the blood cruelly; yet there he stood, resolutely holding
back wife and babies from destruction, choosing even to suffer the
indignities of the lash, rather than that injury should come to one of
his precious charge. Did that horse have reason? I rather think so; and
that he only needed articulation to have made a remonstrance quite as
much to the point as that memorable one made by Balaam's ass.
There is that great mastiff, yawning so lazily, with power to hold an ox
at his will, or to throttle a man. But no man could abuse him as that
little child does every day. He understands well enough that that lump
of animated dough has not arrived at years of discretion, and so he
submits to all manner of cruelties with perfect patience. How, with mere
instinct, does he find out that this child is not yet a "moral agent,"
and that all these pinchings, and pluckings, and brandings with a hot
poker are the irresponsible freaks of the young rascal, who can get off
harmless by pleading the Baby Act? This honest dog would die for that
little child who abuses him every day. But let a "Greaser" come to take
so much as one Brahma pullet from the roost, and he has him by the
throat. Does instinct account for this clear perception of right and
wrong?
Some clever ways he has, also, of winning favor. He has got it into his
head that a certain black cat, that sleeps in any little patch of
sunlight on the kitchen floor, is a nuisance, and he has taken a
contract to abate it. But, at the same time, he is on such friendly
terms with pussy that he would not hurt her for the world. Now a cat
knows, by instinct, how to carry her kittens and not hurt them. But how
did this dog find out that a cat can be carried safely and comfortably
by the nape of her neck? Very gently he takes up pussy thus by her neck,
carries her off a quarter of a mile or so from the farm-house, sets her
down, and then comes back and balances the account with a crust of
bread, or any odd fragment of meat, by way of lunch. On one occasion
puss got back to the house before him. It bothered him that the case
amounted so nearly to a "breach of contract." Taking puss once more by
the neck, he carried her across a creek, and, setting her down on the
other side, returned with an air of profound satisfaction. He got an
extra lunch that day. But how did the dog know that a cat has a mortal
aversion to crossing a stream of water? If that dog had no more than
mere instinct, pray, what is reason?
His "predecessor" was a foolish dog, not more than "half-witted." But
even his canine idiocy gave way to gleams of reason. He became an expert
at driving cattle which trespassed on the farm. If the herd scattered,
he singled out the leader, laid hold of his tail, and steered him as
well as a yachtman could steer his craft through an intricate channel.
After two or three steers had been piloted in this way, the rest would
follow the leaders. The dog had hit upon the most economical plan with
respect to time and the distance to be traversed. But, one day, in
managing a vicious mustang-ox, his patience was sorely tried. Jerking
him suddenly into the right path, his tail parted! The whole bovine
steering-apparatus had given way, as completely as a ship's rudder in a
storm. The dog never could quite comprehend the case. He took himself to
his kennel, and would never drive cattle afterward. In fact, he was
never the same dog after that catastrophe. Only instinct, you say? But
then, if there had been an asylum for canine idiots, that dog would have
been entitled to a ticket of admission. His exceptional foolishness
confirms our theory.
Years ago, a seven-year-old brought home an insignificant little
mongrel--a mere puppy--and pleaded so earnestly for its toleration that
the maternal judgment was quite overcome. "Chip" was always a nuisance,
but understood more of human speech than any dog "on record." If the
plans of the day were discussed in his hearing, he comprehended the
principal movements to be made. If the plan excluded his company he knew
it, and stole away a half-hour in advance, always selecting the right
road, and putting in his mute plea for forbearance in just the nick of
time to make it available. Half a dozen times was that dog given away.
Yet he always knew the day on which the transfer was to be made, and on
that particular day he could never be found. Now, does a dog that
understands the significance of human speech, without a motion or
gesture--not only interpreting but connecting a series of ideas, so as
to comprehend, in advance, plans and movements--find out all these
things by mere instinct? You may limit and qualify the term, but it is
reason, after all.
Train a fox ever so much, and you cannot develop anything in him but the
meanest instincts. He will never be grateful, and never honest, nor can
any terms of friendship be established with him. His traditional cunning
is a hateful dishonesty. After nearly a year of tuition on a young gray
fox, he was never advanced to any respectable degree of intelligence. He
would lie at the mouth of his kennel for hours to confiscate any old hen
who happened to pass with a brood of chickens, disdaining, the while, to
seize any plump young rooster that passed within reach, because his
diabolical instinct was to work the greatest possible amount of
mischief. After making a hundred young chickens orphans, he broke his
chain one night and left for the forest. The thief came back a few
nights afterward to make more orphans. That gray pelt tacked up on the
rear of the barn is his obituary.
A series of brilliant experiments that were to have been made on a young
rattlesnake turned out not a whit more satisfactory. The reptile was not
"raised" just here, but was presented by a friend. His teeth were to
have been drawn, after which various observations were to have been made
concerning his tastes and habits, and particularly his disposition when
not provoked. There was a prospect of making an honest reptile of him.
He was put in an empty barrel for the night; but next morning two
half-breed Shanghaes had him, one by the tail and the other by the head.
He parted about midway, each miserable rooster swallowing his half, and
that without even the excuse of a morbid appetite. Since that time I
have never been able to hate a young rattlesnake half as much as that
detestable breed of Shanghaes.
If one is not sick unto death, what more effectual medication can be
found than the sun, and the south wind, and the all-embracing earth? The
children of the poor are healthy, because they sprout out of the very
dirt. The sun dispels humors, enriches the blood; and the winds execute
a sanitary commission for these neglected ones. They live because they
are of the earth--earthy. The experiment of training a race of
attenuated cherubs in the shade, and making them martyrs to clean aprons
and clean dickeys, is a failure. There is a vast amount of _post mortem_
doggerel that never would have been written if the cherubs had only made
dirt-pies, and had eaten freely of them. Observe the strong tendency in
men, even of culture, to court the wildness and rude energy of savage
life. Let one sleep on the ground, in a mild climate, for three months,
and even the man who reads Homer is content, often, to sleep there the
rest of his lifetime. It is better to tame the savage rather cautiously,
and with some reserve, for if he be eliminated wholly, the best
relations with Nature are broken off. Evermore we are seeking for
something among books and pictures, and in the babblings of polite
society, that we do not find. When the blood is thin, and the body has
become spiritualized, then it is easy to ascend to the clouds, as
balloons go up, and hold high discourse; while the world, under our
feet, teeming with its myriad lives, pulsating even to the smallest
dust, and all glorified, if we will behold it, is not taken into
fellowship, its speech interpreted nor its remedial forces marshaled as
friends, to back our halting and troubled humanity. It has taken almost
six thousand years to find out that a handful of dry earth will heal the
most cruel wound. In the day of our mortal hurt we do but go back to the
earth, believing that in the ages to come we shall go forth again,
eternally renewed.
There are islands in the Pacific where birds and beasts, and every
living thing, are free from fear of, or even a suspicion of wrong, from
man. But where civilization is introduced, there is a bridgeless gulf
between us and all orders of existence beneath. There is a
half-articulate protest coming up, that this thing called modern
civilization is treacherous, cruel, and dishonest. For a century its
evangels have proclaimed its mission of love. But humanity has wrestled
with its own kind more fiercely than ever before. It is decent enough to
kill each other, if done according to some conventional code. But it is
vulgar to eat our enemies; and so the custom, in polite society, has
fallen into disuse.
Is it a wonder that all animate nature is accusatory and suspicious?
Little by little we win it back to our confidence. The birds that were
silent and moody, because of our intrusion, give, after a while, little
fragments of song, and hop down on the lower branches, holding
inquisitory councils. A lizard runs along upon a fallen tree, each time
getting a little nearer; he has the handsomest of eyes, but not a good
facial expression; yet so lithe and nimble, and improves so on
acquaintance that we shall soon be friends. Darting his tongue through
an insect, he comes a little nearer, as though he would ask, "Do you
take your prey in that way?" Two orioles have swung up their hammock to
the swaying branch of a chestnut oak. They do not swing from the
madrono, because its branches are too stiff and unyielding. They have
been in trouble for half an hour. The robins were in trouble earlier in
the day; a dozen of them went after a butcher-bird, and whipped him
honestly and handsomely. There is a little brown owl, sitting on a dry
limb, not a hundred yards off. He came into the world with a sort of
antediluvian gravity that never bodes any good. If the solemn bird could
only sing, he would allay suspicion at once. Never has a song-bird a
bloody beak. Your solemn-visaged men of frigid propriety, out of whose
joyless natures a song or a laugh never breaks, can thrust their talons
into human prey, if but occasion only serve, as this owl will into some
poor bird just at the going down of the sun.
The bees come and go sluggishly, either because there is an opiate in
the sweets of the wild poppy, which flames on the hill-side, or because
there is no winter season here demanding great reserves of honey. Nearly
all of them turn vagabonds and robbers in this country. The line of
departure is toward a redwood, which is dry at the top, a knot-hole
evidently serving for ingress and egress. If their own stores fail, they
will go to some tame hive and fight their more honest neighbors and
plunder all their reserves. Even a bee-hive is no longer a symbol of
lawful industry, since the bees have become knaves, and do not even rob
in a chivalrous way. But they, in turn, will be despoiled by some
vagabond who has carved his initials on every "suspected" tree
hereabout. It is a world of reprisals after all. The strong prey upon
the weak; and they, in turn, after passing virtuous resolutions of
indignant dissent, spoil those who are weaker still. It is a hard
necessity. But how can the fox do without the hare, the hawk without a
thrush, or he without a beetle, or the beetle without his fly? Strong
nations capture the weak; and there are weak and pitiful races of men,
with no force or vitality to found nations and dynasties. These only
wait to be plucked up by the stronger, as so much human rubbish waiting
for flood and flame. High-breeding may degenerate races. Your
thoroughbred cattle, however, take the premiums at the great fairs of
the world. It is not necessary that the ancestral pedigree should be a
long one. But so far as men and women are thoroughbred with respect to
muscle and brain, will they, consciously or otherwise, carry with them
the sceptre of dominion and conquest. They will crowd out inferior
races, either by sheer force or by some trick of diplomacy. An Indian
exchanging territory for blankets, or sending his arrow against an
iron-clad, finds it a losing business always. We write him up handsomely
in romances, but extinguish him cruelly with rifle and sabre.
There was a halo lingering about the dome of the old Mission Church, in
the distance; its cross was glorified just before the sun rested its
disk upon the ocean. The hard outlines of the mountains softened, and
took on a purple hue; the white doves came down out of the clouds, and
clustered about the gables; a light flickered like a fire-fly in the
light-house half a league beyond the church, and another from a window
of the farm-house near by. That skipper, wide off, may take his bearings
from the light on the shore. But at night-fall, the wide-spreading roof
is more hospitable that even this branching madrono. And there is no
philosophy that could not be improved by June butter, redolent of white
clover, with a supplement of cream half an inch thick.
A DAY ON THE LOS GATOS.
A DAY ON THE LOS GATOS.
The brightest stream which bubbles out of the mountains in the Coast
Range, and loses itself on the plains of Santa Clara, ought to have had
a more poetical name. Its feline etymology is probably owing to the fact
that as many wild cats rendezvous about its headwaters as are
congregated within the same limits in any place on these
mountain-slopes. This superabundance of savage life, which so
incontinently runs to white teeth and claws, is an indication that there
is much game in this region. Pussy likes a good bill of fare, and makes
it up of hares, cotton-tail rabbits, ground-squirrels, quails, doves,
and a great number of singing birds, not omitting an occasional
rattlesnake, which is killed so deftly that there is no chance for a
venomous bite. If the unlovely creatures had been more industrious in
this line, the thrushes would have had a better chance, and that dry,
reedy sound in the brush--the one drawback to the pleasure of crawling
on all-fours through the chaparral--would not have started a cold chill
along the spine quite so often.
That little square-looking dog, loaned by a settler at the foot of the
mountain, with his ears split in a dozen places in his encounters with
these animals, goes along for the fun and excitement of another clinch
with his old enemy. The warfare is, after all, conducted on scientific
principles. The wild cat is as strong as a young tiger, and you see by
the depth of the shoulders and the size of the head, that he will fight
terribly. He does not run well, and cannot catch a hare in any other way
than by stealth. The dog runs him to a tree; the cat ascends to the
highest strong limb, goes out on that, and gets an adjustment by which
the smallest possible mark will be presented for a rifle or pistol-shot.
If you want to do the handsome thing, let the head alone; for that is
well defended by the limb on which it is resting. The wind blowing
strong at an oblique angle to your line, will make a difference of at
least an inch in sending that light ball 180 feet; it will also drop
from a right ascending line nearly two inches. Remember, a shrewd
woodsman never forgets these things. Getting your margin adjusted,
plant the ball into the shoulder, just under the spine. He will drop
from the tree with only one foreleg in fighting condition. The dog is on
his back in a second, and there will be the liveliest rough-and-tumble
fight you have seen in many a day. Never mind the wild screams that echo
from the canyon. That fellow's time has come. He will not steal your
best game-chicken out of the top of the tree again.
The dog has won the battle; but he has got some ugly scars along his
sides and flank. Observe that, overheated as he is, he does not rush
into that clear stream. He takes his bath in that shallow spring with a
soft mud bottom. Note how he plasters himself, laying the wounded side
underneath, and then, setting down on his haunches, buries all the
wounded parts in the ooze. The mud has medicinal properties. The dog
knows it. No physician could make so good a poultice for the wounds of a
cat's claws as this dog has made for himself. Pray, if you had been
clawed in that way by either feline or feminine, would you have found
anything at the bottom of your book philosophy so remedial as this dog
has found.
Now that this striped rascal has had his light put out, it is hard to
justify the act after all. He was a thief, stealthy, cowardly,
blood-loving, and cruel. But then his education had been neglected. And
while his moral sentiments had been lapsing for generations, note what a
gain there has been in his animal development; for he is next of kin to
the common house-cat. You cannot upset this theory by pointing to his
abbreviated tail. How long do you suppose it is since every one of your
hair-splitting casuists had a tail more than twice as long as this
fellow, whose descendants, in two generations more, may have none at
all? Taking him up by his enormous jowls, rounding off a head suggesting
diabolical acquisitiveness, it is only necessary to carry a Darwinian
rush-light in the other hand to go straight to the right man and say:
Here is a link in your chain of development, only three removes from the
point you have reached. What a pity that this diminution of tail and
claws does not signify a corresponding decrease of cruel and stealthy
circumvention! You wag your tail approvingly to this proposition,
Samson. But this business of exterminating pests had better cease.
Because, if carried out honestly, it would be inconvenient to some
thousands of men and women who are just now cumbering the world to no
purpose. It goes against the grain mightily to admit that a wild cat
might ever become an angel; but if there is any obscure law tending to
such a result, it is better to interfere with it as little as possible.
If both moral and physical perfectibility are only a question of time,
the fellow who sells his fiery potations close by that sweet mountain
spring, and is never conscious of its perpetual rebuke, ought to have a
margin, at least, of five million years.