IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR?
There was a swish of wings, a flash of gray, a cry of pain; a
squawking, cowering, scattering flock of hens; a weakly fluttering
pullet; and yonder, swinging upward into the sky, a marsh hawk,
buoyant and gleaming silvery in the sun. Over the trees he beat,
circled once, and disappeared.
The hens were still flapping for safety in a dozen directions, but the
gray harrier had gone. A bolt of lightning could hardly have dropped
so unannounced, could hardly have vanished so completely, could
scarcely have killed so quickly. I ran to the pullet, but found her
dead. The harrier’s stroke, delivered with fearful velocity, had laid
head and neck open as with a keen knife. Yet a little slower and he
would have missed, for the pullet warded off the other claw with her
wing. The gripping talons slipped off the long quills, and the hawk
swept on without his quarry. He dared not come back for it at my feet;
so, with a single turn above the woods he was gone.
The scurrying hens stopped to look about them. There was nothing in
the sky to see. They stood still and silent a moment. The rooster
_chucked_. Then one by one they turned back into the open pasture. A
huddled group under the hen-yard fence broke up and came out with the
others. Death had flashed among them, but had missed _them_. Fear had
come, but it had gone. Within two minutes from the fall of the stroke,
every hen in the flock was intent at her scratching, or as intently
chasing the gray grasshoppers over the pasture.
Yet, as the flock scratched, the high-stepping cock would frequently
cast up his eye toward the tree-tops; would sound his alarum at the
flight of a robin; and if a crow came over, he would shout and dodge
and start to run. But instantly the shadow would pass, and instantly
Chanticleer--
“He looketh as it were a grym leoun,
And on hise toos he rometh up and doun;
* * * * *
Thus roial as a prince is in an halle.”
He wasn’t afraid. Cautious, alert, watchful he was, but not afraid. No
shadow of dread lay dark and ominous across the sunshine of his
pasture. Shadows came--like a flash; and like a flash they vanished
away.
We cannot go far into the fields without sighting the hawk and the
snake, whose other names are Death. In one form or another Death moves
everywhere, down every wood-path and pasture-lane, through the black
waters of the mill-pond, out under the open of the April sky, night
and day, and every day, the four seasons through.
I have seen the still surface of a pond break suddenly with a swirl,
and flash a hundred flecks of silver into the light, as the minnows
leap from the jaws of the terrible pike. Then a loud rattle, a streak
of blue, a splash at the centre of the swirl, and I see the pike
twisting and bending in the beak of the terrible kingfisher. The
killer is killed. But at the mouth of the nest-hole in the steep
sand-bank, swaying from a root in the edge of the turf above, hangs
the terrible black snake, the third killer; and the belted kingfisher,
dropping the pike, darts off with a startled cry.
I have been afield at times when one tragedy has followed another in
such rapid and continuous succession as to put a whole shining,
singing, blossoming springtime under a pall. Everything has seemed to
cower, skulk, and hide, to run as if pursued. There was no peace, no
stirring of small life, not even in the quiet of the deep pines; for
here a hawk would be nesting, or a snake would be sleeping, or I
would hear the passing of a fox, see perhaps his keen, hungry face an
instant as he halted, winding me.
There is struggle, and pain, and death in the woods, and there is fear
also, but the fear does not last long; it does not haunt and follow
and terrify; it has no being, no shape, no lair. The shadow of the
swiftest scudding cloud is not so fleeting as this Fear-shadow in the
woods. The lowest of the animals seem capable of feeling fear; yet the
very highest of them seem incapable of dreading it. For them Fear is
not of the imagination, but of the sight, and of the passing moment.
“The present only toucheth thee!”
It does more, it throngs him--our little fellow mortal of the
stubble-field. Into the present is lived the whole of his life--he
remembers none of it; he anticipates none of it. And the whole of this
life is action; and the whole of this action is joy. The moments of
fear in an animal’s life are few and vanishing. Action and joy are
constant, the joint laws of all animal life, of all nature--of the
shining stars that sing together, of the little mice that squeak
together, of the bitter northeast storms that roar across the wintry
fields.
I have had more than one hunter grip me excitedly, and with almost a
command bid me hear the music of the baying pack. There are hollow
halls in the swamps that lie to the east and north and west of me,
that catch up the cry of the foxhounds, that blend it, mellow it,
round it, and roll it, rising and falling over the meadows in great
globes of sound, as pure and sweet as the pearly notes of the veery
rolling round their silver basin in the summer dusk.
What music it is when the pack breaks into the open on the warm trail!
A chorus then of tongues singing the ecstasy of pursuit! My blood
leaps; the natural primitive wild thing of muscle and nerve and
instinct within me slips its leash, and on past with the pack I drive,
the scent of the trail single and sweet in my nostrils, a very fire in
my blood, motion, motion, motion in my bounding muscles, and in my
being a mighty music, spheric and immortal!
“The fair music that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motions swayed....”
But what about the fox, loping wearily on ahead? What part has he in
the chorus? No part, perhaps, unless we grimly call him its conductor.
But the point is the chorus--that it never ceases, the hounds at this
moment, not the fox, in the leading rôle.
“But the chorus ceases for me,” you say. “My heart is with the poor
fox.” So is mine, and mine is with the dogs too. No, don’t say “Poor
little fox!” For many a night I have bayed with the pack, and as
often--oftener, I think--I have loped and dodged and doubled with the
fox, pitting limb against limb, lung against lung, wit against wit,
and always escaping. More than once, in the warm moonlight, I, the
fox, have led them on and on, spurring their lagging muscles with a
sight of my brush, on and on, through the moonlit night, through the
day, on into the moon again, and on until--only the stir of my own
footsteps has followed me. Then, doubling once more, creeping back a
little upon my track, I have looked at my pursuers, silent and stiff
upon the trail, and, ere the echo of their cry has died away, I have
caught up the chorus and carried it single-throated through the
wheeling, singing spheres.
There is more of fact than of fancy to this. That a fox ever purposely
led a dog to run to death would be hard to prove; but that the dogs
run themselves to death in a single extended chase after a single fox
is a common occurrence here in the woods about the farm. Occasionally
the fox may be overtaken by the hounds; seldom, however, except in the
case of a very young one or of one unacquainted with the lay of the
land, a stranger that may have been driven into the rough country
here.
I have been both fox and hound; I have run the race too often not to
know that both enjoy it at times, fox as much as hound. Some weeks ago
the dogs carried a young fox around and around the farm, hunting him
here, there, everywhere, as if in a game of hide-and-seek. An old fox
would have led the dogs on a long coursing run across the range. But
the young fox, after the dogs were caught and taken off the trail,
soon sauntered up through the mowing-field behind the barn, came out
upon the bare knoll near the house, and sat there in the moonlight
yapping down at Rex and Dewey, the house-dogs in the two farms below.
Rex is a Scotch collie, Dewey a dreadful mix of dog-dregs. He had been
tail-ender in the pack for a while during the afternoon. Both dogs
answered back at the young fox. But he could not egg them on. Rex was
too fat, Dewey had had enough; not so the young fox. It had been fun.
He wanted more. “Come on, Dewey!” he cried. “Come on, Rex, play tag
again! You’re still ‘it.’”
I was at work with my chickens one spring day when the fox broke from
cover in the tall woods, struck the old wagon-road along the ridge,
and came at a gallop down behind the hen-coops, with five hounds not a
minute behind. They passed with a crash and were gone--up over the
ridge and down into the east swamp. Soon I noticed that the pack had
broken, deploying in every direction, beating the ground over and
over. Reynard had given them the slip--on the ridge-side, evidently,
for there were no cries from below in the swamp.
Leaving my work at noon, I went down to restake my cow in the meadow.
I had just drawn her chain-pin when down the road through the orchard
behind me came the fox, hopping high up and down, his neck stretched,
his eye peeled for poultry. Spying a white hen of my neighbor’s, he
made for her, clear to the barnyard wall. Then, hopping higher for a
better view, he sighted another hen in the front yard, skipped in
gayly through the fence, seized her, and loped across the road and
away up the birch-grown hills beyond.
The dogs had been at his very heels ten minutes before. He had fooled
them. And no doubt he had done it again and again. They were even now
yelping at the end of the baffling trail behind the ridge. Let them
yelp. It is a kind and convenient habit of dogs, this yelping, one can
tell so exactly where they are. Meantime one can take a turn for one’s
self at the chase, get a bite of chicken, a drink of water, a wink or
two of rest, and when the yelping gets warm again, one is quite ready
to pick up one’s heels and lead the pack another merry dance. The fox
is quite a jolly fellow.
This is the way the races out of doors are all run off. Now and then
they may end tragically. A fox cannot reckon on the hunter with a gun.
He is racing against the pack of hounds. But, mortal finish or no, the
spirit of the chase is neither rage nor terror, but the excitement of
a matched game, the ecstasy of pursuit for the hound, the passion of
escape for the fox, without fury or fear--except for the instant at
the start and at the finish--when it is a finish.
This is the spirit of the chase--of the race, more truly; for it is
always a race, where the stake is not life and death, but rather the
joy of winning. The hound cares as little for his own life as for the
life of the fox he is hunting. It is the race, instead, that he loves;
it is the moments of crowded, complete, supreme existence for
him--“glory” we call it when men run it off together. Death, and the
fear of death, the animals can neither understand nor feel. Only
enemies exist in the world out of doors, only hounds, foxes,
hawks--they, and their scents, their sounds and shadows; and not fear,
but readiness only. The level of wild life, of the soul of all nature,
is a great serenity. It is seldom lowered, but often raised to a
higher level, intenser, faster, more exultant.
The serrate pines on my horizon are not the pickets of a great pen. My
fields and swamps and ponds are not one wide battle-field, as if the
only work of my wild neighbors were bloody war, and the whole of their
existence a reign of terror. This is a universe of law and order and
marvelous balance; conditions these of life, of normal, peaceful,
joyous life. Life and not death is the law; joy and not fear is the
spirit, is the frame of all that breathes, of very matter itself.
“And ever at the loom of Birth
The Mighty Mother weaves and sings;
She weaves--fresh robes for mangled earth;
She sings--fresh hopes for desperate things.”
But suppose the fox were a defenseless rabbit, what of fear and terror
then?
Ask any one who has shot in the rabbity fields of southern New Jersey.
The rabbit seldom runs in blind terror. He is soft-eyed, and timid,
and as gentle as a pigeon, but he is not defenseless. A nobler set of
legs was never bestowed by nature than the little cottontail’s. They
are as wings compared with the bent, bow legs that bear up the
ordinary rabbit-hound. With winged legs, protecting color, a clear map
of the country in his head,--its stumps, railpiles, cat-brier tangles,
and narrow rabbit-roads,--with all this as a handicap, Bunny may well
run his usual cool and winning race. The balance is just as even, the
chances quite as good, and the contest every bit as interesting to him
as to Reynard.
I have seen a rabbit squat close in his form and let a hound pass
yelping within a few feet of him, but waiting on his toes as ready as
a hair-trigger should he be discovered.
I have seen him leap for his life as the dog sighted him, and,
bounding like a ball across the stubble, disappear in the woods, the
hound within two jumps of his flashing tail. I have waited at the end
of the wood-road for the runners to come back, down the home-stretch,
for the finish. On they go through the woods, for a quarter, or
perhaps a half a mile, the baying of the hound faint and intermittent
in the distance, then quite lost. No, there it is again, louder now.
They have turned the course.
I wait.
The quiet life of the woods is undisturbed; for the voice of the hound
is only an echo, not unlike the far-off tolling of a slow-swinging
bell. The leaves stir as a wood mouse scurries from his stump; an
acorn rattles down; then in the winding wood-road I hear the _pit-pat,
pit-pat_, of soft furry feet, and there at the bend is the rabbit. He
stops, rises high up on his haunches, and listens. He drops again upon
all fours, scratches himself behind the ear, reaches over the cart-rut
for a nip of sassafras, hops a little nearer, and throws his big ears
forward in quick alarm, for he sees me, and, as if something had
exploded under him, he kicks into the air and is off,--leaving a
pretty tangle for the dog to unravel, later on, by this mighty jump to
the side.
My children and a woodchopper were witnesses recently of an exciting,
and, for this section of Massachusetts, a novel race, which, but for
them, must certainly have ended fatally. The boys were coming through
the wood-lot where the man was chopping, when down the hillside toward
them rushed a little chipmunk, his teeth a-chatter with terror; for
close behind him, with the easy, wavy motion of a shadow, glided a
dark-brown animal, which the man took on the instant for a mink, but
which must have been a large weasel or a pine marten. When almost at
the feet of the boys, and about to be seized by the marten, the
squeaking chipmunk ran up a tree. Up glided the marten, up for twenty
feet, when the chipmunk jumped. It was a fearfully close call.
The marten did not dare to jump, but turned and started down, when the
man intercepted him with a stick. Around and around the tree he
dodged, growling and snarling and avoiding the stick, not a bit
abashed, stubbornly holding his own, until forced to seek refuge among
the branches. Meanwhile, the terrified chipmunk had recovered his
nerve and sat quietly watching the sudden turn of affairs from a
near-by stump.
I frequently climb into the cupola of the barn during the winter, and
bring down a dazed junco that would beat his life out up there against
the window-panes. He will lie on his back in my open hand, either
feigning death or really powerless with fear. His eyes will close, his
whole tiny body throb convulsively with his throbbing heart. Taking
him to the door, I will turn him over and give him a gentle toss.
Instantly his wings flash; they take him zigzag for a yard or two,
then bear him swiftly round the corner of the house and drop him in
the midst of his fellows, where they are feeding upon the lawn. He
will shape himself up a little and fall to picking with the others.
From a state of collapse the laws of his being bring the bird into
normal behavior as quickly and completely as the collapsed rubber ball
is rounded by the laws of its being. The memory of the fright seems to
be an impression exactly like the dent in the rubber ball--as if it
had never been.
Memories, of course, the animals surely have; but little or no power
to use them. The dog will sometimes seem to cherish a grudge; so will
the elephant. Some one injures or wrongs him, and the huge beast
harbors the memory, broods it, and awaits his opportunity for revenge.
Yet the records of these cases usually show that the creature had been
living with the object of his hatred--his keeper, perhaps--and that
the memory goes no farther back than the present moment, than the
sight of the hated one.
At my railroad station I frequently see a yoke of great sleepy,
bald-faced oxen, that look as much alike as two blackbirds. Their
driver knows them apart; but as they stand there, bound to one another
by the heavy bar across their foreheads, it would puzzle anybody else
to tell Buck from Berry. But not if he approach them wearing an
overcoat. At sight of me in an overcoat the off ox will snort and back
and thrash about in terror, twisting the head of his yoke-fellow,
nearly breaking his neck, and trampling him miserably. But the nigh ox
is used to it. He chews and blinks away placidly, keeps his feet the
best he can, and doesn’t try to understand at all why greatcoats
should so frighten his cud-chewing brother. I will drop off my coat
and go up immediately to smooth the muzzles of both oxen, now blinking
sleepily while the lumber is being loaded on.
Years ago, the driver told me, the off ox was badly frightened by a
big woolly coat, the sight or smell of which probably suggested to the
creature some natural enemy, a panther, perhaps, or a bear. The memory
remained, but beyond recall except in the presence of its first cause,
the greatcoat.
To us there are such things as terror and death, but not to the lower
animals except momentarily. We are clutched by terror even as the
junco was clutched in my goblin hand. When the mighty fingers open, we
zigzag, dazed, from the danger; but fall to planning before the
tremors of the fright have ceased. Upon the crumbled, smoking heap of
San Francisco a second splendid city has arisen and shall ever rise.
Terror can kill the living, but it cannot hinder them from forgetting,
or prevent them from hoping, or, for more than an instant, stop them
from doing. Such is the law of life--the law of heaven, of my
pastures, of the little junco, of myself. Life, Law, and Matter are
all of one piece. The horse in my stable, the robin, the toad, the
beetle, the vine in my garden, the garden itself, and I together with
them all, come out of the same divine dust; we all breathe the same
divine breath; we have our beings under the same divine laws; only
they do not know that the law, the breath, and the dust are divine.
If, with all that I know of fear, I can so readily forget it, and can
so constantly feel the hope and the joy of life within me, how soon
for them, my lowly fellow mortals, must vanish all sight of fear, all
memory of pain! And how abiding with them, how compelling, the
necessity to live! And in their unquestioning obedience, what joy!
The face of the fields is as changeful as the face of a child. Every
passing wind, every shifting cloud, every calling bird, every baying
hound, every shape, shadow, fragrance, sound, and tremor, are
reflected there. But if time and experience and pain come, they pass
utterly away; for the face of the fields does not grow old or wise or
seamed with pain. It is always the face of a child,--asleep in
winter, awake in spring and summer,--a face of life and health always,
as much in the falling leaf as in the opening bud, as much under the
covers of the snow as in the greensward of the spring, as much in the
wild, fierce joy of fox and hound as they course the turning, tangling
paths of the woodlands in their fateful race as in the song of brook
and bird on a joyous April morning.