"big game" of the world, we say Ruminants. That easy and
comprehensive name embraces (1) the Bison and Wild Cattle, (2) the
Sheep, Goats, Ibexes and Markhors, (3) the Deer Family and (4) the
Antelope Family. These groups must be considered separately,
because the variations in mind and temperament are quite well
marked; but beyond wisdom in self-preservation, I do not regard
the intelligence of wild ruminants as being really great.
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 mass, 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 space 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 gods! 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 passed.
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 grass. 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 windlass 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 windlass, 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 windlass 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 space 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 shore 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
assistant. 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 attitude, 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 Attitude 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
circumstances 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 space 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 attitude 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:
[Illustration 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).]
"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 butt 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.