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 Hell 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
butte; 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 butte. Then Sieber said, very kindly:
"If you will climb with me up to the top of this butte 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 space
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 grassy 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
Coke 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 assaults 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 mass 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-grass 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 Hell 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 Hell 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 grass and sage-brush. (3) At night they assembled 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 cucumber 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.
Western frontiersmen and others who live in the land of the pack
rat relate stories innumerable of the absurd but industrious
doings of these eccentric creatures. The ways of the pack rat are
so erratic that I find it impossible to figure out by any rules
known to me the workings of their minds. Strange to say, they are
not fiends and devils of malice and destruction like the brown rat
of civilization, and on the whole it seems that the destruction of
valuable property is not by any means a part of their plan. They
have a passion for moving things. Their vagaries seem to be due
chiefly to caprice, and an overwhelming desire to keep exceedingly
busy. I think that the animal psychologists have lost much by so
completely ignoring these brain-busy animals, and I hope that in
the future they will receive the attention they deserve. Why
experiment with stupid and nerveless white rats when pack rats are
so cheap?
It was in the wonderland that on the map is labeled "Arizona"
that I met some astonishing evidences of the defensive reasoning
power of the pack rat. In the Sonoran Desert, where for arid
reasons the clumps of creosote bushes and salt bushes stand from
four to six feet apart, the bare level ground between clumps
affords smooth and easy hunting-grounds for coyotes, foxes and
badgers, saying nothing of the hawks and owls.
Now, a burrow in sandy ground is often a poor fortress; and the
dropping spine-clad joints of the tree choyas long ago suggested
better defenses. In many places we saw the entrance of pack rat
burrows defended by two bushels of spiny choya joints and sticks
arranged in a compact mound-like mass. In view of the virtue in
those deadly spines, any predatory mammal or bird would hesitate
long before tackling a bushel of solid joints to dig through it to
the mouth of a burrow.
Did those little animals collect and place those joints because of
their defensive stickers,--with deliberate forethought and
intention? Let us see.
In the grounds of the Desert Botanical Laboratory, in November
1907, we found the answer to this question, so plainly spread
before us that even the dullest man can not ignore it, nor the
most skeptical dispute it. We found some pack rat runways and
burrow entrances so elaborately laid out and so well defended by
choya joints that we may well call the ensemble a fortress. On
the spot I made a very good map of it, which is presented on page
164. [Footnote: From "Camp-Fires on Desert and Lava" (Scribner's)
page 304.] The animal that made it was the White-Throated Pack Rat
(_Neotoma albigula_). The fortress consisted of several
burrow entrances, the roads leading to which were defended by
carefully constructed barriers of cactus joints full of spines.
The habitants had chosen to locate their fortress between a large
creosote bush and a tree-choya cactus (_Opuntia fulgida_)
that grew on bare ground, twelve feet apart. When away from home
and in danger, the pack rats evidently fled for safety to one or
the other of those outposts. Between them the four entrance holes,
then in use, went down into the earth; and there were also four
abandoned holes.
Connecting the two outposts,--the creosote bush and the choya,--
with the holes that were in daily use there were some
much-used runways, as shown on the map; and each side of each
runway was barricaded throughout its length with spiny joints of
the choya. A few of the joints were old and dry, but the majority
were fresh and in full vigor. We estimated that about three
hundred cactus joints were in use guarding those runways; and no
coyote or fox of my acquaintance, nor eke a dog of any sense,
would rashly jump upon that spiny pavement to capture a rat.
[Illustration with caption: FORTRESS OF A PACK-RAT, AT TUCSON
DEFENDED BY THE SPINY POINTS OF THE TREE CHOYA (_Opuntia
fulgida_)]
Beyond the cactus outpost the main run led straight to the
sheltering base of a thick mesquite bush and a palo verde that
grew tightly together. This gave an additional ten feet of safe
ground, or about twenty-five feet in all.
On our journey to the Pinacate Mountains, northwestern Mexico, we
saw about twelve cactus-defended burrows of the pack rat, some of
them carefully located in the midst of large stones that rendered
digging by predatory animals almost impossible.
The beautiful little Desert Kangaroo Rat (_Dipodomys
deserti_) has worked out quite a different system of home
protection. It inhabits deserts of loose sand and creosote bushes,
where it digs burrows innumerable, always located amid the roots
of the bushes, and each one provided with three or four
entrances,--or exits, as the occasion may require. Each burrow is
a bewildering labyrinth of galleries and tunnels, and in
attempting to lay bare an interior the loose sand caved in, and
the little sprite that lived there either escaped at a distant
point or was lost in the shuffle of sand.
The Gray Squirrel (_Sciurus carolinensis_).--This beautiful
and sprightly animal quickly recognizes man's protection and
friendship, and meets him half way. Go into the woods, sit still,
make a noise like a nut, and if any grays are there very soon you
will see them. The friendships between our Park visitors and the
Park's wild squirrels are one of the interesting features of our
daily life. We have an excellent picture of Mrs. Russell Sage
sitting on a park bench with a wild gray squirrel in her lap. I
have never seen red or fox squirrels that even approached the
confidence of the gray squirrel in the truce with Man, the
Destroyer, but no doubt generous treatment would produce in the
former the gray squirrel's degree of confidence.
I never knew an observer of the home life of the gray squirrel who
was not profoundly impressed by the habit of that animal in
burying nuts in the autumn, and digging them up for food in the
winter and spring. From my office window I have seen our silver-
gray friends come hopping through eight or ten inches of snow,
carefully select a spot, then quickly bore a hole down through the
snow to Mother Earth, and emerge with a nut. Thousands of people
have seen this remarkable performance and I think that the
majority of them still ask the question: "_How_ does the
squirrel know precisely where to dig?" That question cannot be
answered until we have learned how to read the squirrel mind.
Small city parks easily become overstocked with gray squirrels
that are not adequately fed, and the result is,--complaints of
"depredations." Of course hungry and half-starved squirrels will
depredate,--on birds' nests, fruit and gardens. My answer to all
inquirers for advice in such cases is--_feed the squirrels,
adequately, and constantly, on cracked corn and nuts, and send
away the surplus squirrels._
At this time many persons know that the wild animals and birds now
living upon the earth are here solely because they have had
sufficient sense to devise ways and means by which to survive. The
ignorant, the incompetent, the slothful and the unlucky ones have
passed from earth and joined the grand army of fossils.
Take the case of the Rocky Mountain Pika, or little chief "hare,"
of British Columbia and elsewhere. It is not a hare at all, and it
is so queer that it occupies a family all alone. I am now
concerning myself with _Ochotona princeps,_ of the Canadian
Rockies. It is very small and weak, but by its wits it lives in a
country reeking with hungry bears, wolverines and martens. The
pika is so small and so weak that in the open he could not
possibly dig down below the grizzly bear's ability to dig.
And what does he do to save himself, and insure the survival of
the fittest?
He burrows far down in the slide-rock that falls from the cliffs,
where he is protected by a great bed of broken stone so thick that
no predatory animal can dig through it and catch him. There in
those awful solitudes, enlivened only by the crack and rattle of
falling slide-rock, the harsh cry of Clark's nut-cracker and the
whistling wind sweeping over the storm-threshed summits and
through the stunted cedar, the pika chooses to make his
home. Over the slide-rock that protects him, the snows of the long
and dreary winter pile up from six to ten feet deep, and lie
unbroken for months. And how does the pika survive?
[Illustration
with caption: WILD CHIPMUNKS RESPOND TO MAN'S PROTECTION. J. Alden
Loring and his wild pets]
[Illustration with caption: AN OPOSSUM FEIGNING DEATH]
When he is awake, _he lives on hay, of his own making!_
In September and October, and up to the arrival of the enveloping
snow, he cuts plants of certain kinds to his liking, he places
them in little piles atop of rocks or fallen logs where the sun
will strike them, and he leaves them there until they dry
sufficiently to be stored without mildewing. Mr. Charles L. Smith
declared that the pikas know enough to change their little hay
piles as the day wears on, from shade to sunlight. The plants to
be made into hay are cut at the edge of the slide-rock, usually
about a foot in length, and are carried in and placed on flat-
topped rocks around the mouth of the burrow. The stems are laid
together with fair evenness, and from start to finish the
haymaking of the pika is conducted with admirable system and
precision. When we saw and examined half a dozen of those curing
hay piles, we felt inclined to take off our hats to the thinking
mind of that small animal which was making a perfectly successful
struggle to hold its own against the winter rigors of the summits,
and at the same time escape from its enemies.
The common, every-day Cotton-Tail Rabbit (_Lepus sylvaticus_)
is not credited by anyone with being as wise as a fox, but that
is due to our own careless habits of thought. It has been man's way,
ever since the days of the Cavemen, to underrate all wild animals
except himself. We are not going to cite a long line of individual
instances to exhibit the mental processes or the natural wisdom of
the rabbit. All we need do is to point to its success in
maintaining its existence in spite of the enemies arrayed against
it.