[Illustration: Crouching Lynx]
PAGE
The Animal Story 13
“The sniffings of the baffled bear or tiger” 17
“The inscrutable eyes of all the cats” 25
The Moonlight Trails 31
“All the players were motionless, with ears one way” 37
“It was beyond his reach” 49
The Lord of the Air 53
“He saw his wide-winged mate, too, leave the nest” 57
“Holding the fish firmly in the clutch of one great talon” 65
“Helplessly intertangled in the meshes” 79
“They flocked blackly about with vituperative malice” 83
Wild Motherhood 91
“Led his herd off northward” 95
“Stood for a moment to sniff the air” 99
“Around its rim circled the wary mother” 105
The Homesickness of Kehonka 115
“He would stand motionless, his compact, glossy head high in
air” 125
“Fell with a great splash into the channel of the Tantramar” 133
“The discourager of quests darted stealthily forth” 137
Savoury Meats 141
“Two green eyes, close to the ground” 153
The Boy and Hushwing 157
“He struck the empty air” 165
“Settled himself, much disconcerted, on the back of an old
haircloth sofa” 171
A Treason of Nature 179
“He gave answer at once to the summons” 187
“Started in mad haste down the shore” 189
“He dug his claws deeper into the bark, and bared his fangs
thirstily” 191
The Haunter of the Pine Gloom 197
“The big beast little imagined himself observed” 203
“A great lynx landed on the log” 207
“Presently the lucifee arose and began creeping stealthily
closer” 213
“A silent gray thunderbolt fell upon him” 217
“Yawned hugely, and stretched herself like a cat” 223
“Mounted the carcass with an air of lordship” 229
The Watchers of the Camp-Fire 239
“His big, spreading paws carried him over its surface as if he
had been shod with snow-shoes” 243
“He pushed the ball again, very, very delicately” 249
“Stole noiselessly toward the shining lovely thing” 259
When Twilight Falls on the Stump Lots 271
“She struggled straight toward the den that held her young” 281
The King of the Mamozekel 285
“The calf stood close by, watching with interest” 293
“The mother mallard would float amid her brood” 301
“But they fell short of their intended mark” 309
“Thick piled the snows about the little herd” 319
“Was off through the underbrush in ignominious flight” 335
“It was fear itself that he was wiping out” 343
In Panoply of Spears 347
“The bear eyed him for some moments” 353
“A weasel glided noiselessly up to the door of the den” 369
[Illustration: Eagle]
[Illustration: THE ANIMAL STORY]
The
Kindred of the Wild
Introductory
The Animal Story
Alike in matter and in method, the animal story, as we have it to-day,
may be regarded as a culmination. The animal story, of course, in one
form or another, is as old as the beginnings of literature. Perhaps the
most engrossing part in the life-drama of primitive man was that played
by the beasts which he hunted, and by those which hunted him. They
pressed incessantly upon his perceptions. They furnished both material
and impulse for his first gropings toward pictorial art. When he acquired
the kindred art of telling a story, they supplied his earliest themes;
and they suggested the hieroglyphs by means of which, on carved bone or
painted rock, he first gave his narrative a form to outlast the spoken
breath. We may not unreasonably infer that the first animal story—the
remote but authentic ancestor of “Mowgli” and “Lobo” and “Krag”—was a
story of some successful hunt, when success meant life to the starving
family; or of some desperate escape, when the truth of the narrative was
attested, to the hearers squatted trembling about their fire, by the
sniffings of the baffled bear or tiger at the rock-barred mouth of the
cave. Such first animal stories had at least one merit of prime literary
importance. They were convincing. The first critic, however supercilious,
would be little likely to cavil at their verisimilitude.
Somewhat later, when men had begun to harass their souls, and their
neighbours, with problems of life and conduct, then these same animals,
hourly and in every aspect thrust beneath the eyes of their observation,
served to point the moral of their tales. The beasts, not being in a
position to resent the ignoble office thrust upon them, were compelled to
do duty as concrete types of those obvious virtues and vices of which
alone the unsophisticated ethical sense was ready to take cognisance. In
this way, as soon as composition became a _métier_, was born the fable;
and in this way the ingenuity of the first author enabled him to avoid a
perilous unpopularity among those whose weaknesses and defects his art
held up to the scorn of all the caves.
[Illustration: “THE SNIFFINGS OF THE BAFFLED BEAR OR TIGER.”]
These earliest observers of animal life were compelled by the necessities
of the case to observe truly, if not deeply. Pitting their wits against
those of their four-foot rivals, they had to know their antagonists, and
respect them, in order to overcome them. But it was only the most salient
characteristics of each species that concerned the practical observer. It
was simple to remember that the tiger was cruel, the fox cunning, the
wolf rapacious. And so, as advancing civilisation drew an ever widening
line between man and the animals, and men became more and more engrossed
in the interests of their own kind, the personalities of the wild
creatures which they had once known so well became obscured to them, and
the creatures themselves came to be regarded, for the purposes of
literature, as types or symbols merely,—except in those cases, equally
obstructive to exact observation, where they were revered as temporary
tenements of the spirits of departed kinsfolk. The characters in that
great beast-epic of the middle ages, “Reynard the Fox,” though far more
elaborately limned than those which play their succinct rôles in the
fables of Æsop, are at the same time in their elaboration far more alien
to the truths of wild nature. Reynard, Isegrim, Bruin, and Greybeard have
little resemblance to the fox, the wolf, the bear, and the badger, as
patience, sympathy, and the camera reveal them to us to-day.
The advent of Christianity, strange as it may seem at first glance, did
not make for a closer understanding between man and the lower animals.
While it was militant, fighting for its life against the forces of
paganism, its effort was to set man at odds with the natural world, and
fill his eyes with the wonders of the spiritual. Man was the only thing
of consequence on earth, and of man, not his body, but his soul. Nature
was the ally of the enemy. The way of nature was the way of death. In man
alone was the seed of the divine. Of what concern could be the joy or
pain of creatures of no soul, to-morrow returning to the dust? To
strenuous spirits, their eyes fixed upon the fear of hell for themselves,
and the certainty of it for their neighbours, it smacked of sin to take
thought of the feelings of such evanescent products of corruption. Hence
it came that, in spite of the gentle understanding of such sweet saints
as Francis of Assisi, Anthony of Padua, and Colomb of the Bees, the
inarticulate kindred for a long time reaped small comfort from the
Dispensation of Love.
With the spread of freedom and the broadening out of all intellectual
interests which characterise these modern days, the lower kindreds began
to regain their old place in the concern of man. The revival of interest
in the animals found literary expression (to classify roughly) in two
forms, which necessarily overlap each other now and then, viz., the story
of adventure and the anecdote of observation. Hunting as a recreation,
pursued with zest from pole to tropics by restless seekers after the new,
supplied a species of narrative singularly akin to what the first animal
stories must have been,—narratives of desperate encounter, strange peril,
and hairbreadth escape. Such hunters’ stories and travellers’ tales are
rarely conspicuous for the exactitude of their observation; but that was
not the quality at first demanded of them by fireside readers. The
attention of the writer was focussed, not upon the peculiarities or the
emotions of the beast protagonist in each fierce, brief drama, but upon
the thrill of the action, the final triumph of the human actor. The
inevitable tendency of these stories of adventure with beasts was to
awaken interest in animals, and to excite a desire for exact knowledge of
their traits and habits. The interest and the desire evoked the natural
historian, the inheritor of the half-forgotten mantle of Pliny. Precise
and patient scientists made the animals their care, observing with
microscope and measure, comparing bones, assorting families, subdividing
subdivisions, till at length all the beasts of significance to man were
ticketed neatly, and laid bare, as far as the inmost fibre of their
material substance was concerned, to the eye of popular information.
Altogether admirable and necessary as was this development at large,
another, of richer or at least more spiritual significance, was going on
at home. Folk who loved their animal comrades—their dogs, horses, cats,
parrots, elephants—were observing, with the wonder and interest of
discoverers, the astonishing fashion in which the mere instincts of these
so-called irrational creatures were able to simulate the operations of
reason. The results of this observation were written down, till
“anecdotes of animals” came to form a not inconsiderable body of
literature. The drift of all these data was overwhelmingly toward one
conclusion. The mental processes of the animals observed were seen to be
far more complex than the observers had supposed. Where instinct was
called in to account for the elaborate ingenuity with which a dog would
plan and accomplish the outwitting of a rival, or the nice judgment with
which an elephant, with no nest-building ancestors behind him to instruct
his brain, would choose and adjust the teak-logs which he was set to
pile, it began to seem as if that faithful faculty was being overworked.
To explain yet other cases, which no accepted theory seemed to fit,
coincidence was invoked, till that rare and elusive phenomenon threatened
to become as customary as buttercups. But when instinct and coincidence
had done all that could be asked of them, there remained a great
unaccounted-for body of facts; and men were forced at last to accept the
proposition that, within their varying limitations, animals can and do
reason. As far, at least, as the mental intelligence is concerned, the
gulf dividing the lowest of the human species from the highest of the
animals has in these latter days been reduced to a very narrow
psychological fissure.
Whether avowedly or not, it is with the psychology of animal life that
the representative animal stories of to-day are first of all concerned.
Looking deep into the eyes of certain of the four-footed kindred, we have
been startled to see therein a something, before unrecognised, that
answered to our inner and intellectual, if not spiritual selves. We have
suddenly attained a new and clearer vision. We have come face to face
with personality, where we were blindly wont to predicate mere instinct
and automatism. It is as if one should step carelessly out of one’s back
door, and marvel to see unrolling before his new-awakened eyes the peaks
and seas and misty valleys of an unknown world. Our chief writers of
animal stories at the present day may be regarded as explorers of this
unknown world, absorbed in charting its topography. They work, indeed,
upon a substantial foundation of known facts. They are minutely
scrupulous as to their natural history, and assiduous contributors to
that science. But above all are they diligent in their search for the
motive beneath the action. Their care is to catch the varying, elusive
personalities which dwell back of the luminous brain windows of the dog,
the horse, the deer, or wrap themselves in reserve behind the inscrutable
eyes of all the cats, or sit aloof in the gaze of the hawk and the eagle.
The animal story at its highest point of development is a psychological
romance constructed on a framework of natural science.
[Illustration: “THE INSCRUTABLE EYES OF ALL THE CATS.”]
The real psychology of the animals, so far as we are able to grope our
way toward it by deduction and induction combined, is a very different
thing from the psychology of certain stories of animals which paved the
way for the present vogue. Of these, such books as “Beautiful Joe” and
“Black Beauty” are deservedly conspicuous examples. It is no detraction
from the merit of these books, which have done great service in awakening
a sympathetic understanding of the animals and sharpening our sense of
kinship with all that breathe, to say that their psychology is human.
Their animal characters think and feel as human beings would think and
feel under like conditions. This marks the stage which these works occupy
in the development of the animal story.
The next stage must be regarded as, in literature, a climax indeed, but
not the climax in this genre. I refer to the “Mowgli” stories of Mr.
Kipling. In these tales the animals are frankly humanised. Their
individualisation is distinctly human, as are also their mental and
emotional processes, and their highly elaborate powers of expression.
Their notions are complex; whereas the motives of real animals, so far as
we have hitherto been able to judge them, seem to be essentially simple,
in the sense that the motive dominant at a given moment quite
obliterates, for the time, all secondary motives. Their reasoning powers
and their constructive imagination are far beyond anything which present
knowledge justifies us in ascribing to the inarticulate kindreds. To say
this is in no way to depreciate such work, but merely to classify it.
There are stories being written now which, for interest and artistic
value, are not to be mentioned in the same breath with the “Mowgli”
tales, but which nevertheless occupy a more advanced stage in the
evolution of this genre.
It seems to me fairly safe to say that this evolution is not likely to go
beyond the point to which it has been carried to-day. In such a story,
for instance, as that of “Krag, the Kootenay Ram,” by Mr. Ernest Seton,
the interest centres about the personality, individuality, mentality, of
an animal, as well as its purely physical characteristics. The field of
animal psychology so admirably opened is an inexhaustible world of
wonder. Sympathetic exploration may advance its boundaries to a degree of
which we hardly dare to dream; but such expansion cannot be called
evolution. There would seem to be no further evolution possible, unless
based upon a hypothesis that animals have souls. As souls are apt to
elude exact observation, to forecast any such development would seem to
be at best merely fanciful.
The animal story, as we now have it, is a potent emancipator. It frees us
for a little from the world of shop-worn utilities, and from the mean
tenement of self of which we do well to grow weary. It helps us to return
to nature, without requiring that we at the same time return to
barbarism. It leads us back to the old kinship of earth, without asking
us to relinquish by way of toll any part of the wisdom of the ages, any
fine essential of the “large result of time.” The clear and candid life
to which it re-initiates us, far behind though it lies in the long upward
march of being, holds for us this quality. It has ever the more
significance, it has ever the richer gift of refreshment and renewal, the
more humane the heart and spiritual the understanding which we bring to
the intimacy of it.
[Illustration: THE MOONLIGHT TRAILS]