walks abroad; when he is striking out in shallow runs in hot pursuit
of earthworms and throwing up little hills at short intervals you can
often see him when he comes to the surface; he just shows you his
back for a few moments; then, having pushed up the loose soil, sinks
below again. Now it once happened that a mole showing himself, or his
back, to me in this way, taught me something about the creature which
I did not know, not having found it in the books. It was on a bright
March morning, and I was seated on a stump in a beech wood near the
village of Ockley, in Surrey. The ground all about me was covered with
a deep carpet of dead leaves, glowing gold and red and russet in the
sunlight, when presently, attracted by a rustling among the leaves, I
saw that they were being thrust up by some creature under them. It was
not the small animal I was listening and watching for just then--the
shrew who comes out to sun himself--but a mole throwing up a hill
at that spot within a yard of my foot. By and by his velvety-black
back became visible, and made in its setting of red and yellow leaves
a prettily coloured picture. Presently he disappeared, then quickly
rose again with more earth; but the leaves evidently annoyed him, and
to rid himself of them he suddenly began agitating his body in an
astonishing way, for while the movement lasted he looked like a black
ball spinning round so rapidly as to give it the misty appearance of a
revolving wheel or the wings of a hovering hawk-moth. This swift motion
on his part set the leaves flying, and mole and dust and dancing leaves
together formed a little whirlwind or maelstrom. When it was over the
leaves settled again on the mound, and twice again the extraordinary
performance was repeated, and the little animal being then almost above
the ground I foolishly put out my hand to pick him up, and before I
could properly grasp him he was gone.
The spinning or revolving motion was an illusion of the sight produced
by the exceedingly rapid motions of the skin while the animal was
stationary, and the deluding motions were effected by means of what
the anatomists call the “twitching muscle,” which is possessed in some
degree by most, if not by all, mammalians. We see it every day in our
domestic animals, especially in the dog when he shakes himself after a
swim; and if he has shaggy hair and it is full of water he throws it
off so violently that it fills the air with a dense spray for several
feet around him. He could not do this by merely shaking or rocking his
whole body from side to side; he does rock his body too, but at the
same time he gives the rapid vibratory motion to the whole skin which
discharges the wet. So it is with the horse when he shakes off the wet
or the dust after rolling.
But in the horse the twitching power does not extend, or is not
uniformly powerful, over the whole surface; it is feeble on the hind
quarters, and we can only suppose that in the horse, and other large
mammalians, the chief use of the twitching act is to shake off dust,
flies, and other tormenting insects, and that the growth of the hairy
tail in the horse, used to switch insects off, has made the twitching
power less useful on this portion of the body. In other words, when
this highly specialised tail had fully taken this office or function on
itself it caused the decay of the twitching muscle through disuse in
those parts of his body.
We see, too, that the muscle has its greatest power in that part of the
body which is just out of reach of the tail, and is also more difficult
for the animal to reach with his mouth--that is to say, his back over
the shoulders. A man riding bare-back can feel it powerfully when the
horse shakes himself. “It is like riding on an earthquake,” I heard a
man say once; to me, with no experience of earthquakes, the sensation
was like that of an electric shock.
In man we can imagine the loss of the twitching power has had a
twofold cause: first the hands, which, like the beak in birds, can
reach to pretty well any part of the body, and, secondly, the custom
of wearing clothes, which protect the skin and make the twitching
unnecessary.
The twitching power survives only in the face, and is almost confined
to the forehead: but even there it is, with its slow up-and-down
motion, a poor faculty compared with the rapid shaking or trembling
motion other mammals are capable of, which they are able to confine
to the exact spot on which an insect has alighted. In a few persons
the power extends over the scalp, and I have heard of a man who could
cause his hat to fall off, not with shaking his head, but simply by
working the muscles of his forehead and scalp. Altogether, we may say
that the faculty is weakest in man--that he is at one end of the pole,
and the mole is at the other. The mole exists in the earth, moving in
and covered with the dust he creates in digging, and he no doubt frees
himself from it by means of his twitching muscle a hundred times a day.
That this wonderful muscle can do anything more to increase his
happiness I doubt, and this I say, because it is told in the sacred
writings of the East that Buddha changed himself into a hare and jumped
into a fire to roast himself to provide a meal for a hungry beggar, and
that before jumping in, he--Buddha as a hare--shook himself three times
so that none of the insects in his fur should perish with him.
I don’t believe it! My Ockley mole has proved to me that insect
parasites cannot be got rid of in that way. The hare’s twitching muscle
is not more powerful than that of the generality of animals. I have
seen him make the water fly like a mist out of his fur, but the dog can
do it nearly as well. In the mole the movement is more sustained and, I
imagine, more rapid, yet the fleas must be able to keep their hold on
him since we always find him much infested by them.
XXI
A FRIENDLY RAT
Most of our animals, also many creeping things, such as our “wilde
wormes in woods,” common toads, natterjacks, newts, and lizards, and
stranger still, many insects, have been tamed and kept as pets.
Badgers, otters, foxes, hares, and voles are easily dealt with; but
that any person should desire to fondle so prickly a creature as a
hedgehog, or so diabolical a mammalian as the bloodthirsty, flat-headed
little weasel, seems very odd. Spiders, too, are uncomfortable pets;
you can’t caress them as you could a dormouse; the most you can do is
to provide your spider with a clear glass bottle to live in, and teach
him to come out in response to a musical sound, drawn from a banjo or
fiddle, to take a fly from your fingers and go back again to its bottle.
An acquaintance of the writer is partial to adders as pets, and he
handles them as freely as the schoolboy does his innocuous ring-snake;
Mr. Benjamin Kidd once gave us a delightful account of his pet
humble-bees, who used to fly about his room, and come at call to
be fed, and who manifested an almost painful interest in his coat
buttons, examining them every day as if anxious to find out their true
significance. Then there was my old friend, Miss Hopley, the writer on
reptiles, who died recently, aged 99 years, who tamed newts, but whose
favourite pet was a slow-worm. She was never tired of expatiating on
its lovable qualities. One finds Viscount Grey’s pet squirrels more
engaging, for these are wild squirrels in a wood in Northumberland,
who quickly find out when he is at home and make their way to the
house, scale the walls, and invade the library; then, jumping upon
his writing-table, are rewarded with nuts, which they take from his
hand. Another Northumbrian friend of the writer keeps, or kept, a pet
cormorant, and finds him no less greedy in the domestic than in the
wild state. After catching and swallowing fish all the morning in a
neighbouring river, he wings his way home at meal-times, screaming to
be fed, and ready to devour all the meat and pudding he can get.
The list of strange creatures might be extended indefinitely, even
fishes included; but who has ever heard of a tame pet rat? Not the
small white, pink-eyed variety, artificially bred, which one may buy
at any dealers, but a common brown rat, _Mus decumanus_, one of the
commonest wild animals in England and certainly the most disliked. Yet
this wonder has been witnessed recently in the village of Lelant, in
West Cornwall. Here is the strange story, which is rather sad and at
the same time a little funny.
This was not a case of “wild nature won by kindness”; the rat simply
thrust itself and its friendship on the woman of the cottage: and she,
being childless and much alone in her kitchen and living-room, was
not displeased at its visits: on the contrary, she fed it; in return
the rat grew more and more friendly and familiar towards her, and the
more familiar it grew, the more she liked the rat. The trouble was,
she possessed a cat, a nice, gentle animal not often at home, but it
was dreadful to think of what might happen at any moment should pussy
walk in when her visitor was with her. Then, one day, pussy did walk
in when the rat was present, purring loudly, her tail held stiffly
up, showing that she was in her usual sweet temper. On catching sight
of the rat, she appeared to know intuitively that it was there as a
privileged guest, while the rat on its part seemed to know, also by
intuition, that it had nothing to fear. At all events these two quickly
became friends and were evidently pleased to be together, as they now
spent most of the time in the room, and would drink milk from the same
saucer, and sleep bunched up together, and were extremely intimate.
By and by the rat began to busy herself making a nest in a corner of
the kitchen under a cupboard, and it became evident that there would
soon be an increase in the rat population. She now spent her time
running about and gathering little straws, feathers, string, and
anything of the kind she could pick up, also stealing or begging for
strips of cotton, or bits of wool and thread from the work-basket.
Now it happened that her friend was one of those cats with huge
tufts of soft hair on the two sides of her face; a cat of that type,
which is not uncommon, has a quaint resemblance to a Mid-Victorian
gentleman with a pair of magnificent side-whiskers of a silky softness
covering both cheeks and flowing down like a double beard. The rat
suddenly discovered that this hair was just what she wanted to add a
cushion-like lining to her nest, so that her naked pink little ratlings
should be born into the softest of all possible worlds. At once she
started plucking out the hairs, and the cat, taking it for a new kind
of game, but a little too rough to please her, tried for a while to
keep her head out of reach and to throw the rat off. But she wouldn’t
be thrown off, and as she persisted in flying back and jumping at the
cat’s face and plucking the hairs, the cat quite lost her temper and
administered a blow with her claws unsheathed.
The rat fled to her refuge to lick her wounds, and was no doubt as much
astonished at the sudden change in her friend’s disposition as the cat
had been at the rat’s new way of showing her playfulness. The result
was that when, after attending to her scratches, she started upon her
task of gathering soft materials, she left the cat severely alone.
They were no longer friends; they simply ignored one another’s presence
in the room. The little ones, numbering about a dozen, presently came
to light and were quietly removed by the woman’s husband, who didn’t
mind his missis keeping a rat, but drew the line at one.
The rat quickly recovered from her loss and was the same nice
affectionate little thing she had always been to her mistress; then a
fresh wonder came to light--cat and rat were fast friends once more!
This happy state of things lasted a few weeks; but, as we know, the
rat was married, though her lord and master never appeared on the
scene, indeed, he was not wanted; and very soon it became plain to see
that more little rats were coming. The rat is an exceedingly prolific
creature; she can give a month’s start to a rabbit and beat her at the
end by about 40 points.
Then came the building of the nest in the same old corner, and when it
got to the last stage and the rat was busily running about in search of
soft materials for the lining, she once more made the discovery that
those beautiful tufts of hair on her friend’s face were just what she
wanted, and once more she set vigorously to work pulling the hairs out.
Again, as on the former occasion, the cat tried to keep her friend off,
hitting her right and left with her soft pads, and spitting a little,
just to show that she didn’t like it. But the rat was determined to
have the hairs, and the more she was thrown off the more bent was she
on getting them, until the breaking-point was reached and puss, in a
sudden rage, let fly, dealing blow after blow with lightning rapidity
and with all the claws out. The rat, shrieking with pain and terror,
rushed out of the room and was never seen again, to the lasting grief
of her mistress. But its memory will long remain like a fragrance in
the cottage--perhaps the only cottage in all this land where kindly
feelings for the rat are cherished.
XXII
THE LITTLE RED DOG
Sauntering along a lane-like road between Charterhouse Hinton and
Woolverton, in the West Country, I spied a small red dog trotting along
some distance behind me. He was in the middle of the road, but seeing
that he was observed he sheered off to the other side, and when nearly
abreast of me paused suspiciously, sniffed the air to get the exact
smell, then made a dash past, and after going about twenty or thirty
yards full speed, dropped once more into his travelling trot, to vanish
from sight at the next bend in the road.
Though alone, I laughed, for he was a very old acquaintance of mine.
I knew him well, although he did not know me, and regarding me as
a stranger he very naturally associated my appearance with that
well-aimed stone or half-brick which had doubtless registered an
impression on his small brain. I knew him because he is a common type,
widely distributed on the earth; I doubt if there are many countries
where you will not meet him--a degenerate or dwarf variety of the
universal cur, smaller than a fox-terrier and shorter-legged; the low
stature, long body, small ears, and blunt nose giving him a somewhat
stoaty or even reptilian appearance among the canines. His red colour
is, indeed, the commonest hue of the common dog, or cur, wherever
found. It is rarely a bright red, like that of the Irish setter, or
any pleasing shade of red, as in the dingo, the fox, and the South
American maned wolf; it is dull, often inclining to yellow, sometimes
mixed with grey as in the jackal, sometimes with a dash of ginger in
it. The unbeautiful yellowish-red is the prevailing hue of the pariah
dog. At all events that is the impression one gets from the few of the
numberless travellers in the East who have condescended to tell us
anything about this low-down animal.
Where the cur or pariah flourishes, there you are sure to find the
small red dog, and perhaps wonder at his ability to maintain his
existence. He is certainly placed at a great disadvantage. If he finds
or steals a bone, the first big dog he meets will say to him, “Drop
it!” And he will drop it at once, knowing very well that if he refuses
to do so it will be taken from him, and his own poor little bones
perhaps get crunched in the process. As compensation he has, I fancy,
a somewhat quicker intelligence, a subtler cunning. His brains weigh
less by a great deal than those of the bull-dog or a big cur, but--like
ladies’ brains compared with men’s--they are of a finer quality.
When I encountered this animal in the quiet Somerset road, and laughed
to see him and exclaimed mentally, “There he goes, the same old
little red dog, suspicious and sneaky as ever, and very brisk and busy
although his years must be well-nigh as many as my own,” I was thinking
of the far past, and the sight of him brought back a memory of one of
the first of the small red dogs I have known intimately. I was a boy
then, and my home was in the pampas of Buenos Ayres. I had a young
sister, a bright, lively girl, and I remember that a poor native woman
who lived in a smoky hovel a few miles away was fond of her, and that
she came one day with a present for her--something precious wrapped up
in a shawl--a little red pup, one of a litter which her own beloved dog
had brought forth. My sister accepted the present joyfully, for though
we possessed fourteen or fifteen dogs at the time, these all belonged
to the house; they were everybody’s and nobody’s in particular, and she
was delighted to have one that would be her very own. It grew into a
common red dog, rather better-looking than most of its kind, having a
bushier tail, longer and brighter-coloured hair, and a somewhat foxy
head and face. In spite of these good points, we boys never tired
of laughing at her little Reddie, as he was called, and his intense
devotion to his young mistress and faith in her power to protect him
only made him seem more ludicrous. When we all walked together on the
grass plain, my brother and I used to think it great fun to separate
Reddie from his mistress by making a sudden dash, and then hunt him
over the turf. Away he would go, performing a wide circuit, then,
doubling back, would fly to her for safety. She, stooping and holding
out her hands to him, would wait his coming, and at the end, with
one flying leap, he would land himself in her arms, almost capsizing
her with the force of the impact, and from that refuge look back
reproachfully at us.
The cunning little ways of the small red dog were learned later when
I came to know him in the city of Buenos Ayres. Loitering at the
waterside one day, I became aware of an animal of this kind following
me, and no sooner did he catch my eye than he came up, wagging,
wriggling, and grinning, smiling, so to speak, all over his body; and
I, thinking he had lost home and friends and touched by his appeal,
allowed him to follow me through the streets to the house of relations
where I was staying. I told them I intended keeping the outcast awhile
to see what could be done with him. My friends did not welcome him
warmly, and they even made some disparaging remarks about little red
dogs in general; but they gave him his dinner--a big plateful of
meat--which he devoured greedily, and then, very much at home, he
stretched himself out on the hearth-rug and went fast asleep. When he
woke an hour later he jumped up and ran to the hall, and, finding the
street-door closed, made a great row, howling and scratching at the
panels. I hurried out and opened the door, and out and off he went,
without so much as a thank-you. He had found a fool and had succeeded
in getting something out of him, and his business with me was ended.
There was no hesitation; he was going straight home, and knew his way
quite well.
Years afterwards it was a surprise to me to find that the little red
dog was an inhabitant of London. There was no muzzling order then,
in the ’seventies, and quite a common sight was the independent dog,
usually a cur, roaming the streets in search of stray scraps of food.
He shared the sparrows’ broken bread; he turned over the rubbish heaps
left by the road-sweepers; he sniffed about areas, on the look-out for
an open dust-bin; and he hung persistently about the butcher’s shop,
where a jealous eye was kept on his movements. These dogs doubtless
had owners, who paid the yearly tax; but it is probable that in most
cases they found for themselves. Probably, too, the adventurous life
of the streets, where carrion was not too plentiful, had the effect
of sharpening their wits. Here, at all events, I was witness of an
action on the part of a small red dog which fairly astonished me; that
confidence trick the little Argentine beast had practised on me was
nothing to it.
In Regent Street, of all places, one bright winter morning, I caught
sight of a dog lying on the pavement close to the wall, hungrily
gnawing at a big beef bone which he had stolen or picked out of a
neighbouring dust-hole. He was a miserable-looking object, a sort of
lurcher, of a dirty red colour, with ribs showing like the bars of a
gridiron through his mangy side. Even in those pre-muzzling days, when
we still had the pariah, it was a little strange to see him gnawing his
bone at that spot, just by Peter Robinson’s, where the broad pavement
was full of shopping ladies; and I stood still to watch him. Presently
a small red dog came trotting along the pavement from the direction of
the Circus, and catching sight of the mangy lurcher with the bone he
was instantly struck motionless, and crouching low as if to make a dash
at the other, his tail stiff, his hair bristling, he continued gazing
for some moments; and then, just when I thought the rush and struggle
was about to take place, up jumped this little red cur and rushed
back towards the Circus, uttering a succession of excited shrieky
barks. The contagion was irresistible. Off went the lurcher, furiously
barking too, and quickly overtaking the small dog dashed on and away
to the middle of the Circus to see what all the noise was about. It
was something tremendously important to dogs in general, no doubt. But
the little red dog, the little liar, had no sooner been overtaken and
passed by the other, than back he ran, and picking up the bone, made
off with it in the opposite direction. Very soon the lurcher returned
and appeared astonished and puzzled at the disappearance of his bone.
There I left him, still looking for it and sniffing at the open shop
doors. He perhaps thought in his simplicity that some kind lady had
picked it up and left it with one of the shopmen to be claimed by its
rightful owner.
I had heard of such actions on the part of dogs before, but always
with a smile; for we know the people who tell this kind of story--the
dog-worshippers, or canophilists as they are sometimes called, a people
weak in their intellectuals, and as a rule unveracious, although
probably not consciously so. But now I had myself witnessed this thing,
which, when read, will perhaps cause others to smile in their turn.
But what is one to say of such an action? Just now we are all of us,
philosophers included, in a muddle over the questions of mind and
intellect in the lower animals, and just how much of each element goes
to the composition of any one act; but probably most persons would
say at once that the action of the little red dog in Regent Street
was purely intelligent. I am not sure. The swiftness, smoothness,
and certainty with which the whole thing was carried out gave it the
appearance of a series of automatic movements rather than a reasoned
act which had never been rehearsed.
Recently during my country rambles I have been on the look-out for the
small red dog, and have met with several interesting examples in the
southern counties. One, in Hampshire, moved me to laughter like that
small animal at Charterhouse Hinton.
This was at Sway, a village near Lymington. A boy, mounted on a
creaking old bike, was driving some cows to the common, and had the
greatest difficulty in keeping on while following behind the lazy
beasts on a rough track among the furze bushes; and behind the boy at a
distance of ten yards trotted the little red dog, tongue out, looking
as happy and proud as possible. As I passed him he looked back at me
as if to make sure that I had seen him and noted that he formed part
of that important procession. On another day I went to the village and
renewed my acquaintance with the little fellow and heard his history.
Everybody praised him for his affectionate disposition and his value
as a watch-dog by night, and I was told that his mother, now dead, had
been greatly prized, and was the smallest red dog ever seen in that
part of Hampshire.
Some day one of the thousand writers on “man’s friend” will conceive
the happy idea of a chapter or two on _the_ dog--the universal
cur--and he will then perhaps find it necessary to go abroad to study
this well-marked dwarf variety, for with us he has fallen on evil
days. There is no doubt that the muzzling order profoundly affected
the character of our dog population, since it went far towards the
destruction of the cur and of mongrels--the races already imperilled
by the extraordinary predominance of the fox-terrier. The change was
most marked in the metropolis, and after Mr. Long’s campaign I came
to the conclusion that here at all events the little red dog had
been extirpated. He, with other varieties of the cur, was the dog of
the poor, and when the muzzle deprived him of the power to fend for
himself, he became a burden to his master. But I was mistaken; he is
still with us, even here in London, though now very rare.
XXIII
DOGS IN LONDON