begins to enumerate or describe us as so many thousand “souls,”
doubtless because every single body of us is moribund or asleep.
Consider our noses, for example. They are the seat of a wonderful
faculty, more dependable than sight or hearing; they are capable of
giving us sensations more varied than those of color, and almost as
enjoyable as those of harmony; they can be easily trained so as to
recognize every tree and plant and growing thing by its delicate
fragrance; they would add greatly to our safety and convenience, as
well as to our enjoyment, did we use them as nature intended; yet so
thoroughly neglected are they, as a rule, that it takes a burning rag
or a jet of escaping coal-gas to rouse them to the immense and varied
world of odors in which an animal lives continually.
At present I am the alleged owner of a young setter, Rab, who has
reached the stage of development when he thinks he owns me. For after
you have properly trained a dog, there comes a brief time when he
discovers with joy that he can make you do things for him; and then he
is like a child who discovers that he can make you talk (that is, show
some sign of life) by asking you questions. And this young setter has,
I am convinced, a very low opinion of human aliveness, since there is
never a day when he does not give me a hint that he considers me a poor
cripple—excepting, perhaps, the rare days when I take him
woodcock-hunting, when he mildly approves of me.
One night, after waiting a long time at my feet till I should become
animate, Rab followed me hopefully into the dark kitchen, where he had
never before been allowed to go. I heard his steps behind me only as
far as the door, and thought he was afraid to enter; but when I turned
on the light, there he stood in the doorway, “frozen” into a beautiful
point, his head upturned to a bell and battery on the wall. Presently a
mouse hopped from the battery into a waste-basket on the floor, and Rab
pointed the thing stanchly, his whole body quivering with delight when
a faint odor stole to his nostrils or a rustle of paper to his ears.
From the basket the mouse streaked to the coal-hod, and Rab pointed
that, too, and then a crack under a door, and a yawning closet drawer.
“My bones!” he said, trying to claw the drawer open. “This is a good
place; something is alive here!” Then he came over and sat in front of
me, looking up in my face, his head twisted sideways, to demand why I
had so long kept him out of the only part of the house that was not
wholly dormant.
Though the adventure was twelve months ago, “age cannot wither it, nor
custom stale its infinite variety,” for every night Rab comes to me
where I am reading, nudges my elbow, paws my book, sits in front of me
to yawn hugely, gives me no peace, in short, till I follow him to the
kitchen for another go at the waste-basket, the coal-hod and all the
closet drawers. It is of no avail to leave the doors open; he will not
go unless I join him in the enjoyment of something that lives. A short
time since we flushed another mouse in the cellar, whither he followed
me to look after the furnace; and now he pesters me by day as well as
by night whenever he finds me, as he thinks, wrapped in unmanly
lethargy.
With all his vivacity this young setter, who seems so alert among mere
men, becomes a dull creature the moment you compare him with his wild
kindred. He cannot begin to interpret the world through his senses as
they instantly interpret it, and he would starve to death where they
live on the fat of the land. Once on a forest trail I came upon him
pointing stanchly at the edge of a little opening that lumbermen had
made for yarding logs. Just across the opening, where a jumper road
joined the yard, stood a noble buck, and he was “pointing,” too, for he
was face to face with such a creature as he had never before seen. Both
animals were like statues, so motionless did they stand; but there was
this difference, that the dog rested solidly on earth and might have
been carved from marble, while the buck seemed to rest on air and to be
compounded of some ethereal essence. His eyes fairly radiated light and
color. The velvet on his antlers seemed to grow as I looked upon it,
like the velvet moss in which the fairies are said to rest. Every hair
of him from nose to tail tip was gloriously alive. A moment only he
stood, but long enough for me to carry a picture of him forever
afterward; then he bounded up the old road, and Rab came running over
to ask me what new thing he had discovered.
This marvelous alertness of the natural animal is commonly attributed
to the fact that his physical senses are more acute than ours; but that
is true only of some particular sense of a certain creature. The wolf’s
nose, the deer’s ear, the vulture’s eye,—these are probably keener than
any similar human organ; but, on the other hand, a man’s eye is very
much keener for details than the eye of wolf or deer; his senses of
touch and taste are finer than anything to be found among the lower
orders, and the average of his five senses is probably the highest upon
earth. Yet the animal is more responsive to impressions of the external
world, and this is due, I think, to the fact that he lives more in his
sensations; that he is not cumbered, as we are, by inner phenomena;
that he is free from pain, care, fear, regret, anxiety and other mental
complexities; that he is accustomed to hear (that is, to receive
vibrations) through his feet or his skin quite as much as through his
ears; and that his whole body, relaxed and at ease, often becomes a
first-class receiving instrument for what we call sense impressions.
As an example of this last, note the wild creature’s response to every
change of air pressure, a response so immediate and certain that one
might accurately forestall the barometer by observing the action of
birds, or even of chickens, which anticipate a storm long before your
face has noted the moist wind or your eye the rain-cloud. In the winter
woods I have often seen a deer feeding greedily (quite at variance with
his usual dainty tasting) at an hour long before or long after his
accustomed time, and as I traveled wider I would find other deer doing
the same thing. I used to wonder at this, till I noticed that such
unusual action was always followed by a storm—not an ordinary brief
snowfall, to which deer pay little attention beyond seeking shelter
while it lasts, but a severe storm or blizzard, during which most
animals lie quiet for a whole day, or even two or three days, without
stirring abroad for food.
Whether an element of forethought enters into this act of “stuffing”
themselves before a storm, or whether it is wholly instinctive, like
the bear’s change of diet before he dens for his winter sleep, is a
question which does not concern us, since nobody can answer it. In
either case the deer have felt, as surely as our most sensitive
instruments, not only the decreasing pressure of the air but also its
increasing moisture.
That such sensitiveness is not of any one organ, but rather of the
whole body, becomes more evident when we study the lower orders—fishes,
for example, which may winter under a dozen fathoms of water and a
two-foot blanket of ice, but which nevertheless respond to the changing
air currents far above their heads. Once on a northern lake, in March,
I kept tabs on some trout for fourteen consecutive days, and it seemed
that they moved from deep to shallow water or back again whenever the
wind veered to the proper quarter. I had a water-hole cut in the thick
ice, and, finding a trout under it one day, I kept a couple of lines
with minnows there constantly. The hole was in a shallow place, over a
sandy bottom, and by putting my face to the opening, with a blanket
over my head to exclude the upper light, I could dimly see the shadows
move in from deep water. On six scattering days, when the wind came
light or strong from the south, two of the days bringing snow, the
trout evidently moved shoreward, since I caught them abundantly, as
many as I needed and some to spare; but on the other eight days, some
clear and some stormy, when the wind was north of east or west, not a
trout was seen or caught, and only once was a minnow of mine missing.
It may be said that the trout simply followed their food-supply; but I
doubt this, since trout apparently feed very little in winter; and in
formulating any theory of the matter one must account for the fact that
big fish or little fish moved shoreward whenever the wind blew south.
The phenomenon may appear less foreign to our experience, though not
less mysterious to our reason, if we remember that an old wound or a
corn may by its aching foretell a storm, or that a person suffering
from nervous prostration may by his sudden depression know that the
barometer will soon be falling.
The same bodily sensitiveness appears unchanged in our domestic
animals. I once saw a deer and her two fawns kneel down in the woods,
and watched them in astonishment as they rested for some time on their
knees, as if in supplication; then the ground rocked under me, and I
knew that their feet had felt the tremor of an earthquake long before I
was sensible of it. Such an observation seemed wonderful to me till I
learned that our sheep are equally sensitive in their elastic hoofs,
and that our pigs respond not only to vibration of earth or air, but
also to some finer vibration set in motion, apparently, by human
excitement.
Moreover, I have known one dog, old and half deaf, that, whether asleep
or awake, would respond to the faint tremor of his master’s automobile
before it came into sight or hearing. And what there is in the tremor
of one machine to distinguish it from another of the same make and
power is something that the unaided ear can hardly measure. The dog
lived under a hilltop, on a highway over which scores of automobiles
passed daily; and on holidays, when his master was at home, the scores
would increase to hundreds. He would sleep for hours on the veranda,
paying no heed to the noise or smell or dust of the outrageous things,
till suddenly he would jump up, bark, and start for the gate; and in a
moment or two we would see the master’s auto rise into sight over the
brow of the hill.
The instant response of deer or dog to minute external impressions,
though startling enough, is probably wholly physical, a matter of
vibrations on one side and of nerves on the other; but there are other
phenomena of sensitiveness (and these bring us nearer to our trail of
animal communication) for which it is much harder to find a
satisfactory physical explanation. Such is the feeling or warning of
unsensed danger, or the premonition that some one unseen and unheard is
approaching—a phenomenon which seems to be common among animals, to
judge from repeated observation, and which appears often enough in
human beings to make not only the inquisitive Society for Psychical
Research but almost every thoughtful man or woman take some note of it.
For example, a man awake in his bed sees his son, whom he thinks safely
ashore in a foreign country, fall overboard from a steamer to his
death, at the very hour when the son did fall overboard, as was
afterward learned. Or a woman, the wife of a sea-captain, sitting on
the veranda at home in the bright moonlight, sees the familiar earth
vanish in a world of water, and looks suddenly upon her husband’s ship
as it reels to the gale, turns over to the very edge of destruction,
and then rights itself with half its crew swept overboard—and all this
while the precise event befell a thousand miles away. Such things,
which spell a different kind of sensitiveness from that with which we
are familiar, have happened to people well known to me; but as they
have happened to others also, and as almost every town or village has a
convincing example of its own, I forbear details and accept the fact,
and try here to view or understand it as a natural phenomenon.
At first you may strongly object even to my premise, calling it
incredible that sense-bound mortals should feel a danger that their
eyes cannot see or their ears hear; but there are at least two
reasonable answers to your objection. In the first place, we are
sense-bound only in the sense of limiting ourselves unnecessarily,
confining our perception to five habitual modes, shamefully neglecting
to cultivate even these, and ignoring the use or the existence of other
and perhaps finer means of contact with the external world. Again, it
is not a whit more incredible that sensitive creatures, whether brute
or human, should feel the coming or going of a person than that they
should feel his look or glance, as they certainly do.
This last is no cloudy theory; it is a plain fact which endures the
test of observation. Almost any man of strong personality can disturb
or awaken a sleeping wild animal simply by looking at him intently; and
the nearer the man is the more certain the effect of his gaze on the
sleeping brute. The same is true in less degree of most Indians and
woodsmen, and of many sensitive women and children, as you may prove
for yourself. Go into a room where a sensitive or “high-strung” person
is taking a nap—not sleeping heavily, as most men sleep, but lightly,
naturally, as all wild animals take their rest. Make no noise, but
stand or sit quietly where you can look intently into the sleeper’s
face; and commonly, by a change of position or a turning away of the
head or a startled opening of the eyes, the sleeper will show that he
feels your look and is trying subconsciously to avoid it. The
awakening, whether of animals or of men, does not always follow our
look, most fortunately, but it happens frequently enough under varying
conditions to put the explanation of chance entirely out of the
question.
When I was a child I used to sit long hours in the woods alone, partly
for love of the breathing solitude, and partly for getting acquainted
with wild birds or beasts, which showed no fear of me when they found
me quiet. At such times I often found within myself an impression which
I expressed in the words, “Something is watching you.” Again and again,
when nothing stirred in my sight, that curious warning would come; and
almost invariably, on looking around, I would find some bird or fox or
squirrel which had probably caught a slight motion of my head and had
halted his roaming to creep near and watch me inquisitively. As I grew
older the “feel” of living things grew dimmer; yet many times in later
years, when I have been in the wilderness alone, I have experienced the
same impression of being watched or followed, and so often has it
proved a true warning that I still trust it and act upon it, even when
my eyes see nothing unusual and my ears hear nothing but their own
ringing in the silence.
I remember once, when I was sitting on the shore of a lake at twilight,
that I began to have an increasing impression that some living thing
unseen was near me. At first I neglected it, for I had my eyes on a
deer that interested me greatly; but the feeling grew stronger till I
obeyed it and rose to my feet. At the first motion came a startling
woof! and from some bushes close behind me a bear jumped away for the
woods. No doubt he had been there some time, watching me or creeping
nearer, knowing that I was alive, but completely puzzled by my
shapelessness and lack of action. A similar thing has happened several
times, in other places and with other animals, and always at a moment
when I was most in harmony with the environment and a sharer of its
deep tranquillity. [1]
As a child this faculty (if such it be) was as natural as anything else
in life; for in childhood we take the world as we find it in personal
experience, and nothing is especially wonderful where all is wonder. I
then thought no more of feeling the presence of an animal than of
hearing him walk when I could not see him; but as I grew older the
experience seemed a little odd or “queer,” and I never spoke of it to
any one till I discovered, first, that the faculty seems to be common
among animals, and second, that some Indians (not all) have it and
regard it as the most natural thing in the world. Here is how the
latter discovery came about:
Simmo and I were calling moose from a lake one moonlit night, with a
silent canoe under us, dark evergreen woods at our back, and a little
ghost of a beaver-meadow, vague, misty, shadow-filled, immediately
before our eyes yet seeming as remote as any drifting cloud. To our
repeated call no answer was returned; then we allowed the canoe to
drift ashore where it would, and sat listening to the vast silence. I
was brought back from my absorption in the fragrance, the harmony, the
infinite stillness of the night by feeling the canoe shake and hearing
Simmo whisper, “Somet’ing near. Look out!”
Now in a silence like that, the tense, living silence of the wilderness
at night, one’s ears are as full of tricks as a puckwudgie, who is one
of the mischievous fairy-folk of the Indians. The whine of a mosquito
sounds across the whole lake; or the mutter of a frog becomes like the
roar of a bull of Bashan; or suddenly you begin to hear music as the
faint vibration of some dry stub, purring in the unfelt air currents,
turns to the booming of a mighty church organ. At such a time, unless
one has trained his senses to ignore the obvious (the Indian secret of
seeing and hearing things), one soon becomes confused, uncertain of the
borderland between the real and the imaginary; so presently I turned to
Simmo and whispered, “You hear him?”
The Indian shook his head. “No hear-um; just feel-um,” he said; and
again we settled down to watch. For several minutes we questioned the
woods, the lake, the meadow; but nothing stirred, not a sound broke the
painful quiet, the while we both felt strongly that some living thing
was near us. Then a shadow moved from the darker shadow of an upturned
root, only a few yards away, and a great bull stood alert on the open
shore.
I thought then, and I still think, that besides our ordinary five
senses we have a finer faculty which I must call, for lack of a better
term, the sense of presence; and I explain it on the assumption that
every life recognizes and attracts every other life by some occult
force, as dead matter (if there be such a thing) attracts all other
matter by the mysterious force of gravitation.
Doubtless I have been many times watched in the woods when I did not
know or feel it; and certainly I have often had my eyes upon an
unconscious bird or beast when, though I fancied he grew uneasy under
my scrutiny, he did not have enough sense of danger to run
away—possibly because no real danger threatened him, the eyes that
looked upon him being friendly or merely curious.
Once on a hardwood ridge I came upon a buck lying asleep in open
timber, and stood with my back against a great sugar-maple, observing
him for five or six minutes before he stirred. No, I was not trying to
awaken him by a look, or to stage any other experiment. I was simply
enjoying a rare sight, noting with immense interest that this wild
creature, whom I had always seen so splendidly alert, could nod and
blink like any ordinary mortal. So near was he that I could mark the
drowsiness of his eyes, the position of his feet, the swelling of his
sides as he breathed. I happened to be counting his respirations in
friendly fashion, comparing them with my own, when suddenly his head
turned to me; his eyes snapped wide open, and they were looking
straight into mine. Apparently his feeling or subconscious perception
had warned him where danger was; but still his eyes could not recognize
it, standing there in plain sight. For to stand motionless without
concealment is often the best way to deceive a wild animal, which
habitually associates life with motion.
No more drowsiness for that buck! He was startled, plainly enough; but
he rose to his feet very stealthily, not stirring a leaf, and stood at
tense attention. When he turned his head to look over his shoulder
behind him I raised my field-glass, for I wanted to read his thought,
if possible, in his eyes. As he turned his gaze my way again his nose
seemed to sweep my face. It rested there a moment full on the lens of
my glass, moved on, and returned for a longer inspection. Then he
glided past, still without recognizing me, testing the air at every
springy step, harking this way, looking that way, and disappearing at
last as if he trod on eggs.
From such experiences I judge that the feeling of unsensed danger, or
the more subtle feel of a living thing, is as variable in the animals
as are their instincts or their social habits. It may be dull in one
creature and keen in another of the same species, or alternately awake
and asleep in the same creature; but there is no longer any doubt in my
mind that it is a widespread gift among birds and beasts. When it
appears occasionally among men, therefore, it is to be regarded not as
uncanny or queer, but, like the sure sense of direction which a few men
possess, as a precious and perfectly natural inheritance from our
primitive ancestors. That it skips a dozen generations to alight on an
odd man here or there, like a storm-driven bird on a ship at sea, is
precisely what we might expect of heredity, which follows a course that
seems to us erratic or at times marvelous, as geometry appears to an
Eskimo, because we do not yet understand its law or working principle.
Among savage tribes, who live a natural outdoor life in close contact
with nature, the perception of danger or of persons beyond the ordinary
sense range is much more common than among civilized folk. Almost every
explorer and missionary who has spent much time with African natives,
for example, has noticed that the Blacks have some mysterious means of
knowing when a stranger is approaching one of their
villages—mysterious, that is, because it does not depend on runners or
messengers or any other of our habitual means of communication. A
recent observer of these people has at last offered an explanation of
the matter, with many other impressions of native philosophy, in a work
to which he gives the suggestive title of Thinking Black. Of the scores
of books on Africa which I have read, this is the only one to show more
than a very superficial knowledge of the natives, and the reason is
apparent. The author thinks, most reasonably, that you cannot possibly
know the native or understand his customs until you know his thought,
and that the only trail to his thought is through the language in which
the thought is expressed. Therefore did he study the speech as a means
of knowing the man; and herein he is in refreshing contrast to other
African travelers and hunters I have read, who spend a few months or
weeks in a white man’s camp, knowing the natives about as intimately as
lovers know the moon, and then babble of native customs or beliefs or
“superstitions,”—as if any rite or habit could be understood without
first understanding the philosophy of life from which it sprang, as a
flower from a hidden seed.
This rare observer, who knows how the native thinks because he
perfectly understands the native language, tells us [2] that the Blacks
clearly recognize the power of animals and of normal men to know many
things beyond their sense range; that they give it a definite name, and
explain it in a way which indicates an astonishing degree of abstract
thought on the part of those whom we ignorantly call unthinking
savages. According to these natives, every natural animal, man
included, has the physical gifts of touch, sight, hearing, taste,
smell, and chumfo. I must still use the native term because it cannot
be translated, because it implies all that we mean by instinct,
intuitive or absolute knowledge and (a thing which no other psychology
has even hinted at) the process by which such knowledge is acquired.
This chumfo is not a sixth or extra sense, as we assume, but rather the
unity or perfect co-ordination of the five senses at their highest
point. I may illustrate the matter this way, still following Crawford,
whose record contains many curious bits of observation, savage
philosophy, woods lore and animal lore, many of them written by the
camp-fire and all jumbled together pell-mell: