hunting in the jungle, and chiefly on account of their susceptibility
to moisture in the air. In the wet season it is possible to creep up
to some of the wariest of animals, the thick mat of soft, damp leaves
forming an admirable muffler. In the dry season this is hopeless, every
step is ascream with crackling, and only when a leaf-rattling breeze is
blowing can one pass through the jungle without blatant advertisement.
This, however, is of slight assistance in hunting, for the blowing of
the leaves conceals as well the audible whereabouts of the game. When
the fallen leaves are dry the only method is to walk to some favorable
spot, and there sit and wait for approaching or passing animals to
register their footfalls. In estimating the abundance of jungle life I
have constantly to check a tendency to underestimate numbers in the wet
season. Ameiva lizards appear to be many times as abundant in times of
drought, crashing along with the noise of a peccary, yet they have no
season of æstivation, but only of silent progress.
We do not realize the acuteness of hearing of wild animals until we
try to stalk them over dry leaves. A giant leaf may crash down from
branch to branch and never cause a curassow or deer to start. I have
seen a labba feeding in late afternoon under a nut tree when a whole
branch with clusters of dead leaves hurtled to earth a few yards away,
and the big, spotted rodent merely glanced up, casually munching as
it looked. My next step slipped an inch sideways and crumbled a tiny
leaf crust, and without a second’s investigation the animal gave one
terrified squeal and fled headlong.
There are silent and there are boisterous leaves. Some, with finely
pinnated foliage, have a pact of silence with the elements, from which
wind and rain strive in vain to awaken them. Even when these filigree
ones are dead and cling long to the branches, they give before the
blasts, they let the rain drip from their finger tips without a sound.
But a single, half-loose cecropia frond can imitate a rainstorm, the
roar of a flushed covey of pheasants or a passing troop of monkeys,
all by itself. More than this, it will begin uncannily to quiver and
shake and rattle wildly about, while every adjacent leaf dangles as
silently as if painted. Thus does its sensitive balance and crinkled
shard betray the wandering little wind spouts which are born deep in
the jungle, and, like other aquatic cousins, stretch straight upward in
a tiny, clean-cut whorl of air.
A book could be written upon burning leaves--how they meet their
cremation, how they curl when this new, devastating long-bottled-up sun
heat chars their tissues. How they shout and crack in the wind of their
own swan song, and how they look when the heat and roar have passed
and the cold ash remains. A month of drought at Kartabo once made
the thick mat of bamboo leaves about the compound considerable of a
menace. So we had a great raking and bonfire of the ten million and one
elongated slivers of pale brown leaves. (Even the color of dead leaves,
like the plumage of hen pheasants, is far more subtle and beautiful
than we suspect, for after the above sentence, I try to match a dead
bamboo leaf color in Ridgway’s color book and fail utterly. It lies
between vinaceous-buff and olive-buff and is of no human-named color.)
The ashy souls of leaves differ to as great a degree as do their shapes
and life-greens. Some are so ethereal that they vanish in a curl of
faint blue smoke and leave scarcely a trace of ponderable greyness. The
bamboos are far otherwise. There is nothing quiet or sad about their
cremation. They snap and crackle joyously in the flames, with more gust
than ever they rattled in the trade winds. And indeed their passing
is far less of a radical change than for most leaves. They are so
surcharged with silica that the alchemy of glowing heat merely alters
their hue to silvery white, and when the furnace of their tissues has
cooled, they lie unchanged in shape and outline. A heavy rain or big
wind shatters this crystalline ghost of a _feuille_, and the various
salts are washed into the soil, ready for their next great adventure.
Before I lived under bamboos I never realized how friendly fallen
leaves could be. Trees with heavy, leaded-stemmed leaves drop them
straight to the ground. But bamboo leaves are like zeppelins when they
are launched and, with the slightest breeze float along on even keels,
drifting sometimes far into the laboratory. When at tea one day I idly
watched a leaf dangling high up from one of the lofty stems, so far
away I could not tell whether it was brown or green. A slight gust came
and it broke off and, revolving slowly, scaled obliquely down, through
the verandah and launched in my teacup.
These leaves register very accurately the force of the wind, and I have
seen a thick bed of ashes of burned bamboo leaves studded thickly as
a porcupine’s skin with the javelins of recent falls, two lots having
speared the ashes at different angles. One was almost upright, having
landed in a gentle wind that afternoon, the other at an oblique angle,
after volplaning on the stronger trades of morning.
Leaves in death still mirror many of the characteristics of their
living fellows. In the tropics a host of plants flower once or at
most twice a year, but attract insects at all times by setting forth
a little bowl of nectar on each leaf stalk. I have observed a small
bush with forty-nine leaves and counted nine and forty ants thereon,
one guest to each nectar-cup,--each having visited, sipped and
remained--perhaps by their jealous gormandizing keeping away other more
harmful insects. On fallen leaves the sides of the bowls still seem to
contain some sweetness, and to these come other ants (as we used to
love to scrape the emptied ice-cream freezer), who gnaw eagerly at the
shrivelled cups and the sweet crusts which have fallen from the table
of the jungle.
There are parts of jungle clearings which I hardly know in early
morning, while their foliage is still asleep. Some leaves are
surprisingly drowsy and not until the sun actually fillips them with
its beams do they raise their heads, twist on their stalks in a leafy
yawn, and eat to their daily stint in their chlorophyll factory. These
leaves die in the position of sleep, so that if we had a fallen twigful
we would know their somnolent attitude in life.
By far the phase of dominant interest in fallen or dead leaves is
the part they have played in the evolution of animal life. If we can
infer the position of sleep from that in death, how vastly greater is
possible the reconstruction of dead vegetation from living creatures
of the jungle. If every leaf and twig, flower and fruit, branch and
trunk were to vanish suddenly from the earth, their memory would remain
deeply impressed in form, size, movement, pattern and color of a host
of creatures, while we would still have even the jungle lights and
shadows etched upon fur and feathers. As we go down the scale in life
we find more and more marvels of resemblance, and it would be an easy
matter to reconstruct an entire plant of animals. I have caught monster
walking-stick insects over a foot in length, which were dead wood to
the keenest eye. Smaller ones carry the resemblance to an inordinate
extreme. Not only do they look like twigs and stems, but they _act_
like them, clinging with four feet and dangling the other two out in
midair, while every now and then the whole insect sways gently, as does
a tiny twig moved by a breath. Things such as this make a scientist’s
work wonderful and holy beyond Bryan’s utmost conception of these words.
From day to day in the jungle I add to my animal-plants. I discover
giant katy-dids so green and flat, so veined and stemmed, that no
passing observer could say, “This is leaf, this insect.” Others
have spoiled the symmetry and perfection of their sham chlorophyll
with simulated holes, and apparent tears and spots of fungi, and
the droppings of birds. All the diseases, parasites and injuries
of leaves have been photographed upon the wings of insects, in
unconscious endeavor to escape observation. At this point we come upon
interactions, complications, subtleties of great delicacy, such as are
shown by mantids, or “rar’hor’ses” as they are called in the Southern
States. These are incarnated, material sophists, camouflaged under
chlorophyll color not for protection but for attack. As the white fox
creeps upon the white ptarmigan over the white snow, so here in the
tropics, the mantids re-enact a similar, but viridescent drama.
Passing on from growing leaves we find flower bugs and orchid spiders,
the latter being forced to conceal their brilliant pigments in the
shadow of under-leaf, until some particular blossom appears. Then, with
their colors and patterns so exact that they might have been fashioned
in the same petal shop the spiders take their place on or near the
flowers. Some even eat away the heart of the blossom, substituting
their stamen leg and pistil palpi, and with the unharmed nectary still
giving forth perfume, these deadly frauds of flowers await the visiting
bees.
Caterpillars gnaw out bits of leaf and then fill up the space with
their own painted bodies, but butterflies and moths are the veritable
reflections of leaves, they would indeed be naked and blatant to
the world were foliage to vanish. Here again not only are color and
pattern invoked but even the movement in falling. I have had a brown
butterfly flutter in short, oblique eddies to my feet, and there alight
warelessly and sway from side to side. Dozens of times I have crept
up and enmeshed a dead leaf in my net, and as many times have brushed
heedlessly by a dead leaf only to have it take wings to itself and fly
away.
Two adventures which befell me yesterday had to do with leaves, and
touched the extremes of the gamut of an explorer’s life--from the
danger of death to the glory of new discovery. Every morning a bird
had been calling from a certain tree-top--a short, raucous, unpleasant
call, but a new one. So ventriloquil was it that it had wholly
baffled me. Only by triangulation, the successive focussing from
three distant points, could I ever hope to find it. I was creeping
slowly on my second lap, lifting my feet high to clear twigs and
vines, when something drew my eyes from the tree overhead to the dead
leaves below. This has happened to me perhaps a score of times and I
hope will continue in the future--the sudden, inexplicable perception
of a poisonous snake on which my foot is about to descend. A large
fer-de-lance, more like dead leaves than the leaves themselves, was
coiled less than two feet away. On its scales it mirrored the brown
dead leaves, the dark fungus spots, the shadows of the curled-up edges,
the high lights of the burnished surface sheen. Optically there was no
interruption of the floor of dead foliage; actually a horrible death
lay twelve inches beneath my upraised foot. The lethal mat was coiled
as evenly as a rope on a battleship and in the exact center lay the
arrow head with its unwinking eyes and the flickering tongue. As I
withdrew my foot and began to breathe again, I forgot my raucous-voiced
bird and sat down to ponder this. I took my strong butterfly net and
drew the netting taut across the ring and behind this barrier I slowly
approached. Closer and closer I drew until I could see the slit-like
pupil and the green and livid mottling of the iris. When I almost
touched the sharp snout with the other side of the mesh, I sniffed
carefully and repeatedly, dulling every other sense but that of smell.
There came to my nostrils a faint but distinct odor, an unpleasant
musk, which, once detected, remained vivid. It was a faint adumbration
of that strong, repulsive smell which permeates the cage where one of
these reptiles is confined, and I believe that, without invoking any
more radically psychic process, my attention is attracted and focussed
at these times by the faint, unconsciously stimulating odor of the
snake on the jungle floor. I cannot otherwise explain my invariable
detection at the last minute, of creatures who more than any others are
of the leaves, leafy.
My second adventure was also a thrilling one but from a wholly
different point of view. I was walking along a trail after a shower,
looking idly at a big, palmated leaf at my very elbow when there
suddenly materialized upon it a large lizard. It was one of the
most beautiful of all lizards and fortunately had been named with
imagination--_Polychrus marmoratus_--the many-colored Marble One. It
was sprawled flat upon the great green expanse, its scales shimmering
leaf-green with enough spots here and there to be a convincing portion
of the full-grown, insect-defaced foliage. I leaned toward it and it
began slowly to creep away. The long, slender tail was curled and
twisted into a lifeless tendril, and the toes dangled half in midair
like no imaginable piece of any live reptile. Progress was by means of
the forefeet alone, one after the other being pushed ahead stealthily,
taking hold and dragging the rest of the creature onward. The body,
hind legs and tail simply scraped over the leaf.
When it reached the thick, brown twig, magic began before our
eyes--for fortunately I had two companions to share this wonder. As
it left the green tissue and crawled slowly out along the twig its
course was traceable not only by its position in space, but by most
exquisitely adjusted and timed pigmental change,--at the exact edge of
the leaf the green gradually faded and a wave of brown swept down the
reptile. Never have I seen a more perfect use of obliterative color.
In captivity these polychrus will often run through their whole little
palatal gamut from mere emotion, or light and shadow. The whole soul
of my lizard on the leaf was concentrated in his half-closed eyes
watching my every motion, yet it must have been through the eye alone
that the amazingly accurate somatic color change was dictated and
regulated. Here was surely the ultimate example of vegetable imitation,
twigs, leaves--both green and brown--tendril swaying movement, all
in one organism. Not for anything would I have betrayed the lizard’s
trust in the magnificent shield which nature had built up about it. We
pretended to be completely deceived and left it--an irregular bit of
half-greenness on the second leaf, and half brownness on the twig.
A classic volume will some day be written on the adventures of
fallen leaves, for when a leaf has evaded the inroads of insects and
fungi, has resisted wind and rain, succumbing finally to the pull
of gravitation, there awaits it, in addition to ultimate mold and
desiccation, a host of possible adventures on the jungle floor.
[Illustration: “The jungle _du printemps eternel_”]
With all my desire to clothe the fallen leaf with dramatic interest and
an abstract vitality, my first and last thoughts are those of sadness.
Alien as I am to these tropical jungles, a mere transient injection
from the North, the sear and yellow leaf means to me the end of a
season, of a year--a very appreciable fraction of lifetime--and even in
this evergreen land, this jungle _de le printemps éternel_, the dead
leaf eddying to earth is a sad and a tragic happening.
V
THE JUNGLE SLUGGARD
[Illustration: “A fitting inhabitant of Mars”]
Sloths have no right to be living on the earth today; they would be
fitting inhabitants of Mars, where a year is over six hundred days
long. In fact they would exist more appropriately on a still more
distant planet where time--as we know it--creeps and crawls instead
of flies from dawn to dusk. Years ago I wrote that sloths reminded
me of nothing so much as the wonderful Rath Brother athletes or of a
slowed-up moving picture, and I can still think of no better similes.
Sloths live altogether in trees, but so do monkeys, and the chief
difference between them would seem to be that the latter spend their
time pushing against gravitation while the sloths pull against it.
Botanically the two groups of animals are comparable to the flower
which holds its head up to the sun, swaying on its long stem, and, on
the other hand, the over-ripe fruit dangling heavily from its base.
We ourselves are physically far removed from sloths--for while we can
point with pride to the daily achievement of those ambulatory athletes,
floor-walkers and policemen, yet no human being can cling with his
hands to a branch for more than a comparatively short time.
Like a rainbow before breakfast, a sloth is a surprise, an unexpected
fellow breather of the air of our planet. No one could prophesy a
sloth. If you have an imaginative friend who has never seen a sloth
and ask him to describe what he thinks it ought to be like, his
uncontrolled phrases will fall far short of reality. If there were no
sloths, Dunsany would hesitate to put such a creature in the forests
of Mluna, Marco Polo would deny having seen one, and Munchausen would
whistle as he listened to a friend’s description.
A scientist--even a taxonomist himself--falters when he mentions the
group to which a sloth belongs. A taxonomist is the most terribly
accurate person in the world, dealing with unvarying facts, and his
names and descriptions of animals defy discretion, murder imagination.
Nevertheless when next you see a taxonomist disengaged, approach
him boldly and ask him in a tone of quarrelsome interest to what
order of Mammalia sloths belong. If an honest conservative he will
say, “Edentata,” which, as any ancient Greek will tell you, means a
toothless one. Then if you wish to enrage and nonplus the taxonomist,
which I think no one should, as I am one myself, then ask him Why? or,
if he has ever been bitten by any of the eighteen teeth of a sloth?
The great savant Buffon in spite of all his genius, fell into most
grievous error in his estimation of a sloth. He says, “The inertia of
this animal is not so much due to laziness as to wretchedness; it is
the consequence of its faulty structure. Inactivity, stupidity, and
even habitual suffering result from its strange and ill-constructed
conformation. Having no weapons for attack or defense, no mode of
refuge even by burrowing, its only safety is in flight.... Everything
about it shows its wretchedness and proclaims it to be one of those
defective monsters, those imperfect sketches, which Nature has
sometimes formed, and which, having scarcely the faculty of existence,
could only continue for a short time and have since been removed from
the catalogue of living beings. They are the last possible term amongst
creatures of flesh and blood, and any further defect would have made
their existence impossible.”
If we imagine the dignified French savant himself, naked, and dangling
from a lofty jungle branch in the full heat of the tropic sun, without
water and with the prospect of nothing but coarse leaves for breakfast,
dinner and all future meals, an impartial onlooker who was ignorant of
man’s normal haunts and life could very truthfully apply to the unhappy
scientist, Buffon’s own comments. All of his terms of opprobrium would
come home to roost with him.
A bridge out of place would be an absolutely inexplicable thing, as
would a sloth in Paris, or a Buffon in the trees. As a matter of fact
it was only when I became a temporary cripple myself that I began to
appreciate the astonishing lives which sloths lead. With one of my
feet injured and out of commission I found an abundance of time in six
weeks to study the individuals which we caught in the jungle near by.
Not until we invent a superlative of which the word “deliberate” is
the positive can we define a sloth with sufficient adequateness and
briefness. I dimly remember certain volumes by an authoress whose style
pictured the hero walking from the door to the front gate, placing
first the right, then the left foot before him as he went. With such
detail and speed of action might one write the biography of a sloth.
Ever since man has ventured into this wilderness, sloths have aroused
astonishment and comment. Four hundred years ago Gonzala de Oviedo
sat him down and penned a most delectable account of these creatures.
He says, in part: “There is another strange beast the Spaniards call
the Light Dogge, which is one of the slowest beasts and so heavie and
dull in mooving that it can scarsely goe fiftie pases in a whole day.
Their neckes are high and streight, and all equall like the pestle of a
mortar, without making any proportion of similitude of a head, or any
difference except in the noddle, and in the tops of their neckes. They
have little mouthes, and moove their neckes from one side to another,
as though they were astonished: their chiefe desire and delight is
to cleave and sticke fast unto Trees, whereunto cleaving fast, they
mount up little by little, staying themselves by their long claws.
Their voice is much differing from other beasts, for they sing only in
the night, and that continually from time to time, singing ever six
notes one higher than another. Sometimes the Christian men find these
beasts, and bring them home to their houses, where also they creepe
all about with their natural slownesse. I could never perceive other
but that they love onely of Aire: because they ever turne their heads
and mouthes toward that part where the wind bloweth most, whereby may
be considered that they take most pleasure in the Aire. They bite not,
nor yet can bite, having very little mouthes: they are not venemous or
noyous any way, but altogether brutish, and utterly unprofitable and
without commoditie yet known to men.”
It is difficult to find adequate comparisons for a topsy-turvy creature
like a sloth, but if I had already had synthetic experience with a
Golem, I would take for a formula the general appearance of an English
sheep dog, giving it a face with barely distinguishable features and no
expression, an inexhaustible appetite for a single kind of coarse leaf,
a gamut of emotions well below the animal kingdom, and an enthusiasm
for life excelled by a healthy sunflower. Suspend this from a jungle
limb by a dozen strong hooks, and--you would still have to see a live
sloth to appreciate its appearance.
At rest, curled up into an arboreal ball, a sloth is indistinguishable
from a cluster of leaves; in action, the second hand of a watch often
covers more distance. At first sight of the shapeless ball of hay,
moving with hopeless inadequacy, astonishment shifts to pity, then to
impatience and finally, as we sense a life of years spent thus, we
feel almost disgust. At which moment the sloth reaches blindly in our
direction, thinking us a barren, leafless, but perhaps climbable tree,
and our emotions change again, this time to sheer delight as a tiny
infant sloth raises its indescribably funny face from its mother’s
breast and sends forth the single tone, the high, whistling squeak,
which in sloth intercourse is song, shout, converse, whisper, argument
and chant. Separating him from his mother is like plucking a bur from
one’s hair, but when freed, he contentedly hooks his small self to our
clothing and creeps slowly about.
Instead of reviewing all the observations and experiments which I
perpetrated upon sloths, I will touch at once the heart of their
mysterious psychology, giving in a few words a conception of their
strange, uncanny minds. A bird will give up its life in defending its
young; an alligator will not often desert its nest in the face of
danger; a male stickleback fish will intrepidly face any intruder that
threatens its eggs. In fact, at the time when the young of all animals
are at the age of helplessness, the senses of the parents are doubly
keen, their activities and weapons are at greatest efficiency for the
guarding of the young and the consequent certainty of the continuance
of their race.