flowers--and yet to a passing glance reveal no trace of inflorescence.
Small and yellowish white, in irregular clusters of six to a dozen,
they make no kind of visual showing, but their nectaries call to small
trigonid bees in no uncertain way, and through the hours of sunlight
the branches of the mangrove are busy marts of trade. Each cluster of
blossoms becomes a corner grocery where the customers come for their
buckets of nectars and packages of pollen and rush away without paying,
or so they may think. But there are leaks in the pollen bags, and when
they enter another blossom, the little stream of sifting yellow dust
drifts across the entrance, a few grains or even a single one, falls
upon the waiting pistil, and the bee has repaid for his bread and
honey many fold and with compound interest. Its destiny fulfilled,
the flower falls apart, the petal, lacerate-woolly margins and all,
drifting off on the first tide. The ovary swells, two seeds form, and
now comes the first adjustment, and we realize that in the botanist’s
dry remark “one-seeded by abortion” may be concealed tragic doom and
a wealth of subtle meaning. No spear can be thrown straight which has
twin heads and shafts, and so one seed shrivels and dies, and the
other thrives and grows. What decides the fate of life or death we do
not know. Some delicate balance, some subtle test of worth or lack
takes place in every one of the thousands upon thousands of fertilized
mangrove blossoms, and there is no appeal. The reason, as we shall see,
is too vital, the target too difficult and treacherous for a thought to
be given to unborn plants.
The problem of the next generation of mangroves is a serious one.
The seeds are formed over an everchanging surface; soft, sticky mud
giving place to strong currents, flowing first in one, then in the
opposite direction; rough waves plough up the mud and splash against
the stilt-like roots. No sticky secretion, no mere weight, no hooks
or ærial wings will suffice for these seeds. From their natal branch
high above the tidal area, some sure method of anchorage must be found
to enable them to avoid being smothered in the mud, stranded on the
shore, rolled into deep water or washed out to sea.
The method is the arrow or loaded dart, and the force is the energy of
gravitation stored in particle after particle by the mother plant, as
she drew up salts and water and elements, raising them sapfully from
mud and tide, and condensing them into a solid, slender, pointed weapon
capable of coping with all the difficulties of the new environment.
But no seed alone can thus function, and in solving this problem the
mangrove reveals itself as one of the most remarkable plants in the
world. The lower forms of vegetation form their seeds and thrust them
forth naked upon the world; the more advanced plants ensheath their
offspring in swaddling clothes of protection against heat and cold,
moisture and aridity. These are comparable to egg-laying creatures,
with yolk and shell to shield the embryo from dangers. But the mangrove
is truly viviparous, and the embryo seed remains attached for months,
nourished by the sap of the parent branch. Out of the pear-shaped head
a root-like structure grows downward, often to a length of twenty
inches and a width of one. Like an airplane bomb, or the deadly
throwing assagai of the Zulus, the mangrove seedling is thickest
three-fourths of the way down, and then tapers rapidly. With a weight
of as much as three ounces and driving force generated by a height of
twenty feet, the umbilical cord of sap may safely dry, the connecting
sheath shrivel, and one day there is a dull little spatter of mud, or
a splash of water, and the unconscious work of the bees, the months of
slow invigorating by the parent plant are fulfilled. The seed sticks
upright in the mud, propelled through even two feet of water to its
goal, and immediately rootlets sprout and consolidate the anchorage.
I once blazed two dozen seedlings which seemed ready to drop, and
three of these were loosed at low water, so that they fell unhindered
directly into the mud. The others I missed and I can only surmise
whether this is the rule; whether some subtle influence of moon or tide
is not sufficient to cause the final separation. Such a stimulus would
be of great value to the young plant and is no more improbable than the
marvellous effect of the moon’s rays upon the palolo worms of the sea
bottom.
Let us for awhile forget the mangrove circus medley,--crab clowns,
strong men of the ants, hairy wild tarantulas, prestidigitator opossums
producing ten infant opossums from a single fold of skin, white
elephant membracid larvæ, living statue lianas, frog barkers and
lightning change lizards. Let us think of birds, or of a single bird.
I have seen more than a hundred kinds of birds among the mangroves
of Kartabo, but a mere enumeration of these would be of little
value and of no interest. And instead of selecting the rarest, most
bizarre of tropical forms, let us choose the commonest, the most
blatant, apparently the most ordinary bird, with average habits and
usual traits; which is another way of saying that we have observed
it casually, watched it with unintelligent inattention, and wholly
failed to interpret its activities in the terms of their desperate
significance.
A kiskadee flew to a root before me and called loudly. For a moment it
was only a kiskadee, and hardly registered color or sound, so common a
feature of the day was it. It was threatened with the oblivion of the
abundant, the neglect of the familiar. In New York City on a day of
slush and humid chill, with rush and worry and congested life, to hear
the loud, certain call _kis-ka-dee!_ from a cage in the Zoological Park
was to thrill in every fibre, and to remember peace, and calm thoughts
and vast quiet spaces. As the steamer moved up to the Georgetown
telling, _kis-ka-dee!_ from a corrugated iron roof signalized the
approach of another season of wonderful jungle existence. But from
that first moment on, the kiskadees were ungratefully allowed to sink
into the subconscious, while jaded, conscious senses strained after new
forms and novel sounds.
Today, however, looking up from my canoe among the mangroves, I saw the
bird as first I saw it many years ago--it became more than one among
hundreds, it assumed a miraculous rejuvenation.
Its very presence among the mangroves was significant. To the eyes of
all immigrants through the ages the mangrove and the kiskadee must have
come first--the tourist on the last ocean steamer, dark-haired men of
quaint Spanish galleons, Carib Indians in their dugouts paddling from
islands of the sea, and the man whose stone ax I found the other day,
squatting on a couple of vine-tied logs, drifting from God knows where.
Here on the very apex, the outermost root, marking the junction of the
Cuyuni and Mazaruni Rivers--here a kiskadee perched and here it had
built its nest. It was exciting thus to be able to fix a locality with
almost planetary, or at least continental accuracy. I have felt the
same thing when circling in a plane over the very tip of Long Island,
or standing on the spray-drenched, southernmost boulder of Ceylon,
or squatting on a Buddhist cairn on the verge of Tibet. Now I knew
that even a small map of South America would show this very spot of
mangroves and the exact perch of my kiskadee,--and the bird grew in
importance.
To Northern appraisement, our kingbird is nearest to this tropical
tyrant, except that the latter is even more wonted to man’s presence.
The kiskadee has nothing of delicacy or dainty grace. It is beautiful
in rufous wings and brilliant yellow under plumage, it is regal with
a crown of black, white and orange. But in life and caste it is
decidedly middle class. It is the harbinger of the dawn, but so is an
alarm-clock, and in regularity and blatancy of announcement there is
much in common between the two.
The husky call crashes upon the ear soon after the bird is sighted,
and from early times has caught the attention and been translated into
human speech. I know not what the stone-ax man dubbed it, he may only
have grunted and hurled his weapon at it, hoping for a morsel of food.
The Arrowaks and the few remaining Caribs know it as _Heet-gee-gee_,
and the Spaniards, prompted perhaps by the Jesuit Fathers, interpreted
it _Christus fui_; to Dutch ears it became characteristically tangled
up with _g’s_ and _i’s_, _Griet-je-bie_, the French more cleverly
phrased it with the onomatopoetic _Qu-est-ce-qu’il-dit?_ or _Qui? Oui,
Louis!_ while the negroes laugh it into _Kiss, Kiss, me deh’_.
I leaned back in the canoe and watched my kiskadee through a lattice
of curved roots. Within five minutes it gave me a hint of the living
chains of life with which the mangroves abound. The bird left its
perch and with a wild outpouring of screams and shrill cries flew with
unwonted directness, straight out and up over the river. Its mark was
a caracara hawk--a menial, degenerate, vegetable-feeding _Accipiter_,
who, when eggs or nestlings offer, loves to be tempted and loves to
fall! Swiftly after the kiskadee swept the next link in the chain, two
humming-birds whirring past, catching up at once and buzzing about the
tyrant’s head, well knowing that this sturdy eight inches of feathers,
alias flycatcher, so quick to cry “wolf” at every passing hawk, was far
from being wholly guiltless in the matter of certain nestlings.
But this is only an occasional failing and we pass to admiration
of other, more worthy attributes. The kiskadee, like most strong
characters has a number of doubles and imitators; one has drawn a grey
veil over the yellow breast, another has a wider bill, two are almost
replicas in miniature, but they are all conventional in haunt and
food. They all live in the compound of the bungalow and search the
air diligently for winged insects as their names say they should. But
kiskadee has overthrown the traditions of his family. A kindred spirit
to the mangrove, his quick eye has caught the advantages of aquatic
isolation and so we often find him nesting among the outer growths.
And having accepted the sanctuary of this strange amphibious tree, he
has altered his habits in other ways. A grey-throated kingbird or a
lesser kiskadee will often choose a perch over the water from which it
gracefully swoops for flying ants and termites. But watch the kiskadee!
As a returning crusader flaunts the infidel’s scimiter, and keeps
silence upon certain ways and means and happenings, so kiskadee
returned to perch, wiping from its bill the sordid taint of tweaked
hawk’s feather, and ready to explain the lost feather from its own
crown as worthy mark of battle. Its next movement was significant of
much of earthly progress and evolution--indeed an accumulation of
similar achievements would be quite enough to explain my sitting in a
canoe, watching the kiskadee with high power glasses, and endeavoring
to philosophize upon what I saw, instead of still pushing my body into
pseudopodia with my erstwhile amœbic confrères in the mud below. This
thought came when the bird fell from its root, plopped into the water,
and with effort, and a bit bedraggled as to plumage, rose with a small
fish in its beak.
The eternal restlessness of two of our pet monkeys, “Sadie” and
“Holy Ghost,” suggested to one of us the excellent definition of a
monkey:--“An animal which never wants to be where it is,” and this
applied to habits and traits emphasizes the importance of the kiskadee
diving after a fish instead of merely swooping after a passing insect:
the wide beak, the fringe of guiding bristles, soft plumage, the
examples of its relatives and the instinctive dictates of hundreds of
past generations, all point flycatcherward, yet it chooses otherwise
and taps a more nourishing source of food supply closed to its
superficial imitators, nearer to its new home, and less dependent on
sun and season.
In this, as in all similar cases, the vital interest lies not in the
fact of the actual change of habit, but how it came to arise. It were
easy in the comfort of one’s study with eyes fixed on pencil and paper
to devise the method of origin, clothing it with facile words. There
come to memory the shrill chatter, the swift short flights, the trim,
stream line forms of midget mangrove kingfishers, tiny Isaak Waltons
whose plunge, strike and return embody the perfection of piscatory
art. How easy for the intelligent eye of the kiskadee to observe the
mode of life of these little neighbors of the roots, to essay, to
practice and to succeed! Or if this strains our credulity, let us take
another sheet of paper and again logically explain the origin of the
habit; a pursued insect falls into the water, the kiskadee swoops at it
at the same moment when a minnow arises; the fish is unintentionally
seized instead of the flying ant, the foundation of cause and effect is
laid; and so, “dearly beloved,” that is the way the kiskadee learned to
fish!
For my part, I have not the faintest idea of how it began, in fact the
little I have been able to ascertain, tends more to complicate than to
clarify the problem, but there is one very significant thing about this
flycatcher fishing. The Kiskadee Tyrant (_Pitangus sulphuratus_) in
some of its several forms ranges from Texas to the Argentine, and from
Guiana to Peru.
Many years ago in western Mexico I observed the Northern form of
Pitangus plunging for minnows in an arroyo pool, later, in the Orinoco
delta and in Trinidad the subspecies _trinitatis_ fished for me in
both places; during five separate visits to Guiana I have seen many
individual kiskadees catching fish in widely separated localities, and
I have heard of a similar habit in birds of Brazil and Argentina.
Now while some unusually adaptable or quick-sighted bird may learn a
new habit, or a new variation of an old habit, it is quite another
thing to imagine a similar spreading of it wholesale among the
individuals of the species ranging over mountains, plains and islands
throughout a continent and a half. Such an achievement is as absurdly
improbable as the theory of a kingfisher tutor. We do not know how it
has come about, but when it is made clear I believe that many other
equally mysterious phenomena will be understood; why so many groups
of hoofed animals quite distantly related, all began in past time to
develop horns more or less simultaneously; why in hundreds of tropical
lakes which never know spring, untold hosts of ducks and geese are, as
one bird, stirred by something beyond themselves--as inexplicable and
invariable as the magnetic needle; why a flock of birds in flight has
no individual will, but is swerved and turned, carried aloft or settled
to rest by some inclusive spirit of flock or species. All this is not
recognized by any taxonomist, it is not explained by psychologists,
it is hardly ever thought of by naturalists, but some day it will
demand of our philosophy an explanation. When that time comes, I will
understand the fishing of my mangrove kiskadee as now I understand only
how much I want to know.
A strange city or shore or jungle, a new friend, or house or garden
should always first be seen at night; should be glanced at, not
scrutinized, listened to, not examined, wondered at, not studied.
The glamour rightly born of dusk will then forever mitigate defects
apparent in the glare of day, ash-cans, thorns, thick wrists, oilcloth
tiles or blight. But no studied plan led my feet to the mangroves on
a May midnight of the wettest moon at full. Raindrops from distant
Venezuelan storms, and others which had spattered upon the mysterious
heights of Roraima had filled the rivers up to their brims. And now the
pull of the moon had slackened, and gently let the liquid mass sink
down. There was not a ripple, only an occasional heave and settling,
more effective, more potent of cosmic energy than any crashing waves or
surging bore. And I did not wonder that ancient man failed to connect
the tides and moon, for here high overhead hung the great satellite,
while before me the gravity pull of yesternight’s moon was just
relaxing.
The light was somewhat grayed with clouds, but quite bright enough
for type, if I had not forgotten that there was such a thing; the
mangrove world was oxidized, the leaves lost all their semblance
to foliage,--the branches merely dripped dark, oblong sheets of
tissue. The slowly sinking mirror stretched the completed curves of
roots,--slits widening to ellipses, ellipses to circles, until suddenly
the earthly halves were shattered upon the dull glisten of exposing mud.
I was perched upon the buttress of a small mora which had ventured far
out beyond its jungle brethren, or had been long since isolated by
encroaching waters. Behind me was a black palm swamp and the narrow
trail between. Optically both were invisible, aurally they were clearly
outlined. From the swamp came the cheery little voices of the black
and scarlet leaf walkers, the cubee frogs of the Indians, snapping out
their brief but vital message, and from end to end the white-collared
nighthawks patrolled the trail, with short, silent flights,
thistle-down alightings, and never-ending queries of _Who-are-you?_ as
distinct as though worded by human lips. I remembered my Brazilian frog
who pursued my researches with his eternal _Why?_ I looked at the moon
and the water and the mangroves, I thought of my imperfect self and I
knew that never in this world would I form a satisfactory answer to
either bird or batrachian.
Beyond the outermost roots came the low thrumming of a catfish
singing in the shallows, forced perhaps by the lowering tide from some
moonlit feeding ground hidden from my sight. It ceased abruptly and
like an aerial antiphony came a deep rumbling throb from a root at
my right,--the call of the greatest of all tree frogs, a well-named
_Hyla maxima_. Here night after night I had heard him and had tried to
approach. But always he detected my lightest step and became silent.
His is the resonant bass violin in the orchestra of a jungle night. At
this moment from two miles away, a chorus of these great frogs rang
clear from a distant swamp. For about three-fourths of the time the
calls were perfectly synchronized, coming in great successive waves;
_wahrrook! wahrrook! wahrrook!_ Wahruk, by the way, is their Akawai
Indian name. Then some batrachian with a poor sense of rhythm got out
of tempo, and this threw all the rest into confusion.
Now that I had remained quiet for many minutes, the fears of the giant
tree frog were allayed and he called, almost within reach. I examined
every branch near me and at last saw the outline of his great goggle
eyes, standing high above his inconspicuous head. I even distinguished
a huge webbed hand, looking like a bit of splayed out moss, resting
flabbily against a bit of bark. In five minutes he rumbled forty-two
times, grouping his emotional reiterations in series of eight, with
long rests between. Steadily I watched him, until without warning, in
the midst of a deep-throated _wahrrook!_ he leaped into mid air. Only
it was not my supposed frog with the outstretched hand which sprang,
but a shapeless bit of dangling lichen a foot away, my image reverting
into moss and bark; a lifetime of carefully trained eyesight availed
nothing, even in this brilliant tropical moonlight, when pitted against
the dissolving power of a giant tree-frog. He splashed into the water,
reaching another mangrove root in two kicks, and vanished again. This
was not maxima’s usual habit of a creeping walk from leaf to leaf, now
and then leaping to a higher part of the foliage,--and I waited, and
wondered.
In front of me were several twigfuls of leaves, and just below two
curved roots, one complete from trunk to water, the second lacking a
few inches of crossing the arc of the other. The air was motionless,
the water like glass, when I distinctly saw three of the leaves move
to and fro. Then two more farther on, followed by quiet, then all
waved simultaneously, as with memory of the breeze of the past rising
tide, or anticipations of the breaths which would usher in the coming
dawn. No other leaf in sight even trembled,--only these rocked and
swung. Another vegetable miracle followed,--the shortened root began
to grow before my eyes! I had recently measured and marvelled at a
bamboo shoot which pushed steadily upward almost ten inches a day, but
here was a mere root which had added six inches to its length in half
as many minutes! Finally my dull eyes cleared, and as the detective
stories say, there was solved the mystery of the frog’s leap, the
shaking leaves and the sprouting root; a snake flowed slowly along
through the leafy twigs, over the arched root to its tip, and then,
with its suspended body, spanned the gap between it and the next root.
Long before I had even seen the moving leaves, the frog had sensed the
danger and fled.
As I watched the root apparently grow thicker, then diminish, and
finally again become a shortened segment, my memory pared down the
moon, cleared the sky of clouds, held fast to the mangroves, but raised
the flat lines of bordering jungle into rounded hills. The palms and
dark water and cool tropic air were the same, but instead of the
roar of distant howlers there came to the ear the joyous whoops of
gibbons,--the wa-was of the deep Bornean jungle.
All this leaped vividly to mind because it framed the last time I
saw a snake among mangroves. That time the snake was smaller, but its
effect was of infinitely greater moment. I was hunting Argus pheasants,
but had unwillingly allowed my interest to be temporarily distracted
by two great apes, orang-utans, which I saw now and then, and which
were remarkably tame. One of these, a small animal about half grown,
invariably retreated toward the river-bank, and then vanished. No
matter how carefully I trailed the strange little being, every trace
of him disappeared when I reached the mangrove fringe. One moonlight
night I sat upon a mangrove root, compass in hand, trying to locate a
distant calling Argus pheasant, as the correct lining-up of the bird
would be sure to bisect its dancing ground. After I had sat quietly for
a long time, something drew my eyes upward and there, high overhead,
peering down at me, was the orang, chin on hand, leaning on the edge of
his nest of branches. There was no fear in his glance,--he looked like
a meditative, aged man, who would have been more in place leaning on a
cane in a chimney corner, than on a frail platform of broken boughs in
a mangrove tree. I gradually focussed my electric flash on his face and
he blinked at the strange light. He mumbled with his lips as if talking
to himself, saying strange tree-top things about huge fireflies which
burned too brightly. Once he swept a huge hand across his face, then
sucked a great, crooked forefinger and without moving his head, rolled
his eyes upward at a passing bat.
I shut off my light and we gazed at one another in the moonlight, with
interest, but without malice or suspicion, until suddenly his twitching
lips drew together, and I saw his whole body rise and stiffen. I
followed his glance as best I could, somewhere beyond me, and before
long I saw a small snake climbing out of the water up one of the roots.
I knew it for a harmless species and after watching it draw out its
whole length of three feet, I looked upward again. Not a sound, neither
snap of twigs nor rustle of leaves had come to me, but the monkey’s
nest was empty. I could see the branches more or less clearly on all
sides for thirty feet, yet there was no hint of the great ape. The
harmless little snake had sent him off in violent but silent haste into
the jungle, whereas my presence had given him no apparent disquietude.
He was absent the following night, but the second night was back and
actually snoring before I came close enough to disturb him. I never saw
him again.
VII
THE LIFE OF DEATH