THE WILD ANIMALS AT PLAY
The watcher of wild animals never gets used to the sight of their
mirthless sport. In all other respects animal play is entirely human.
A great deal of human play is serious--desperately serious on the
football-field, and at the card-table, as when a lonely player is
trying to kill time with solitaire.
I have watched a great ungainly hippopotamus for hours trying to do
the same solemn thing by cuffing a croquet-ball back and forth from
one end of his cage to the other. His keepers told me that without the
plaything the poor caged giant would fret and worry himself to death.
It was his game of solitaire.
In all their games of rivalry the animals are serious as humans, and,
forgetting the fun, often fall to fighting--a sad case, indeed. But
brutes are brutes. We cannot expect anything better of the animals.
Only this morning the whole flock of chickens in the hen-yard started
suddenly on the wild flap to see which would beat to the back fence
and wound up on the “line” in a free fight, two of the cockerels
tearing the feathers from each other in a desperate set-to.
You have seen puppies fall out in the same human fashion, and kittens
also, and older folk as well. I have seen a game of wood-tag among
friendly gray squirrels come to a finish in a fight. As the crows pass
over during the winter afternoon, you will notice their play--racing
each other through the air, diving, swooping, cawing in their fun,
when suddenly some one’s temper snaps, and there is a mix-up in the
air.
They can get angry, but they cannot laugh. I once saw what I thought
was a twinkle of merriment, however, in an elephant’s eye. It was at
the circus several years ago. The keeper had just set down for one of
the elephants a bucket of water which a perspiring youth had brought
in. The big beast sucked it quietly up,--the whole of it,--swung
gently around as if to thank the perspiring boy, then soused him, the
whole bucketful! Everybody roared, and one of the other elephants
joined in with trumpetings, so huge and jolly was the joke.
The elephant who played the trick looked solemn enough, except for a
twitch at the lips and a glint in the eye. There is something of a
smile about every elephant’s lips, to be sure, and fun is so
contagious that one should hesitate to say that he saw an elephant
laugh. But if that elephant didn’t laugh, it was not his fault.
From the elephant to the infusorian, the microscopic animal of a
single cell known as the paramœcium, is a far cry--to the extreme
opposite end of the animal kingdom, worlds apart. Yet I have seen
_Paramœcium caudatum_ at play in a drop of water under a compound
microscope, as I have seen elephants at play in their big bath-tub at
the zoölogical gardens.
Place a drop of stagnant water under your microscope and watch these
atoms of life for yourself. Invisible to the naked eye, they are
easily followed on the slide as they skate and whirl and chase one
another to the boundaries of their playground and back again, first
one of them “it,” then another. They stop to eat, they slow up to
divide their single-celled bodies into two cells, the two cells now
two living creatures where a moment before they were but one, both of
them swimming off immediately to feed and multiply and play.
Play seems to be as natural and as necessary to the wild animals as it
is to human beings. Like us the animals play hardest while young, but
as some human children never outgrow their youth and love of play, so
there are old animals that never grow too fat nor too stiff nor too
stupid to play.
The condition of the body has a great deal to do with the state of the
spirit. The sleek, lithe otter could not possibly grow fat. He keeps
in trim because he cannot help it, perhaps, but however that may be,
he is a very boy for play, and even goes so far as to build himself a
slide or chute for the fun of diving down it into the water. A writer
in one of the magazines tells of an otter in the New York Zoölogical
Park that swam and dived with a round stone balanced on his head.
Building a slide is more than we children used to do, for we had
ready-made for us grandfather’s two big slanting cellar-doors, down
which we slid and slid and slid till the wood was scoured white and
slippery with the sliding. The otter loves to slide. Up he climbs on
the bank, then down he goes--splash--into the stream. Up he climbs
and down he goes--time after time, day after day. There is nothing
like a slide, unless it is a cellar-door.
How much of a necessity to the otter is his play, one would like to
know--what he would give up for it, and how he would do deprived of
it. In the case of Pups, my neighbor’s beautiful young collie, play
seems more needful than food. There are no children, no one, to play
with him there, so that the sight of my small boys sets him almost
frantic.
His efforts to induce a hen or a rooster to play with him are
pathetic. The hen cannot understand. She hasn’t a particle of play in
her anyhow, but Pups cannot get that through his head. He runs rapidly
around her, drops on all fours flat, swings his tail, cocks his ears,
looks appealingly and barks a few little cackle-barks, as nearly
hen-like as he can bark them, then dashes off and whirls back--while
the hen picks up another bug. She never sees Pups. The old white coon
cat is better; but she is usually up the miff-tree. Pups steps on her,
knocks her over, or otherwise offends, especially when he tags her out
into the fields and spoils her hunting. The Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals ought to send some child or puppy out to play
with Pups of a Saturday.
I doubt if among the lower forms of animals play holds any such
prominent place as with the dog and the keen-witted, intelligent
otter. To catch these lower animals at play is a rare experience. One
of our naturalists describes the game of “follow my leader,” as he
watched it played by a school of minnows--a most unusual record, but
not at all hard to believe, for I saw recently, from the bridge in the
Boston Public Garden, a school of goldfish playing at something very
much like it.
This naturalist was lying stretched out upon an old bridge, watching
the minnows through a large crack between the planks, when he saw one
leap out of the water over a small twig floating at the surface.
Instantly another minnow broke the water and flipped over the twig,
followed by another and another, the whole school, as so many sheep,
or so many children, following the leader over the twig.
The love of play seems to be one of the elemental needs of all life
above the plants, and the games of us human children seem to have
been played before the dry land was, when there were only water babies
in the world, for certainly the fish never learned “follow my leader”
from us. Nor did my young bees learn from us their game of “prisoners’
base” which they play almost every summer noontime in front of the
hives. And what is the game the flies play about the cord of the
drop-light in the centre of the kitchen ceiling?
One of the most interesting animal games that I ever saw was played by
a flock of butterflies on the very top of Mount Hood, whose pointed
snow-piled peak looks down from the clouds over the whole vast State
of Oregon.
Mount Hood is an ancient volcano, eleven thousand two hundred
twenty-five feet high. Some seven thousand feet or more up, we came to
“Tie-up Rock”--the place on the climb where the glacier snows lay
before us and we were tied up to one another and all of us fastened by
rope to the guide.
From this point to the peak, it was sheer deep snow. For the last
eighteen hundred feet we clung to a rope that was anchored on the edge
of the crater at the summit, and cut our steps as we climbed.
Once we had gained the peak, we lay down behind a pile of sulphurous
rock, out of the way of the cutting wind, and watched the steam float
up from the crater, with the widest world in view that I ever turned
my eyes upon.
The draft pulled hard about the openings among the rock-piles, but
hardest up a flue, or chimney, that was left in the edge of the
crater-rim where parts of the rock had fallen away.
As we lay at the side of this flue, we soon discovered that
butterflies were hovering about us; no, not hovering, but flying
swiftly up between the rocks from somewhere down the flue. I could
scarcely believe my eyes. What could any living thing be doing
here?--and of all things, butterflies? This was three or four thousand
feet above the last vestige of vegetation, a mere point of volcanic
rock (the jagged edge-piece of an old crater) wrapped in eternal ice
and snow, with sulphurous gases pouring over it, and across it
blowing a wind that would freeze as soon as the sun was out of the
sky.
But here were real butterflies. I caught two or three of them and
found them to be vanessas (_Vanessa californica_), a close relative of
our mourning-cloak butterfly. They were all of one species,
apparently, but what were they doing here?
Scrambling to the top of the piece of rock behind which I had been
resting, I saw that the peak was alive with butterflies, and that they
were flying--over my head, out down over the crater, and out of sight
behind the peak, whence they reappeared, whirling up the flue past me
on the wings of the draft that pulled hard through it, to sail down
over the crater again, and again to be caught by the draft and pulled
up the flue, to their evident delight, up and out over the peak, where
they could again take wings, as boys take their sleds, and so down
again for the fierce upward draft that bore them whirling over Mount
Hood’s pointed peak.
Here they were, thousands of feet above the snow-line, where there was
no sign of vegetation, where the heavy vapors made the air to smell,
where the very next day a wild snowstorm wrapped its frozen folds
about the peak--here they were, butterflies, playing, a host of them,
like so many schoolboys on the first coasting snow!