Part 8

The answer came unexpectedly. It was in the Pemigewasset valley in midsummer. At daybreak I had come softly down the wood road to the trout pool and stopped to watch a mink dodging in and out along the shore. When he passed out of sight under some logs I waited quietly for other Wood Folk to show themselves. A slight movement on the end of a log--and there was Pekompf, so still that the eye could hardly find him, stretching a paw down cautiously and flipping it back with a peculiar inward sweep. Again he did it, and I saw the long curved claws, keen as fish-hooks, stretched wide out of their sheaths. He was fishing, spearing his prey with the patience of an Indian; and even as I made the discovery there was a flash of silver following the quick jerk of his paw, and Pekompf leaped to the shore and crouched over the fish that he had thrown out of the water.

So Pekompf watches the pools as he watches a squirrel's hole because he has seen game there and because he likes fish above everything else that the woods can furnish. But how often must he watch the big trout before he catches one? Sometimes, in the late twilight, the largest fish will move out of the pools and nose along the shore for food, their back fins showing out of the shallow water as they glide along. It may be that Pekompf sometimes catches them at this time, and so when he sees the gleam of a fish in the depths he crouches where he is for a while, following the irresistible impulse of all cats at the sight of game. Herein they differ from all other savage beasts, which, when not hungry, pay no attention whatever to smaller animals.

It may be, also, that Pekompf's cunning is deeper than this. Old Noel, a Micmac hunter, tells me that both wildcat and lynx, whose cunning is generally the cunning of stupidity, have discovered a remarkable way of catching fish. They will lie with their heads close to the water, their paws curved for a quick grab, their eyes half shut to deceive the fish, and their whiskers just touching and playing with the surface. Their general color blends with that of their surroundings and hides them perfectly. The trout, noticing the slight crinkling of the water where the long whiskers touch it, but not separating the crouching animal from the log or rock on which he rests, rise to the surface, as is their wont when feeding, and are snapped out by a lightning sweep of the paws.

Whether this be so or not I am not sure. The raccoon undoubtedly catches crabs and little fish in this way; and I have sometimes surprised cats--both wildcats and Canada lynxes, as well as domestic tabbies--with their heads down close to the water, so still that they seemed part of the log or rock on which they crouched. Once I tried for five minutes to make a guide see a big lynx that was lying on a root in plain sight within thirty yards of our canoe, while the guide assured me in a whisper that he could see perfectly and that it was only a stump. Then, hearing us, the lynx rose, stared, and leaped for the brush.

Such hiding would easily deceive even a trout, for I have often taken my position at the edge of a jam and after lying perfectly still for ten minutes have seen the wary fish rise from under the logs to investigate a straw or twig that I held in my fingers and with which I touched the water here and there, like an insect at play.

So Old Noel is probably right when he says that Pekompf fishes with his whiskers, for the habits of both fish and cats seem to carry out his observations.

But deeper than his cunning is Pekompf's inborn suspicion and his insane fury at being opposed or cornered. The trappers catch him, as they catch his big cousin the lucivee, by setting a snare in the rabbit paths that he nightly follows. Opposite the noose and attached to the other end of the cord is a pole, which jumps after the cat as he starts forward with the loop about his neck. Were it a fox, now, he would back away out of the snare, or lie still and cut the cord with his teeth and so escape. But, like all cats when trapped, Pekompf flies into a blind fury. He screeches at the unoffending stick, claws it, battles with it, and literally chokes himself in his rage. Or, if he be an old cat and his cunning a bit deeper, he will go off cautiously and climb the biggest tree he can find, with the uncomfortable thing that he is tied to dangling and clattering behind him. When near the top he will leave the stick hanging on one side of a limb while he cunningly climbs down the other, thinking thus to fool his dumb enemy and leave him behind. One of two things always happens. Either the stick catches in the crotch and Pekompf hangs himself on his own gibbet, or else it comes over with a sudden jerk and falls to the ground, pulling Pekompf with it and generally killing him in the fall.

It is a cruel, brutal kind of device at best, and fortunately for the cat tribe has almost vanished from the northern woods, except in the far Northwest, where the half-breeds still use it for lynx successfully. But as a study of the way in which trappers seize upon some peculiarity of an animal and use it for his destruction, it has no equal.

That Pekompf's cunning is of the cat kind, suspicious without being crafty or intelligent like that of the fox or wolf, is curiously shown by a habit which both lynx and wildcat have in common, namely, that of carrying anything they steal to the top of some lofty evergreen to devour it. When they catch a rabbit or fish fairly themselves, they generally eat it on the spot; but when they steal the same animal from snare or cache, or from some smaller hunter, the cat suspicion returns--together with some dim sense of wrongdoing, which all animals feel more or less--and they make off with the booty and eat it greedily where they think no one will ever find them.

Once, when watching for days under a fish-hawk's nest to see the animals that came in shyly to eat the scraps that the little fish-hawks cast out when their hunger was satisfied, this cat habit was strikingly manifest. Other animals would come in and quietly eat what they found and slip away again; but the cats would seize on a morsel with flashing eyes, as if defying all law and order, and would either growl horribly as they ate or else would slink away guiltily and, as I found out by following, would climb the biggest tree at hand and eat the morsel in the highest crotch that gave a foothold. And once, on the Maine coast in November, I saw a fierce battle in the tree-tops where a wildcat crouched, snarling like twenty fiends, while a big eagle whirled and swooped over him, trying to take away the game that Pekompf had stolen.

By far the most curious bit of Pekompf's cunning came under my eyes, one summer, a few years ago. Until recently I had supposed it to be a unique discovery; but last summer a friend, who goes to Newfoundland every year for the salmon fishing, had a similar experience with a Canada lynx, which emphasizes the tendency of all cats to seek the tree-tops with anything that they have stolen; though curiously enough I have never found any trace of it with game that they had caught honestly themselves. It was in Nova Scotia, where I was trout fishing for a little season, and where I had no idea of meeting Pekompf, for the winters are severe there and the wildcat is supposed to leave such places to his more powerful and longer-legged cousin, the lynx, whose feet are bigger than his and better padded for walking on the snow. Even in the southern Berkshires you may follow Pekompf's trail and see where he makes heavy weather of it, floundering belly-deep like a domestic tabby through the soft drifts in his hungry search for grouse and rabbits, and lying down in despair at last to wait till the snow settles. But to my surprise Pekompf was there, bigger, fiercer, and more cunning than I had ever seen him; though I did not discover this till after a long search.

I had fished from dawn till almost six o'clock, one morning, and had taken two good trout, which were all that the stream promised to yield for the day. Then I thought of a little pond in the woods over the mountain, which looked trouty when I had discovered it and which, so far as I knew, had never been fished with a fly. Led more by the fun of exploring than by the expectation of fish, I started to try the new waters.

The climb through the woods promised to be a hard one, so I left everything behind except rod, reel, and fly-book. My coat was hung on the nearest bush; the landing-net lay in the shade across a rock, the end of the handle wedged under a root, and I dropped my two trout into that and covered them from the sun with ferns and moss. Then I started off through the woods for the little pond.

When I came back empty-handed, a few hours later, trout and landing-net were gone. The first thought naturally was that some one had stolen them, and I looked for the thief's tracks; but, save my own, there was not a footprint anywhere beside the stream up or down. Then I looked beside the rock more carefully and found bits of moss and fish-scales, and the pugs of some animal, too faint in the gravel to make out what the beast was that made them. I followed the faint traces for a hundred yards or more into the woods till they led me to a great spruce tree, under which every sign disappeared utterly, as if the creature had suddenly flown away net and all, and I gave up the trail without any idea of what had made it.

For two weeks that theft bothered me. It was not so much the loss of my two trout and net, but rather the loss of my woodcraft on the trail that had no end, which kept me restless. The net was a large one, altogether too large and heavy for trout fishing. At the last moment before starting on my trip I found that my trout net was rotten and useless, and so had taken the only thing at hand, a specially made forty-inch net which I had last used on a scientific expedition for collecting specimens from the lakes of northern New Brunswick. The handle was long, and the bow, as I had more than once tested, was powerful enough to use instead of a gaff for taking a twenty-five pound salmon out of his pool after he had been played to a standstill; and how any creature could drag it off through the woods without leaving a plain trail for my eyes to follow puzzled me, and excited a most lively curiosity to know who he was and why he had not eaten the fish where he found them. Was it lynx or stray wolf, or had the terrible Injun Devil that is still spoken of with awe at the winter firesides returned to his native woods? For a week I puzzled over the question; then I went back to the spot and tried in vain to follow the faint marks in the moss. After that whenever I wandered near the spot I tried the trail again, or circled wider and wider through the woods, hoping to find the net or some positive sign of the beast that had stolen it.

One day in the woods it occurred to me suddenly that, while I had followed the trail three or four times, I had never thought to examine the tree beneath which it ended. At the thought I went to the big spruce and there, sure enough, were flecks of bright brown here and there where the rough outer shell had been chipped off. And there also, glimmering white, was a bit of dried slime where a fish had rested for an instant against the bark. The beast, whatever he was, had climbed the tree with his booty; and the discovery was no sooner made than I was shinning up eagerly after him.

Near the scraggy top I found my net, its long handle wedged firmly in between two branches, its bow caught on a projecting stub, its bag hanging down over empty space. In the net was a big wildcat, his round head driven through a hole which he had bitten in the bottom, the tough meshes drawn taut as fiddle-strings about his throat. All four legs had clawed or pushed their way through the mesh, till every kick and struggle served only to bind and choke him more effectually.

From marks I made out at last the outline of the story. Pekompf had found the fish and tried to steal them, but his suspicions were roused by the queer net and the clattering handle. With true lynx cunning, which is always more than half stupidity, he had carried it off and started to climb the biggest tree he could find. Near the top the handle had wedged among the branches, and while he tried to dislodge it net and fish had swung clear of the trunk. In the bark below the handle I found where he had clung to the tree boll and tried to reach the swinging trout with his paw; and on a branch above the bow were marks which showed where he had looked down longingly at the fish at the bottom of the net, just below his hungry nose. From this branch he had either fallen or, more likely, in a fit of blind rage had leaped into the net, which closed around him and held him more effectually than bars of iron. When I came under for the first time, following his trail probably crouched on a limb over my head watching me steadily; and when I came back the second time he was dead.

That was all that one could be sure about. But here and there, in a torn mesh, or a tuft of fur, or the rip of a claw against a swaying twig, were the marks of a struggle whose savage intensity one could only imagine.

ANIMAL SURGERY

Most people have seen a sick cat eat grass, or an uneasy dog seek out some weed and devour it greedily to make his complaining stomach feel better. Some few may have read John Wesley's directions on the art of keeping well--which have not, however, found their way into his book of discipline for the soul--and have noted with surprised interest his claim that many medicines in use among the common people and the physicians of his time were discovered by watching the animals that sought out these things to heal their diseases. "If they heal animals they will also heal men," is his invincible argument. Others may have dipped deep into Indian history and folk-lore and learned that many of the herbs used by the American tribes, and especially the cures for rheumatism, dysentery, fever, and snake bites, were learned direct from the animals, by noting the rheumatic old bear grub for fern roots or bathe in the hot mud of a sulphur spring, and by watching with eager eyes what plants the wild creatures ate when bitten by rattlers or wasted by the fever. Still others have been fascinated with the first crude medical knowledge of the Greeks, which came to them from the East undoubtedly, and have read that the guarded mysteries of the Asclepiades, the healing cult that followed Æsculapius, had among them many simple remedies that had first proved their efficacy among animals in a natural state; and that Hippocrates, the greatest physician of antiquity, whose fame under the name of Bokrat the Wise went down through Arabia and into the farthest deserts, owes many of his medical aphorisms to what he himself, or his forebears, must have seen out of doors among the wild creatures. And all these seers and readers have perhaps wondered how much the animals knew, and especially how they came to know it.

To illustrate the matter simply and in our own day and generation: A deer that has been chased all day long by dogs, and that has escaped at last by swimming an icy river and fallen exhausted on the farther shore, will lie down to sleep in the snow. That would mean swift death for any human being. Half the night the deer will move about at short intervals, instead of sleeping heavily, and in the morning he is as good as ever and ready for another run. The same deer shut up in a warm barn to sleep overnight, as has been more than once tested with park animals, will be found dead in the morning.

Here is a natural law of healing suggested, which, if noted among the Greeks and Indians, would have been adopted instantly as a method of dealing with extreme cold and exhaustion, or with poisoning resulting in paralysis of the muscles. Certainly the method, if somewhat crude, might still have wrought enough cures to be looked upon with veneration by a people who unfortunately had no knowledge of chemical drugs, or Scotch whisky, or sugar pellets with an ethereal suggestion of intangible triturations somewhere in the midst of them.

That the animals do practice at times a rude kind of medicine and surgery upon themselves is undeniable. The only question about it is, How do they know? To say it is a matter of instinct is but begging the question. It is also three-fourths foolishness, for many of the things that animals do are beyond the farthest scope of instinct. The case of the deer that moved about and so saved his life, instead of sleeping on heavily to his death, may be partly a case of instinct. Personally it seems to me more a matter of experience; for a fawn under the same circumstances, unless his mother were near to keep him moving, would undoubtedly lie down and die. More than that, it seems to be largely a matter of obedience to the strongest impulse of the moment, to which all animals are accustomed or trained from their birthday. And that is not quite the same thing as instinct, unless one is disposed to go to the extreme of Berkeley's philosophy and make instinct a kind of spirit-personality that watches over animals all the time. Often the knowledge of healing or of primitive surgery seems to be the discovery or possession of a few rare individual animals, instead of being spread widecast among the species, as instincts are. This knowledge, or what-you-may-call-it, is sometimes shared, and so hints at a kind of communication among animals, of whose method we catch only fleeting glimpses and suggestions--but that will be the subject of another article. The object of this is, not to answer the questions of how or whence, but simply to suggest one or two things I have seen in the woods as the basis for further and more detailed observations.

The most elemental kind of surgery is that which amputates a leg when it is broken, not always or often, but only when the wound festers from decay or fly-bite and so endangers the whole body. Probably the best illustration of this is found in the coon, who has a score of traits that place him very high among intelligent animals. When a coon's foot is shattered by a bullet he will cut it off promptly and wash the stump in running water, partly to reduce the inflammation and partly, no doubt, to make it perfectly clean. As it heals he uses his tongue on the wound freely, as a dog does, to cleanse it perhaps, and by the soft massage of his tongue to reduce the swelling and allay the pain.

So far this may or may not be pure instinct. For I do not know, and who will tell me, whether a child puts his wounded hand to his mouth and sucks and cleanses the hurt by pure instinct, or because he has seen others do it, or because he has had his hurts kissed away in childhood, and so imitates the action unconsciously when his mother is not near?

Most mother animals tongue their little ones freely. Now is that a caress, or is it some hygienic measure begun at birth, when she devours all traces of the birth-envelopes and licks the little ones clean lest the nose of some hungry prowler bring him near to destroy the family? Certainly the young are conscious of the soft tongue that rubs them fondly, and so when they lick their own wounds it may be only a memory and an imitation,--two factors, by the way, which lie at the bottom of all elemental education. That explanation, of course, leaves the amputated leg out of the question; and the surgery does not stop here.

When a boy, and still barbarian enough to delight in trapping, partly from a love of the chase that was born in me, and partly to put money into a boy's empty pocket, I once caught a muskrat in a steel trap that slid off into deep water at the first pull and so drowned the creature mercifully. This was due to the careful instructions of Natty Dingle, at whose feet I sat to learn woodcraft, and who used the method to save all his pelts; for often an animal, when caught in a trap, will snap the bone by a twist of his body and then cut the leg off with his teeth, and so escape, leaving his foot in the trap's jaws. This is common enough among fur-bearing animals to excite no comment; and it is sad now to remember that sometimes I would find animals drowned in my traps, that had previously suffered at the hands of other trappers.

I remember especially one big musquash that I was going to shoot near one of my traps, when I stopped short at noticing some queer thing about him. The trap was set in shallow water where a path made by muskrats came up out of the river into the grass. Just over the trap was a turnip on a pointed stick to draw the creature's attention and give him something to anticipate until he should put his foot on the deadly pan beneath. But the old musquash avoided the path, as if he had suffered in such places before. Instead of following the ways of his ancestors he came out at another spot behind the trap, and I saw with horrible regret that he had cut off both his fore legs, probably at different times, when he had been twice caught in man's abominable inventions. When he came up out of the stream he rose on his hind legs and waddled through the grass like a bear or a monkey, for he had no fore feet to rest upon. He climbed a tussock beside the bait with immense caution, pulled in the turnip with his two poor stumps of forearms, ate it where he was, and slipped back into the stream again; while the boy watched with a new wonder in the twilight, and forgot all about the gun as he tended his traps.

It does not belong with my story, but that night the traps came in, and never went out again; and I can never pass a trap now anywhere without poking a stick into it to save some poor innocent leg.

All this is digression; and I have almost forgotten my surgery and the particular muskrat I was talking about. He, too, had been caught in some other fellow's trap and had bitten his leg off only a few days before. The wound was not yet healed, and the amazing thing about it was that he had covered it with some kind of sticky vegetable gum, probably from some pine-tree that had been split or barked close to the ground where Musquash could reach it easily. He had smeared it thickly all over the wound and well up the leg above it, so that all dirt and even all air and water were excluded perfectly.

An old Indian who lives and hunts on Vancouver Island told me recently that he has several times caught beaver that had previously cut their legs off to escape from traps, and that two of them had covered the wounds thickly with gum, as the muskrat had done. Last spring the same Indian caught a bear in a deadfall. On the animal's side was a long rip from some other bear's claw, and the wound had been smeared thickly with soft spruce resin. This last experience corresponds closely with one of my own. I shot a big bear, years ago, in northern New Brunswick, that had received a gunshot wound, which had raked him badly and then penetrated the leg. He had plugged the wound carefully with clay, evidently to stop the bleeding, and then had covered the broken skin with sticky mud from the river's brink, to keep the flies away from the wound and give it a chance to heal undisturbed. It is noteworthy here that the bear uses either gum or clay indifferently, while the beaver and muskrat seem to know enough to avoid the clay, which would be quickly washed off in the water.