Part 1

_The_ WILD HEART

_By Emma-Lindsay Squier_

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GENE STRATTON-PORTER

_Illustrations and Decorations by_ PAUL BRANSOM

Cosmopolitan Book Corporation NEW YORK MCMXXII

_Copyright, 1922, by Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, New York. All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian_

_First printing_ _March, 1922_ _Second printing_ _April, 1922_

_Printed in the United States of America_

DEDICATED TO

_BASIL KING_

WITH DEEPEST GRATITUDE FOR THE INSPIRATION AND ENCOURAGEMENT THROUGH WHICH THE WILD HEART STORIES FOUND WRITTEN EXPRESSION, AND FOR THE TITLE OF THE SERIES WHICH THUS CAME INTO BEING.

THE ILLUSTRATIONS _and_ CONTENTS

PAGE Skygak discovered that catching mice was Three-Spot’s chief vocation SKYGAK 12 He circled slowly above our heads 32 U-Chu-Ka never failed to answer our call U-CHU-KA 34 For the dogs had lost the lighter scent SANCTUARY 47 He questioningly sniffed the breeze THE FAERY NIGHT 66 Cannon came charging in a whirlwind of THE FRIENDSHIP THAT feathers FAILED 82 His constant barking set the grown-ups against him STOP THIEF 101 If Clarence had been a man, he would have endowed orphanages O’HENRY 124 Timothy clung to the bottle habit TIMOTHY, THE DIRTY BEAR 145 Sometimes the bandit birds swooped down THE BANDIT BIRD 168 Her nostrils dilated at the hated human scent MY FRIEND THE PRINCESS 189 A wild thing of the deep woods, ruled by pain instead of kindliness ETHEL 208

AN INTRODUCTION _Which might better be entitled_: Some Youngsters Find the Wrong Parents

_By_

Gene Stratton-Porter

Since “The Wild Heart” is throbbing with the same blood that pulses in the heart of every human being who goes to the fields and woods and fraternizes with the creatures that home there, since the feet that carry a wild heart on its journey are following the same path that a few peculiar feet have made, what they have found and what the heart has learned is the same thing that similar feet have been finding and hearts have been learning since the beginning of time.

The author of this book pronounces it “very simple, having no literary style or value.” Perhaps this estimate indicates modesty on her part, but it is not the truth concerning the book. Thoreau once wrote: “It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak and the other to hear.” Those of us who have made our own path through the wilds know the truth when we hear it. The first law that can be laid down concerning any work worthy to be put into the hands of the public is the old law that every writer should write concerning matters of his own personal observation. Whenever any writer follows this old rule, working with sincerity of heart, with inborn insight concerning his chosen subject, following the promptings of a simple human heart, and using a certain facility in the choice of words, which is a gift of God primarily, that author must evolve good work. Laying down these specifications as law which governs every masterpiece that ever has been produced, it will be observed that “The Wild Heart” follows them as naturally as water flows to the sea, possibly as unconsciously.

To anyone who knows the fields and woods the book carries the conviction of truth. Those who do not know nature will not believe many of these statements, because they have not learned that when one goes into the haunts of the wild calmly, fearlessly, absolutely in tune with Nature, one is perfectly safe. The people who go to fraternize with the free creatures, to learn the secrets of Nature, to protect, to love, to fellowship with the wild, wear an invincible armor.

Enos Mills will tell you that he tramps the Rocky Mountains for weeks at a time absolutely without a weapon. Arthur Heming will tell you that he travels Canada from side to side, north and south, passing all kinds of wild creatures at all seasons and under any conditions, and nothing touches him.

I can tell you that my face has been within two feet of a coiled rattlesnake ready to strike, but it did not strike. Two minutes later a man antagonistic to the wild passed the same location and immediately the snake disclosed itself and was ready to fight.

Very recently some children playing at the edge of the desert found a scorpion. They coaxed it onto a piece of bark and were carrying it around playing with it. So long as they felt no fear of the creature, it was quiescent in their hands. The instant they carried it among grown people who recognized it and were afraid, the trouble began. When the wild thing entered the atmosphere of fear and was surrounded by the taint of that acid which is exhaled from the body of any human being experiencing fear, that instant it was on guard and ready to strike.

Any human being carrying in his breast a wild heart knows instinctively how to fraternize with the wild. Anyone carrying a heart of fear and antagonism will have a troubled journey through forest or desert. The writer of this book proves that she carries a wild heart in her breast. Her records are unquestionably true. They are precisely the same things that happen to anyone having a heart in tune with Nature.

So the book passes, first, because it speaks the truth. It needs only that these records should be read to gain an idea of the degree of insight possessed by the writer. The nice comprehension of what the wild is thinking and feeling, the keen perception of the “why” of things, pass the book on the grounds of insight. The simple unassuming manner in which the record is kept proves it the emanation of a human heart without guile, effervescing love, not only for the beauties of field and forest, but for the living creatures that home there.

It is modest of the writer to say that her book has “no literary style or value,” but the book proves the reverse. Throughout will be found the value of truth, the exquisite style of utter simplicity, the best plain common word chosen to tell the plain common story; and it is a very difficult thing always to find the right words with which to tell any story. There are only about twenty thousand words in the English language. When you compare this number with the number of objects existing in the world, the number of ideas that have sprung and will spring in the human brain, it easily can be appreciated that it is sometimes difficult to find the right word by which to express one’s meaning clearly and simply; for there always is one word which, better than any other, will portray a situation or describe an object.

Any author who is actuated by sincerity will always choose the plain simple word which expresses his meaning plainly and simply. The one thing that sets apart the work of any writer is the ability to express himself in plain simple language that common people can understand and appreciate. It was on this subject that Martin Luther once said: “Hebrew, Latin, and Greek I spare until we learned ones come together, and then we make it so curled and finical that God Himself wondereth at us.”

That is precisely the reason why nine-tenths of the Nature books written in this country have been failures. They are “so curled and finical” that only the “learned ones” can understand what they are all about.

To me it is an atrocity to tag a bird, a butterfly, or a flower with several inches of Latin or Greek per each. Every living creature should have a common, simple, descriptive name that a common human being who wants to know what it is can learn and remember. I do truly believe “that God Himself wondereth at us” if He takes the time to look at many of the books to be found in our libraries concerning the most exquisite and beautiful of His creatures.

I believe that any normal man or woman would be intensely interested in the organism of a moth, the delicate parts so beautifully evolved to serve their purpose; but what common person could wade through a large volume crammed from end to end with such terms as _patagia_, _jugum_, _discocellulars_, _phagocytes_? It is such works on Nature that have kept the Nature lovers of many generations out of the fields and woods. They had not the education, the time, nor the inclination to be sufficiently “curled and finical” to be specific. They could take no one specimen and learn it, because they could not identify it. In a book such as “The Wild Heart” there is no word that a ten-year-old child can not comprehend; while there is a wonderful beauty and facility in the choice of words, in the sincerity of expression, and the sympathetic insight.

I certainly wish that a copy of this book may go into every home in the world, for two reasons: the first, that men and women may learn how anyone with a sympathetic heart devoid of fear may fraternize with the wild; and for the other very excellent reason that it may do something toward teaching parents that all children are not alike and can not possibly be run through the same groove.

Here and there in a family there is born a child with a wild heart. It is nothing less than a tragedy when such a child is cursed with the wrong parents. God gives to only a few of His children a wild heart, a musical ear, facile fingers. The man or woman who keeps a child born with the love of the woods in its heart from contact with Nature, who destroys the trust that God placed in its heart, and instils fear bred by man, does a dreadful thing, a thing that must end in disaster. Nature does not reveal her secrets to everyone. Creatures of the wild will not be brothers with any save a very few specially endowed human beings.

Today my heart sickens at the thought of what would have happened to me if, when I told my Mother I had been talking with the fairies and what they said and did, she had whipped me for not speaking the truth; if, when I came from the woods with my apron torn and soiled, full of dirty specimens, my heart overflowing with the wonders of my discoveries, I had been beaten and forbidden to go again. If we are to have truly great art, literature, or science in the future, many, perhaps most, of those who are to do the work will be born into this world in simple common homes like the Indiana homes in which the author of “The Wild Heart” and I were born. What we as a nation produce in wonder-work along any creative line in the future is going to depend upon the ability of parents of this generation to recognize and to foster unusual gifts in their children when they first detect them. The mother who whips a child because it happens to have been born with a wild heart does a thing so wickedly cruel that there are no words in which to describe the situation adequately. If this book will serve the one purpose of making fathers and mothers of the coming generation sympathetic and kindly to the little wild hearts that they bring into the world, it will perform a very great work indeed.

_Part One_ _The Story of_ SKYGAK AN OLD-MAN SEA-GULL

_Skygak discovered that catching mice was Three-Spot’s chief vocation, and he made her life a burden._

Skygak was an old-man sea-gull. He had circled and screamed over the waters of Puget Sound for many a season, and it is doubtful if there is anything in aërial lore that he did not know. He was an expert at fishing, and could swoop down on an unsuspecting smelt from a dizzy height and have the shiny fish down his gullet without so much as touching his webbed feet to the water’s surface. He could snatch up a sidling red crab before it could seek the shelter of a rock, and drop it neatly and accurately on a stone, to dart down upon the mangled remains before the juicy meal could be purloined by any of his kindred.

He knew when storms were coming, and sometimes, when the skies were clearest and the sun warmest, he would spiral up to a great height and scream in long, quavering cadences that grew louder as the rain and wind approached. Then the Siwash clam-diggers on the beach would gather up their bags and shovels and bid their women see to brushwood, for they knew the cry of the sea-gull when the Storm-God rides. They respected the gray gull’s warning.

We were children on the shores of Puget Sound, Brother and I. From our little log cabin, with its porch roof slanting low like an old-fashioned pokebonnet, we would watch the sea-gulls circle in the sky or bob lazily on the blue waters of the bay like so many feathered corks.

We knew Skygak among the other gulls, for one wing was white, the other gray. So when we saw him, we named him by a queer, fanciful name that seemed to fit a bird of air and water. And because the boat landing in front of the cabin furnished a resting place for webbed feet on sunshiny days, Skygak made it his headquarters, and we came to look for him and to be fond of him.

When we sailed in the tiny twelve-foot boat with its home-made leg-o’-mutton sail or paddled in the dugout canoe made for us by a Siwash Indian chief, we looked for Skygak in every flock of sea-gulls that passed us, and it was our superstition, made on the spur of the moment, as children’s fancies are, that if he flew over us we would have good luck, and that a wish made on the instant would come true.

But we never dreamed that Skygak of the air lanes would one day be an intimate friend of ours, for we had been told by sailor and Indian alike—and who knows more of seafaring birds than they?—that sea-gulls could not be tamed. The Siwash chief who had given us our dugout canoe knew the habits of the winged scavengers and loved them. Perhaps the primitive heart of him, held in leash by the white man’s civilization, was tuned to the wild, untamed heart of the gulls, for they flocked around his beach shanty unafraid, and ate the scraps of clams he flung to them; but he had never touched one of the gray brethren.

And so it happened, on a day of mists and clouds, that Skygak came into our lives as something more than a gray-and-white winged bird whose passage above our boat would make a wish come true.

It was a day typical of autumn in the Sound country. Gray rain pattered ceaselessly into gray waters that stretched away to meet a leaden horizon, and low-hanging clouds swirled restlessly with every gust of wind. But the smell of wet pines was in the air; the grass was green and glistening with iridescent beads. It was a day when the out-of-doors called the hardy one to don overshoes, raincoat, and sou’wester hat and fare forth to breathe the wet fragrance of woods and field, to feel the soft rain on uplifted face, and to listen for the storm cry of the gulls circling against the sky.

Brother and I, clad against the rain, stood in wonder at the shore end of the float. For there on the far end was Skygak, a miserable, dripping figure hunched dejectedly on the wet planking. His once sleek wings hung limply at his sides, his feathers were draggled and unkempt, his head was hanging miserably as if the light but steady drizzle were torment to him.

Above him soared and circled his kindred of the sky, wondering, no doubt, what was wrong, for now and again one of them would turn in a half-circle, spinning on the tip of one great wing, and scream sharply, as if in invitation to Skygak to join the airy tribe. And the old-man sea-gull would turn one eye up to the birds above him and give vent to a plaintive, longing cry. His draggled wings would flap in the rain as if sheer force of will must bear him upward, then relax hopelessly as if the effort made him more miserable.

We watched and speculated, Brother and I, for never had we seen a gull in such a plight. We saw that he was denied the water, too, for he would stalk, with the wobbly, swinging motion of a web-foot tribe, to the edge of the float, crane his neck as if about to launch himself upon the rain-beaten waves, and then retreat to the middle of the wharf once more. A gull who could neither fly nor swim! What had happened?

We took the problem to the Siwash chief a mile up the beach, mending a fish-net in his warm and smoky shanty. He listened impassively, yet with interest. And he returned with us to the float to diagnose the gull’s ailment.

When he saw Skygak, he grunted briefly but sympathetically. The bird had been caught in the swell behind a large boat—a battle-ship, probably—when it was discharging oil, he told us. It was not an uncommon thing, he said. The gull’s feathers were soaked with the heavy oil, and until it had evaporated, or until new feathers should grow, Skygak would be helpless both in the air and in the sea, and since he could not provide food for himself he would starve to death.

So spoke the Siwash chief, but his philosophy was not ours. We told each other that Skygak should not die, and we called to the wet, miserable gull that we would take care of him, but he did not even raise his head.

What should we feed him? We had neither clams nor fish, and we were afraid to go too near him, lest he mistake our friendly intentions and take to the water in self-defense, to be weighted down by his oil-soaked feathers.

With the permission of our always sympathetic mother we salvaged cookies from the jar behind the kitchen stove. We took cold griddle cakes, too, and scraps of meat and bread. And with these dainties we set about the task of winning the gray gull’s confidence and of saving him from the misfortune which had overtaken him.

Carefully and very quietly we went down the float, as near as we could approach without Skygak’s taking alarm. When he showed signs of restlessness, we advanced no further, but put a chunk of meat upon the planks and withdrew to watch and wait.

The gull, at first indifferent to everything but his unexplainable plight, gradually felt hunger’s urge, and his long neck craned toward our offering of food. Slowly he waddled toward it, a grotesque gray bundle of draggled feathers, and with one vigorous gulp the meat disappeared.

Then we tossed him a chunk of bread softened with water, and this time Skygak did not hesitate. The first morsel had aroused an appetite which for the time being supplanted misery. He stalked forward and swallowed the food, turning on us the broadside of one black eye, as if asking for more.

Nor did we refuse him. We tossed him, piece by piece, the food we had brought with us, and returned to the pantry for more. Always we placed the bread or meat a little nearer the shore and the cabin, and Skygak followed the morsels anxiously, greedily, satisfying a hunger which must have been of long and painful duration.

Early dusk was upon us when we finally succeeded in tolling the gray gull through the front yard into the chicken run, and into an unused brooder house which offered a shelter against the rainy night.

The lamps were lighted in the little log cabin when we completed our self-appointed task of making Skygak comfortable, and our only regret was that we could not give our friend a blanket. We feared he would not understand.

That was the beginning of a threesided friendship. The first few days of Skygak’s convalescence were spent in huddled misery, and he moved only when Brother or I came into the brooder house with food and water. Then the rain ceased, Indian summer came smilingly upon the Sound country, and when the sun shone warmly, Skygak decided that life was not all a haze of gloom, and he set about vigorously to restore himself to a normal condition. Hour after hour he pulled and massaged his feathers until some of the heavy oil was loosened. The sunshine helped to dry his draggled plumage, new feathers commenced to grow, and little by little Skygak became his old cocky self.

His affection for Brother and me was as apparent as was his dislike for all other members of the human race. The grown-ups he would not trust, and passers-by annoyed and alarmed him. But he would follow us about wherever we went, stalking along behind us with grotesque dignity, and when invited, would fly up on my shoulder or on Brother’s to receive bits of food from our fingers and to snap playfully at us with his great, powerful bill when we pretended to box with him.

The liberty of the ranch was his, but his favorite spot was a corner of the front porch where he would sit for hours in solemn contemplation of the bay in front. People who went by on the trail looked in wonder at the gray gull apparently very much at home in a little log cabin.

Soon he learned to eat with the chickens, and when the bran mash was spread for them in a long, wooden trough, Skygak would be there before the bucket was emptied. Then, as the hens came flocking around, the gull would spread his magnificent wings, open his huge beak to its widest extent, and scream shrilly and fiercely, laying about him with his yellow beak like a warrior swinging a deadly sword. The startled poultry, unused to this changeling of the sea and sky, would scurry away with distressed and frightened cackles, and Skygak would eat his fill at the trough, pausing occasionally to administer punishment to any daring cockerel who ventured too near. Many a bunch of feathers have I seen hanging from his bill, like a scalplock hung from the belt of an Indian brave, mute witness to a battle of brief but bloody duration.

Our animals soon learned that this wandering guest was to be respected. Tinker, the rat terrier, learned to his cost that Skygak was not a hen to be chased from the front porch, if he chose to stay there.

Between our cat, Three-Spot, and the gull, a bitter feud developed, which had for its beginning such a small thing as a mouse. One had been killed in a trap, and Brother tendered it to Skygak as an experiment. The delicacy was new, but wholly acceptable, and with one ecstatic snap of his beak Skygak swallowed it, and afterward, as Brother averred, fairly licked his chops. Three-Spot sulked and gloomed because of the slight, but her cup of woe was not full.

For in some mysterious manner, Skygak discovered that catching mice was Three-Spot’s chief vocation, and he made her life a burden. One morning we heard an outraged yowl from the cat and an answering scream from Skygak. On the back porch we found the two, Three-Spot crouched over a dead mouse, eyes gleaming dangerously, tail switching from side to side, and every hair erect. The bird was advancing cautiously, but relentlessly, wings outspread, beak wide open, screaming and snapping at every step. Three-Spot did not lack courage, but her experience had not included juggernaut gulls, and when the terrifying yellow beak was hard upon her, she fled, spitting venomously, and Skygak, like a disreputable robber chief, swallowed her hard-earned prize in one mouthful.