Part 7

From that time on we gave Hector his liberty for a few hours each day. And always, before releasing him, we would take the precaution to feed him well. We did not intend to have any fatalities among the poultry if we could help it. But even with a full stomach, he worried the barnyard into a daily spasm of fear. For as he regained the use of his wing, he would fly slowly, majestically, over the poultry pens, turning his head from side to side as hawks do when they are picking their prey and calculating the time for the swoop to earth. Brother and I believed firmly that Hector had no intention of snatching up a chick or a pigeon, that his daily flight was merely by way of exercise and for the dramatic satisfaction it gave him to see the feathered crew below him so disturbed.

At any rate, he never once attempted to harm any of our live stock. Perhaps it was because we fed him so well, but Brother and I preferred to think it was because he was a gentleman, and that he would not betray our confidence when we trusted him to do the right thing.

This daily flight of Hector’s was most annoying to the grown-ups, however. In the first place, the hens were not laying so well as they had. They were frightened out of all nesting desire by Hector’s calm aërial promenades, and were in a continual state of nervous excitement. Then, too, when Prince gave the danger signal and all the hens ran for cover with their chicks, the grown-ups would dash out of the house each time ready to fire upon a strange marauder, only to be confronted with Hector making peaceable spirals above the hen-houses. He would come to us when we whistled shrilly, and would sit quietly on my wrist to nibble at a piece of cooky as if he had never had a carnivorous thought in his life.

I should like to tell you that he and Lazarus became friends after the hawk had become partially domesticated, but such was never the case. Lazarus used to come stalking into the back-yard, his legs much too long for the rest of him, and a tiny, serrated, red comb sticking up from the bald spot on his head. His body was still almost bare, though a generous tuft of feathers on his tail showed where he might in time expect some real plumage. He still carried the scars of his aërial adventure under his wings. He would approach Hector cautiously, craning his neck in and out with a curious rubberized effect, and would stop at a safe distance, turning his head on one side, giving Hector a timorous inspection from the broadside of one amber eye. And Hector would return the look scornfully, his curved beak giving him a morose, sneering expression. His whole attitude seemed to say, “Never mind, I’ll get you next time!”

As Hector grew stronger and could fly better, the grown-ups gave the ultimatum that we must dispose of him in some way. It was too dangerous, they said, to have a chicken hawk around the ranch. In vain we argued that Hector was a gentleman, that he would not bother any of our poultry. But to our sorrow, they said that he should be taken to the city and presented to the zoölogical gardens there.

Brother and I told Hector what was going to happen to him, and that it was not in our power to prevent his going, and it seemed to us that he was very thoughtful afterward. We shall always believe that what happened was the direct result of the grown-ups’ decision to send him into captivity, although, you understand, we could not blame them. They had been more than kind to our somewhat dangerous guest.

The next day when we released our robber chieftain from his stake, he flew up over the cabin roof, circled once around it, then flew northward along the beach and was soon out of sight. When night came Hector did not return. And though Brother and I stood in the yard whistling until we were breathless, there was no sudden swoop of a gray-brown bird from the air, no Hector to curve sharp talons gently around my wrist.

The next morning, when we went for milk at the neighboring ranch, we knew why our friend had not come back to us. On the fence outside the barn, hung limply over the pickets just as he had fallen, was a draggled bunch of gray-brown feathers that had once been our beautiful Hector, the Robber Chief. The wide wings were powerless now, the body was riddled with fine shot, the once proud head with its curved beak drooped pitifully. The fierce dark eyes were closed. Never again would Hector perform his dance of joy at our coming, never again would he stare appraisingly at Lazarus, or frighten the hens and pigeons with his lazy circles above their heads.

The rancher told us he had shot the hawk the day before. And he could not understand why we wept over the blood-stained bunch of feathers. He did not know that Hector was a friend of ours—and a gentleman.

Brother and I always thought that Hector deliberately courted death rather than spend his life in yearning captivity. And I, for one, am glad he did. For no one else would have understood him and loved him as we did.

_Part Ten_ MY FRIEND THE PRINCESS

This is not my story, except incidentally. It is the story of a Bengal tigress named Princess, with a coat of dull gold striped with ebony. A restless, sullen tigress, padding the length of her narrow cage, with amber eyes staring out at some vision beyond the iron bars, with tawny lips half drawn back from white, pointed fangs. A tigress with something high and noble in her steady pacing, her air of absolute detachment from everything around her. When I met her I was no longer a child living near Puget Sound, but had quite grown up and moved to California, and to city life far from my woodland friends of earlier and sweeter years.

Princess lives in a motion-picture studio’s menagerie now, but there was a time when she knew the hot, marshy smell of the Bengal jungles, when she crouched, tense in every muscle, to spring upon a fat bullock, when she padded through narrow jungle trails to drink at the hidden pool which only the forest creatures knew.

She was caught in a tiger pit, they told me, when little more than a cub. She had been purchased first by a circus, and then by the motion-picture company which owns her now. They told me she was fierce and utterly without affection. And indeed she looked so, pacing back and forth in her iron-barred cage, her breath coming in a hissing snarl as she noted our presence, her amber eyes widening ever so little as she caught our scent.

Still I could not think Princess was so terrible. I could not find it in my heart to be afraid of her. I pitied her. There was something unbearably pathetic in her constant pacing. It seemed to me that I could actually feel the longing of her caged heart to be out in the open again, to lope down jungle trails, to lie stretched out on rocks warm with Indian sunshine. There was no enmity in the look she turned on us, only indifference, and—was it pleading?

It was my first visit to the studio. And I carried away with me that picture of Princess in her cramped cage, pacing, pausing, sniffing at the air heavy with human scent, her amber eyes seeing something afar off, something we could not understand—

Then I discovered that the keeper of the menagerie was an old friend of mine. “Pudgy” he was nicknamed. He was short and rotund, and trained animals with kindness instead of whips. I had known him in the Puget Sound country when Brother and I were children. A woodsman he had been then, and with a tiny little cabin near Green Point. We had visited him often, for he shared our love for the things of the open. He had had a tame deer whose name was Nellie, and he had nursed back to health a bobcat that he had rescued from a trap in the High Sierras. It was not strange that with his love of animals Pudgy should finally come into a position as keeper of a motion-picture menagerie. Many years had passed since we had seen each other, but when we met by chance—I was of the press—we renewed old acquaintance, and found pleasure in talking of Puget Sound and of the woods creatures we had loved.

Through him I came to know personally the animals in the menagerie. I was introduced to the Russian wolves, to the lions, to the bears, and to Princess the tigress. I think he liked her best of all the wild things there, and I am sure I did. There was something about her cheated strength, her restrained power, that made my heart go out to her. I never failed to visit her when I went to the studio, and I liked to think that she knew me and recognized me as a friend.

It was several weeks after Pudgy and I renewed our old friendship that they told me at the studio that Princess, the glorious Bengal tigress, was to be killed. She had grown unmanageable for picture work, they said, too sullen and too treacherous. The picture in hand called for a tiger hunt. She was to be sacrificed for the sake of reality and shot down. Her pelt, they added, would be worth a great deal of money.

But I could not think of Princess in terms of a pelt that was worth money. I felt as if a human being had been sentenced to death. Because she could not find it in her royal heart to cringe beneath the trainer’s lash, she was to die; because she was queenly, and unafraid, she no longer had the right to live.

I have seen the tortures wild animals go through in making pictures. How they are prodded with pointed sticks, made to jump into water from great heights, and forced to run through blazing brush. I have seen lions and tigers struck cruelly on their sensitive noses to make them register rage. All these things had Princess suffered from trainers and directors. I did not blame her for rebelling.

I came upon Pudgy as he sat on a bench near Princess’s cage, his chin in his hand, and he was staring at her while she paced restlessly back and forth with hissing intakes of breath.

“They are going to kill her,” he said slowly, “just because they can’t break her spirit.”

I sat beside him, and together we watched Princess. Pudgy told me how he had tried to ease the fear and hatred of humans in the heart of the jungle tigress by being especially nice to her. How, when she had hurt herself jumping from a springboard into a lake with sharp rocks in it, he had gone into the cage and bathed the swollen paw, and how she had licked his hand with her huge, grating tongue. Once she had had a swelling on her throat; he was the only one whom she suffered to minister to it. And again, when she had sickened with fever, he had stayed in her cage a night and a day, moistening her tongue with water and watching until her eyes lost their glazed stare and became normal once more.

“And they’re going to kill her,” he repeated slowly, “just because she can’t understand the treatment they’ve given her—because she’s not afraid of their whips any more.”

His voice almost broke. And my heart went out to him and to the tawny wild thing in the barred cage. If he could only make the Powers understand, I told him. If only he could make them realize that Princess was not wantonly ferocious, only tortured into savagery by unkind treatment. He shook his head. The Powers, he said, understood nothing that did not have a dollar mark attached.

So the day was set when Princess was to die. It was to be in the out-of-door arena, an oval piece of ground enclosed in upright bars and strong steel wire. At the back was a miniature thicket of bamboo, ferns, and marsh grass. At the front was the camera cage, strongly barred to prevent danger from the wild animals being photographed in action.

My visit to the menagerie that day was accidental. I did not know that the tigress was to be killed. I had only been told that an interesting picture was being made in the arena. So I pushed my way through the double line of carpenters, actors, and onlookers, to the very bars of the huge out-of-door cage. The camera man was already in his barred enclosure, and inside the arena the director, a slim-waisted man with a black mustache, was outlining the action of the scene to the hero of the picture, who, attired in a hunting costume, dabbed at his face with a yellow powder-puff.

“The tiger comes bounding out of the jungle,” the director was saying, “and you shoot from behind that log. Never mind if you don’t get her the first shot. I’ll have my gun on her, and I’ll finish her off. There’s no danger.”

My heart stopped and then thumped painfully. I had stumbled unknowingly on the scene of Princess’s execution. I felt sickened. I could not bear to stay and see her shot at—wounded first by an ill-aimed rifle, then fired upon until she dropped, an inert mass of tawny gold and black—

I turned away, tried to press through the crowd. But there were too many people. Every one from the studio had ceased work to come and see the spectacular death of Princess, the Bengal tigress.

I was dimly aware that men were rolling a cage on wheels up to the side entrance of the arena. From between the bars I caught a glint of sunlight on a body of savage beauty. I saw, too, the white, drawn face of Pudgy, standing by the side of the cage.

Some one opened the side gate of the arena. The director and the actor were still talking. The director was showing graphically how the other should come out of the jungle, should listen for the tigress’s coming, should drop behind the log and fire—

What happened then I can scarcely remember. It was all so sudden, so breath-taking. A confusion of signals had been the cause, they told me afterward. The man at the cage thought the opening of the arena gate was the signal to release Princess—and he had opened the door of her cage!

There was a shout that died away in a gasp of many breaths, a silence that was like a great commotion—for Princess, the royal Bengal tigress, crashed through the flimsy greenery of the mimic jungle and like a tawny statue stopped short, her head raised, her amber eyes wide.

It was a nightmare, that terrible instant. No one moved. The director’s face went pasty white, the actor’s red-lined mouth had fallen open. There in that oval cage the two puny men faced the magnificent creature of the wilds, faced the animal they had planned to kill—and they were helpless.

Only the briefest moment did the tableau last. For Princess’s nostrils dilated with the hated human scent, her eyes narrowed to slits, her nose wrinkled back, and she snarled. The director was speaking jerkily without moving—saying that no one must scream—telling some one to bring the gun—

At the sound of his voice the tigress dropped to a crouch. Her tail lashed her sides. I could not take my eyes from the arena. My throat was dry. I was vaguely conscious that a man had pushed past me. It was Pudgy, the menagerie keeper.

For a scant second a lower crouch—a long-drawn snarl—then a voice spoke, quietly, sharply.

“_Princess!_”

At the sound of the keeper’s voice, the tigress lifted her head ever so little, and her amber, black-rimmed eyes turned toward him.

“Princess!” he said again. “Keep back—steady, old girl!”

He had unfastened the front gate of the arena and opened it. He was unarmed; he carried not so much as a whip. Yet he went toward her quietly, talking in a gentle monotone, and she snarled at him as he came. But he walked quickly, confidently. He placed himself between the two men and the crouching tigress. Then he planted his feet far apart and smiled down at her.

“Maybe you’re mad at these folks, but you wouldn’t be mad at me—your old pal,” he said softly.

There was a moment of sickening suspense. Then the snarl died on Princess’s lips, her tail ceased its frenzied lashing, and she rose from her crouching position.

“The danger is over,” Pudgy said quietly to the men behind him. “Just move out toward the door. Take your time. Don’t run.”

Then he spoke to the tigress again:

“Into your cage, old girl, right out through the same door you came in—Out you go—It’s all right, lady—Don’t be frightened—You know your old pal wouldn’t do anything to hurt you—”

He was stepping forward toward her, urging her gently but firmly back through the side gate of the enclosure. She snarled as she went, and stopped once to roar full-throated defiance. But the mild little man talked to her always, caressing her with his voice, comforting her with the assurance that she was not to be hurt. The tawny body slipped through the door into the wagon cage—the door clanged after her—it was over.

Pudgy came out of the arena at the gate where he had entered. His face was calm, his hands untrembling. I pushed past the people in front of me and in a moment was beside him.

“Tell them, oh, tell them now!” I whispered. And Pudgy, because he, too, loved the things of the wild, understood me.

“Do you think it would do any good?” he questioned under his breath, and I nodded, being almost past speech.

Together we sought the director of the picture. He was one of the Powers. His word would mean much.

He was still white-lipped and breathless, but he attempted a wan smile as he shook Pudgy’s hand.

“Well, she almost got us,” he spoke with forced cheerfulness. “If it hadn’t been for you—” He shuddered in spite of himself. “If there’s anything I can do, old-man, to show my gratitude—”

Pudgy’s eyes turned toward the wagon cage where Princess had commenced her endless pacing. She was still snarling softly, as if dreaming of the vengeance on man which had almost been hers.

“Maybe you don’t know it,” he said slowly, “but the real reason Princess obeyed me was because she knows me and likes me. She knows I like her, too, and she wouldn’t do anything to make me feel bad. And if you really mean what you say—about doing something—why, let Princess live. She—she’s a friend of mine.”

There was a short silence. The director was staring at him curiously.

“That tiger—that bloodthirsty beast—a _friend_ of yours?” he said incredulously.

“Yes,” answered Pudgy simply. “She’s just that, and I don’t want her killed.”

The director turned away, walked a few short steps, and halted. “All right,” he said briefly, “if that’s the way of it—I’ll see what I can do.”

As I said before, this is not my story. I wish it were. I should love to have the friendship of that wonderful tigress as Pudgy has it. But at least I always make it a point, when at the studio, to pay a brief visit to Princess, the Royal Bengal. She paces unceasingly and stares at something beyond the bars which humans may not see. But because Pudgy has let me come inside the railing, and has told Princess that I helped, a very little bit, in obtaining her reprieve from the death sentence, I like to think that her amber eyes as they rest on me are not fierce, but kindly, and that she knows that I love her and wish her well.

_Part Eleven_ ETHEL OF THE WILD HEART

_Part Eleven_ ETHEL _of the_ WILD HEART

This is the story of a lioness in a cage at a great moving-picture studio—a lean, tawny lioness with slanting, amber eyes and flexible muscles that undulated under the loose skin like ripples of water under a blanket of kelp.

They said, the people of the studio, that Ethel was savage, that she had clawed a trainer and injured an actor for life, that she hated women and would not tolerate the touch of a human hand. And they thought me a little mad when I wanted to go into the cage where she and four other lions were taking their exercise.

But I was of the press, so I was permitted to enter the cage with the trainer, to go through the doubled-barred iron doors, and to stand very quietly while the keeper of the lions, with a long whip, lashed the snarling animals to their pedestals.

Of them all, Ethel was the most savage. Her eyes blazed with a wicked light that burned green behind the amber; her tail lashed furiously when the trainer flicked her with his whip; and afraid as she undoubtedly was, the courage of her spirit showed itself in her stubborn crouch and the vicious striking of her powerful paws whenever the lash came near her.

She fascinated me. The other lions were cowed, it seemed, by long experience with the stinging whip. They took their places protesting and snarling, but with alacrity none the less. Ethel would not obey. In defiance of the stern commands of the trainer and the leather thong which flicked remorselessly about her eyes and nose, she would leap from one side of the cage to the other, crouch for an instant, then spring again, shaking the bars in her frenzied attempts to escape the persecuting lash, while the other lions watched her from their pedestals uneasily, with guttural intakes of breath and occasional snarls.

Do you wonder what I felt when Ethel careened about the cage, stubborn, disobedient, mad with rage as well as with a terror born of pain? At first I felt fear, a fear as unreasoning as that of the lioness. For in one of her crazed leaps she brushed against me, so that I was pushed sharply against the iron bars of the cage.

“Do you want to go out?” the trainer was asking me, and I shook my head, for I could not speak.

Then suddenly the fear left me. The thread of ice which had seemed to run from the top of my head to the very soles of my feet melted away as though in a warm sunshine. For Ethel, crouching in snarling defiance, had suddenly raised her head. For an instant we measured each other, eye to eye. And in that moment I remembered another wild thing—this one uncaged—and I remembered myself a little girl alone on the Hill Trail, facing the amber eyes of one of Ethel’s distant kin. I want to tell you what I remembered, so that you will know why the ice thread was melted and why things happened in that barred cage that the trainer said had never happened before.

It was while we still lived in the little cabin on the Bay, and I was yet a child. Brother had gone away to school, and I was lonely, so more than ever I sought the woods and the companionship of the woods creatures there.

It was a sultry day in August when the juncoes were flying in panicky flocks, and when a haze of smoke was in the air that told of forest fires not so far away. All the night before the sky in the west had been reddened with a dull glow that gradually grew brighter, and though we had no fear for ourselves since a cleared space lay between the wooded hills and the cabin we were sorry for the wild things of the woods who would be forced to flee from the red monster that devoured their homes so relentlessly.

The air that day was oppressive, for the smoke hung low, and if we listened carefully, we could hear the distant crackling of tall pines with gum-smeared trunks on fire, and the occasional crash of a giant fir, tortured too long by licking flames.

I sought the Hill Trail, listening, as I climbed, to the ominous crackle of burning trees, much nearer than I would have wished. And perhaps it was because of that intentness that I came, without realizing it, face to face with a wildcat, the largest I have ever seen, stretched across the trail, only a few feet in front of me.