Chapter 9
As one reaches the Golden Gate, near Mammoth Hot Springs, many little animals of the Ground-squirrel group are seen running about, and from the distance comes a peculiar cry, a short squeak uttered every ten or fifteen seconds. You stop, perhaps search with your eye the remote hillside, but you are looking too far afield. Glance toward the tumbled rock piles, look at every high point. There on top of one you note a little gray lump, like a bump of moss, the size of your fist, clinging to the point of the rock. Fix your glasses on it, and you will see plainly that the squeak is made by this tiny creature, like a quarter-grown Rabbit with short, round, white-rimmed ears and no visible tail. This is the curious little animal that cannot be happy anywhere but in the slide rock; this is the Calling Hare. "Little Chief Hare" is its Indian name, but it has many others of much currency, such as "Pika," and "Starved Rat," the latter because it is never fat. The driver calls it a "Coney," or "Rock Rabbit." In its colour, size, shape, and habits it differs from all other creatures in the region; it is impossible to mistake it. Though a distant kinsman of the Rabbits, it is unlike them in looks and ways. Thus it has, as noted, the very un-rabbit-like habit of squeaking from some high lookout. This is doubtless a call of alarm to let the rest of the company know that there is danger about, for the Coney is a gregarious creature; there may be a hundred of them in the rock-slide.
Some years ago, in Colorado, I sketched one of the Coneys by help of a field glass. He was putting all the force of his energetic little soul into the utterance of an alarm cry for the benefit of his people.
But the most interesting habit of this un-rabbity Rabbit is its way of preparing for winter.
When the grass, the mountain dandelions, and the peavines are at their best growth for making hay, the Coney, with his kind, goes warily from his stronghold in the rocks to the nearest stretch of herbage, and there cuts as much as he can carry of the richest growths; then laden with a bundle as big as himself, and very much longer, he makes for the rocks, and on some flat open place spreads the herbage out to be cured for his winter hay. Out in full blaze of the sun he leave it, and if some inconsiderate rock comes in between, to cast a shadow on his hay a-curing, he moves the one that is easiest to move; he never neglects his hay. When dry enough to be safe, he packs it away into his barn, the barn being a sheltered crevice in the rocks where the weather cannot harm it, and where it will continue good until the winter time, when otherwise there would be a sad pinch of famine in the Coney world. The trappers say that they can tell whether the winter will be hard or open by the amount of food stored up in the Coney barns.
Many a one of these I have examined in the mountains of British Columbia and Colorado, as well as in the Park. The quantity of hay in them varies from what might fill a peck measure to what would make a huge armful. Among the food plants used, I found many species of grass, thistle, meadow-rue, peavine, heath, and the leaves of several composite plants. I suspect that fuller observations will show that they use every herb not actually poisonous, that grows in the vicinity of their citadel. More than one of these wads of hay had in the middle of it a nest or hollow; not, I suspect, the home nest where the young are raised, but a sort of winter restaurant where they could go while the ground was covered with snow, and sitting in the midst of their provisions, eat to their heart's content.
It is not unlikely that in this we see the growth of the storage habit, beginning first with a warm nest of hay, which it was found could be utilized for food when none other was available. The fact that these barns are used year after year is shown by the abundance of pellets in several layers which were found in and about them.
THE WEATHERWISE CONEY
A very wise little people is this little people of the Rocks. Not only do they realize that in summer they must prepare for winter, but they know how to face a present crisis, however unexpected. To appreciate the following instance, we must remember that the central thought in the Coney's life is his "grub pile" for winter use, and next that he is a strictly daytime animal. I have often slept near a Coney settlement and never heard a sound or seen a sign of their being about after dark. Nevertheless, Merriam tells us that he and Vernon Bailey once carried their blankets up to a Coney colony above timber-line in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho, intending to spend the night there and to study the Coneys whose piles of hay were visible in all directions on their rocks. As this was about the first of September, it was natural to expect fair weather and a complete curing of the hay in a week or so. But a fierce storm set in with the descending night. The rain changed to hail and then to snow, and much to the surprise of the naturalists, they heard the squeak of the Coneys all night long.
These animals love the sunshine, the warmth and the daylight, and dread cold and darkness as much as we do. It must have been a bitter experience when at the call of the older ones every little Coney had to tumble out of his warm bed in the chill black hours and face the driving sleet to save the winter's supplies. But tumble out they did, and overtime they worked, hard and well, for when the morning dawned the slide-rock and the whole world was covered deep in snow, but every haycock had been removed to a safer place under the rocks, and the wisdom of the Coney once more exemplified, with adequate energy to make it effective.
HIS SAFETY IS IN THE ROCKS
No one has ever yet found the home nest of the Calling Hare. It is so securely hidden under rocks, and in galleries below rocks, that all attempts to dig it out have thus far failed. I know of several men, not to mention Bears, Badgers, Wolverines, and Grizzlies, who have essayed to unearth the secret of the Coney's inner life. Following on the trail of a Coney that bleated derisively at me near Pagoda Peak, Col., I began at once to roll rocks aside in an effort to follow him home to his den. The farther I went the less satisfaction I found. The uncertain trail ramified more and more as I laboured. Once or twice from far below me I heard a mocking squeak that spurred me on, but that too, ceased. When about ten tons of rock had been removed I was baffled. There were half a dozen possible lines of continuation, and while I paused to wipe the "honest sweat" from my well-meaning brow, I heard behind me the "weak," "weak," of my friend as though giving his estimate of my resolution, and I descried him--I suppose the same--on a rock point like a moss-bump against the sky-line away to the left. Only, one end of the moss-bump moved a little each time a squeak was cast upon the air. I had not time to tear down the whole mountain, so I did as my betters, the Bears and Badgers have done before me, I gave it up. I had at least found out why the Coney avoids the pleasant prairie and the fertile banks, and I finished with a new and profounder understanding of the Scripture text which says in effect, "As for the Coney, his safe refuge is in the rocks."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote C: It proved later to be an albino domestic Rabbit run wild.]
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X
Ghosts of the Campfire
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X
Ghosts of the Campfire
It is always worth while to cultivate the old guides. Young guides are often fresh and shallow, but the quiet old fellows, that have spent their lives in the mountains, must be good or they could not stay in the business; and they have seen so much and been so far that they are like rare old manuscript volumes, difficult to read, but unique and full of value. It is not easy to get them to talk, but there is a combination that often does it. First, show yourself worthy of their respect by holding up your end, be it in an all-day climb or breakneck ride; then at night, after the others have gone to bed, you sit while the old guide smokes, and by a few brief questions and full attention, show that you value any observations he may choose to make. Many happy hours and much important information have been my reward for just such cautious play, and often as we sat, there flitted past, in the dim light, the silent shadowy forms of the campfire ghosts. Swift, not twinkling, but looming light and fading, absolutely silent. Sometimes approaching so near that the still watcher can get the glint of beady eyes or even of a snowy breast, for these ghosts are merely the common Mice of the mountains, abounding in every part of the West.
There are half a dozen different kinds, yet most travellers will be inclined to bunch them all, and pass them by as mere Mice. But they are worthy of better treatment. Three, at least, are so different in form and ways that you should remember them by their names.
First is the _Whitefooted or Deer-mouse_. This is the one that you find in the coffee pot or the water bucket in the morning; this is the one that skips out of the "grub box" when the cook begins breakfast; and this is the one that runs over your face with its cold feet as you sleep nights. It is one of the most widely diffused mammals in North America to-day, and probably the most numerous.
It is an elegant little creature, with large, lustrous black eyes like those of a Deer, a fact which, combined with its large ears, the fawn-coloured back, and the pure white breast, has given it the name of "Deer-mouse." It is noted for drumming with one foot as a call to its mate, and for uttering a succession of squeaks and trills that serve it as a song.
Sometimes its nest is underground; and sometimes in a tree, whence the name Tree-mouse. It breeds several times in a year and does not hibernate, so is compelled to lay up stores of food for winter use. To help it in doing this it has a very convenient pair of capacious pockets, one in each cheek, opening into the mouth.
THE JUMPING MOUSE
He glides around the fire much as the others do, but at the approach of danger, he simply fires himself out of a catapult, afar into the night. Eight or ten feet he can cover in one of these bounds and he can, and does, repeat them as often as necessary. How he avoids knocking out his own brains in his travels I have not been able to understand.
This is the New World counterpart of the Jerboa, so familiar in our school books as a sort of diminutive but glorified kangaroo that frequents the great Pyramids. It is so like a Jerboa in build and behaviour that I was greatly surprised and gratified to find my scientist friends quite willing that I should style it the American representative of the African group.
The country folk in the East will tell you that there are "seven sleepers" in our woods, and enumerate them thus: the Bear, the Coon, the Skunk, the Woodchuck, the Chipmunk, the Bat, and the Jumping Mouse. All are good examples, but the longest, soundest sleeper of the whole somnolent brotherhood is the Jumping Mouse. Weeks before summer is ended it has prepared a warm nest deep underground, beyond the reach of cold or rain, and before the early frost has nipped the aster, the Jumping Mouse and his wife curl up with their long tails around themselves like cords on a spool, and sleep the deadest kind of a dead sleep, unbroken by even a snore, until summer is again in the land, and frost and snow unknown. This means at least seven months on the Yellowstone.
Since the creature is chiefly nocturnal, the traveller is not likely to see it, excepting late at night when venturesome individuals often come creeping about the campfire, looking for scraps or crumbs; or sometimes other reckless youngsters of the race, going forth to seek their fortunes, are found drowned in the tanks or wells about the hotels.
Here is a diagram of a Jumper in the act of living up to its reputation. And at once one asks what is the reason for this interminable tail. The answer is, it is the tail to the kite, the feathering to the arrow; and observation shows that a Jumping Mouse that has lost its tail is almost helpless to escape from danger. A good naturalist records that one individual that was de-tailed by a mowing machine, jumped frantically and far, but had no control of the direction, and just as often as not went straight up or landed wrong end to, and sometimes on a second bound was back where it had started from.
It is very safe to say that all unusual developments serve a very vital purpose in the life of the creature, but we are not always so fortunate as in this case, to know what that purpose is.
THE CALLING MOUSE
One day fifteen years ago I was sitting on a low bank near Baronett's Bridge across the Yellowstone, a mile and a half from Yancey's. The bank was in an open place, remote from cliffs or thick woods; it was high, dry, and dotted with holes of rather larger than field-mouse size, which were further peculiar in that most of them went straight down and none was connected with any visible overland runways.
All of which is secondary to the fact that I was led to the bank by a peculiar bleating noise like the "weak" of a Calling Hare, but higher pitched.
As I passed the place the squeakers were left behind me, and so at last I traced the noise to some creature underground. But what it was I could not see or determine. I knew only from the size of the hole it must be as small as a Mouse.
Not far away from this I drew some tracks I found in the dust, and later when I showed the drawing, and told the story to a naturalist friend, he said: "I had the same experience in that country once, and was puzzled until I found out by keeping a captive that the creature in the bank was a Grasshopper Mouse or a Calling Mouse, and those in your drawing are its tracks."
At one time it was considered an extremely rare animal, but now, having discovered its range, we know it to be quite abundant. In northern New Mexico I found one species so common in the corn-field that I could catch two or three every night with a few mousetraps. But it is scarce on the Yellowstone, and all my attempts to trap it were frustrated by the much more abundant Deer-mice, which sprang the bait and sacrificed themselves, every time I tried for the Squeaker.
In the fall of 1912 I was staying at Standing Rock Agency in North Dakota. On the broken ground, between the river and the high level prairie, I noted a ridge with holes exactly like those I had seen on the Yellowstone. A faint squeak underground gave additional and corroborative evidence. So I set a trap and next night had a specimen of the Squeaker as well as a couple of the omnipresent Deer-mice.
Doubtless the Calling Mouse has an interesting and peculiar life history, but little is known of it except that it dwells on the dry plains, is a caller by habit;--through not around the campfire--it feeds largely on grasshoppers, and is in mortal terror of ants.
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XI
Sneak-cats Big and Small
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XI
Sneak-cats--Big and Small
You may ride five hundred miles among the mountains, in a country where these beasts of prey abound, and yet see never a hair of a living Wildcat. _But how many do you suppose see you?_ Peeping from a thicket, near the trail, glimpsing you across some open valley in the mountains, or inspecting you from various points as you recline by the campfire, they size you up and decide they want no nearer dealings with you; you are bad medicine, a thing to be eluded. And oh! how clever they are at eluding us.
If you turn out the biggest Lynx on the smoothest prairie you ever saw, he will efface himself before you count twenty. The grass may be but three inches high and the Lynx twenty-three, but he will melt into it, and wholly escape the searching eyes of the keenest. One would not think an empty skin could lie more flat. Add to this the silent sinuosity of his glide; he seems to ooze around the bumps and stumps, and bottle up his frightful energy for the final fearsome leap. His whole makeup is sacrificed to efficiency in that leap; on that depends his life; his very existence turns on the wondrous perfection of the sneak, of which the leap is the culmination. Hunters in all parts where these creatures abound, agree in calling Wildcat, Lynx, and Cougar by the undignified but descriptive name of Sneak-cat.
THE BOBCAT OR MOUNTAIN WILDCAT
The Wildcat of Europe, and of literature, is a creature of almost unparalleled ferocity. Our own Wildcat is three times as big and heavy, so many persons assume that it is three times as ferocious, and therefore to be dreaded almost like a Tiger. The fact is, the American Wildcat or Bobcat is a very shy creature, ready to run from a very small dog, never facing a man and rarely killing anything bigger than a Rabbit.
I never saw but one Bobcat in the Yellowstone Park, and that was not in the Park, but at Gardiner where it was held a captive. But it came from the Park, and the guides tell me that the species is quite common in some localities.
It is readily recognized by its cat-like form and its short or bob-tail, whence its name.
MISUNDERSTOOD--THE CANADA LYNX
The southern part of North America is occupied by Bobcats of various kinds, the northern part by Lynxes, their very near kin, and there is a narrow belt of middle territory occupied by both. The Yellowstone Park happens to be in that belt, so we find here both the Mountain Bobcat and the Canada Lynx.
I remember well three scenes from my childhood days in Canada, in which this animal was the central figure. A timid neighbour of ours was surprised one day to see a large Lynx come out of the woods in broad daylight, and walk toward his house. He went inside, got his gun, opened the door a little, and knelt down. The Lynx walked around the house at about forty yards distance, the man covering it with the gun most of the time, but his hand was shaking, the gun was wabbling, and he was tormented with the thought, "What if I miss, then that brute will come right at me, and then, oh, dear! what?"
He had not the nerve to fire and the Lynx walked back to the woods. How well I remember that man. A kind-hearted, good fellow, but oh! so timid. His neighbours guyed him about it, until at last he sold out his farm and joined the ministry.
The next scene was similar. Two men were out Coon-hunting, when their dogs treed something. A blazing fire soon made, showed plainly aloft in the tree the whiskered head of a Lynx. The younger man levelled his gun at it, but the other clung to his arm begging him to come away, reminding him that both had families dependent on them, and earnestly protesting that the Lynx, if wounded, would certainly come down and kill the whole outfit.
The third was wholly different. In broad daylight a Lynx came out of the woods near a settler's house, entered the pasture and seized a lamb. The good wife heard the noise of the sheep rushing, and went out in time to see the Lynx dragging the victim. She seized a stick and went for the robber. He growled defiantly, but at the first blow of the stick he dropped the lamb and ran. Then that plucky woman carried the lamb to the house; finding four deep cuts in its neck she sewed them up, and after a few days of careful nursing restored the woolly one to its mother, fully recovered.
The first two incidents illustrate the crazy ideas that some folks have about the Lynx, and the last shows what the real character of the animal is.
I have once or twice been followed by Lynxes, but I am sure it was merely out of curiosity. Many times I have met them in the woods at close range and each time they have gazed at me in a sort of mild-eyed wonder. There was no trace of ferocity in the gaze, but rather of innocent confidence.
The earliest meeting I ever had with a Lynx I shall remember when all the other meetings have been dimmed by time, but I have used the incident without embellishment in the early part of "Two Little Savages," so shall not repeat it here.
THE SHYEST THING IN THE WOODS--MOUNTAIN LION, PUMA OR COUGAR
Reference to the official report shows that there are about one hundred Mountain Lions now ranging the Yellowstone Park. And yet one is very safe in believing that not twenty-five persons of those living in the Park have ever seen one.
By way of contrast, the report gives the number of Blackbear at the same--about one hundred--and yet every one living in the Park or passing through, has seen scores of Bears.
Why this difference? Chiefly owing to their respective habits. The Cougar is the most elusive, sneaking, adroit hider, and shyest thing in the woods. I have camped for twenty-five years in its country and have never yet seen a wild Cougar. Almost never are they found without dogs specially trained to trail and hunt them.
Although I have never seen a Cougar at large, it is quite certain that many a one has watched me. Yes! even in the Yellowstone Park. Remember this, oh traveller, sitting in front of the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel! you are in sight of two famous Cougar haunts--Mt. Evarts and Bunsen Peak, and the chances are that, as you sit and perhaps read these lines, a Cougar lolling gray-brown among the gray-brown rocks of the mountain opposite, is calmly surveying all the world about, including yourself.
If you consult the witching contraband books that we of a bygone age used to read surreptitiously in school hours, you will learn that "the Cougar is a fearsome beast of invincible prowess. He can kill a Buffalo or an ox with a blow of his paw, and run off with it at full speed or carry it up a tree to devour, and he is by choice a man-eater. Commonly uttering the cry of a woman in distress to decoy the gallant victim to his doom." If, on the other hand, you consult some careful natural histories, or one or two of the seasoned guides, you learn that the Cougar, though horribly destructive among Deer, sheep, and colts, rarely kills a larger prey, and never is known to attack man.
I have had many persons take exception to the last statement, and give contrary proof by referring to some hair-lifting incident which seemed to be a refutation. But most of these attacks by Cougars have failed to stand the disintegrating power of a carefully focussed searchlight.
There is no doubt that the Cougar is addicted to horseflesh, as his scientific name implies (_hippolestes_=horse pirate). He will go a long way to kill a colt, and several supposed cases of a Cougar attacking a man on horseback at night prove to have been attacks on the horse, and in each case on discovering the man the Cougar had decamped.
This creature is also possessed of a strong curiosity and many times is known to have followed a man in the woods merely to study the queer creature, but without intent to do him harm. Nevertheless the timid traveller who discovers he is "pursued by a Cougar" may manage to persuade himself that he has had a hairbreadth escape.
THE TIME I MET A LION