NIGHT LIFE OF THE WILDERNESSNIGHT LIFE OF THE WILDERNESS
NIGHT LIFE OF THE WILDERNESS
TWILIGHT is deepening into dusk as you leave camp to follow the silent trail. The long summer day has had its lesson, broken short off, as all lessons are before we learn them; now what of the night?
With the sunset a subtle change comes over the big woods; they are fragrant and profoundly still. Trees that were massed in the sunshine now seem more individual, standing with outstretched arms, praying their myriad prayer; and viewing them against the sky you see their delicate grace as well as their strength. The birds have long been quiet, all but the robin, who on the tip of the tallest evergreen, where he can see a gleam of afterglow, pours out a strangely wild song. He is always the lastto go to bed. Chipmunks that have been silently busy all day, and red squirrels that have been noisily idle, are now in their dens asleep. Something like a shadow passes before your face, swooping downward in quivering flight; you hear the scratching of tiny feet on bark, and there at your shoulder, looking at you with round inquisitive eye, is Molepsis the flying squirrel. He is the gentlest, the most lovable of his tribe, and he belongs to the night. You are watching him, your heart warming to the little fellow, when leaves rustle and a twig cracks.
If your ears were better trained, you would know now what is passing, since no two animals rustle the leaves or snap a twig in precisely the same way. Lacking such lore of the woods, you halt at the first sound, straining your eyes in the gloom. The rustle draws nearer; and there in the shadow stands Hetokh the buck, observing you keenly and asking, “Who are you, Pilgrim, and whither does your trail lead?”
There is no fear in his alert poise, you see; nor does he whirl and bound away in alarm, as you expect him to do, because you know him only by daylight. Receiving no answer, he goes his own way, but haltingly, looking back as he disappears. Then Molepsis loses interest in you, or remembers his small affairs; he runs to the top of his tree,launches himself out in slanting flight, and is swallowed up in the immensity of the dusk. Such a little life to trust itself so boldly in a great darkness!
Again the trail is before you, silent but never lifeless; it seems always to be listening. As you follow it onward, you are wiser than before, having learned the odor of a deer and the meaning of a tiny shadow that often passes before your face in the twilight. You are also more sympathetic, and richer by two happy memories; for the flying squirrel has softened your heart to all innocent creatures, and that questioning pose of the buck has awakened a desire to know more of the real animal, the living mysteriousanimaof him, not the babble of his death or the jargon of his bones that fill our books of hunting or of science. Meanwhile Kook’skoos the great horned owl is sounding for rain, and his voice is no longer a foreboding; it is a call, an invitation to come and learn.
And speaking of learning, you will not follow the twilight trail very far before it is impressed on your mind that the wild creature you surprise or startle by day is very different from the creature that surprises and often startles you by night. He has at first all the advantage, being at home in dark woods where you are a wary stranger. Then, as you grow familiar with the dusk, more in tunewith its harmony, you begin to appreciate this distinction: by day you see a strange wild animal at a distance; by night you may meet him as a fellow traveler on the same road of mystery. This natural equality, this laying aside of all killing or collecting for a live-and-let-live policy, is absolutely essential if you would learn anything worth knowing about the wood folk.
All this is at variance with the prevalent notion that timid beasts spend their nights in a state of terror; but never mind that notion now. It is pure delusion. You will learn from the night woods that the alleged terror of animals is, like their imaginary struggle for existence, the distorted reflection of a human and most unnatural experience. A lone man in the woods after nightfall is like one who has lost his birthright of confidence in nature. His spine goes chilly at every rustling; his overstrained eyes irritate his whole nervous system, which becomes “like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh”; whereupon his imagination conjures up a world of savage beasts and other hallucinations. When he returns to his fire-lighted camp, there to think of small or large creatures roaming the dusk from which he has just escaped with trembling, he easily attributes to them his own human fears or terrors. It does not occur to our fevered fancy that the animal isabroad because he prefers the dusk to the daylight, or that he has, as we shall see, an excellent reason for his preference. The simple fact is that of fear, in any human sense, the wild animal is wholly and happily ignorant.
Let me emphasize, therefore, as the first lesson of the night woods, that they have no fear in them, except such as you carry in your own heart. Banish that fear, and you shall speedily learn this other lesson: by day your civilized man is by force of habit an intruder, a meddlesome adventurer who makes noises and disturbs the peace; but by night his transgressions are covered; he is peaceable because powerless, unable to use his inventions, and nature accepts him as part of a reasonable universe in which sizes vary but rights are all equal. Gradually his spirit, set free from its worldly business, expands into the immensity around him. From the stars and the still night he absorbs tranquillity; and then it is that the animal seems to recognize his changed disposition and meets him unafraid. This, I think, is the most illuminating experience that comes to a man who enters into the spirit of the night, that the wild animal has little or no fear of him.
One evidence of this is the fact that you can come much nearer to an animal by night than by day. Though all his senses are then much betterthan yours, he will often wait beside trail or waterway till you are almost upon him, when he is apt to startle you as he breaks away. He has sensed you long before you became aware of him, and has been watching you closely; but your approach, timid and halting in the uncertain light, has disarmed his suspicion. Another plain piece of evidence is that the same timid creatures which this morning fled from you, as if you had a demon, will to-night come confidently to your tenting ground, so near that you may be awakened by their low calls or their soft footsteps.
You may think that this careless approach is due to the animal’s ignorance, that he cannot smell you because the scent of men, as of all birds or beasts, is very faint in sleep; and so I thought till I learned better. I think now that it is not the smell of man, but of something variable in man, which arouses an animal’s suspicion. Before a little child, who certainly has the man scent, most timid beasts show no fear whatever, but only a lively curiosity.
Near a permanent camp of mine I once constructed a roof of bark, a shelter open on all sides, wherein to tie trout-flies and do other woodsy work in stormy weather. Soon I noticed fresh tracks all about; then I kept vegetables in the shed, with salt and other things that deer like. One rainynight I heard sounds out there, and crept from my tent to investigate. Some animal slipped away as I approached; but so black was the night that I could not see the shelter till I went beyond and viewed it against the open lake. Presently a shadow glided past to stand under the roof; my nose told me it was a deer, and behind it trotted two smaller shadows that were her fawns. They smelled me, no doubt, and I think they also saw me, their eyes being better than mine in such light; but they showed no alarm until I walked past them on my way to the tent. Then they ran away, but without their usual warning cries, and within a few minutes I heard the doe calling her little ones under the roof again.
These deer are but types of many other timid animals that may be met after darkness has fallen, at such close range that one who has known them only by daylight is amazed at their boldness. As a rule, the so-called savage beasts are always difficult of approach, being more shy than any rabbit; while harmless creatures that we imagine to be governed by terror give the impression at night that they are frolicsome rather than fearful. Even the wood mice—clean, beautiful little creatures, so delicately balanced that the sudden appearance of danger may paralyze or kill them—seem to lose much of their natural timidity as they run aboutamong the twilight shadows. By day you see them, if at all, only as vanishing streaks; by night you may hear them climbing up one side of your tent and sliding down the other. They will enter freely and, as I have often tested, will sit in your open palm, as at a friendly table, and eat what you offer them.
Two rules of courtesy must be observed, however, when you entertain such little guests. You must eschew mental excitement, which is contagious; and you must never make a sudden motion.
One reason for the boldness of animals at night is that they apparently recognize man’s helplessness, his lack of confidence in his own senses. At times one may even think that an animal is playing with him, as children are moved to play with one who is blindfolded. Such was my impression, at least, when I went astray one night in making my way back to camp. A half-moon was shining, giving enough light in the open places, but sadly confusing matters in the forest depths, where one’s eyes were never quite sure whether they were looking upon substance or shadow. I had missed the trail, and was casting for it in circles, hurrying as one does when lost, blundering through the woods with the clumsiness that distinguishes man from all other creatures. Down into a valley ofgloom I went, only to find myself in surroundings that were all strange and wild. Next I floundered through a stream, and was climbing the bank when I saw something in front of me, something big, motionless, and misty-white.
Now I had been seeing white things for an hour past, bleached rocks, spots of moonlight, silver birches; but this was different. I knew instantly that the thing was alive; for there is something in a living animal that makes itself known, though your ordinary senses cannot tell you why or how you know. For a long moment I faced the thing steadily; but it was dead-still, and I could make nothing of it. As I started forward, the misty-white spot enlarged to twice its size, narrowed again, drifted away among the trees like a ghost. When I followed, straining my eyes after it, I fell into a hidden branch of the stream where water was deep and the mud bottomless. The white thing stood, as if watching me, only a few yards beyond.
Yes, it was rather creepy just then. The chill in my spine was not of the cold water when all the grisly doings of ha’nts, wanderlights and banshees (tales that I heard in childhood and forgotten) came back in a vivid troop. For a time I was as pagan as any of my old ancestors, and as ready to believe in any kind of hobgoblin; only I must find out what the mysterious thing was.
When I struggled out of the pool, the white spot floated up a hill in front of me, noiselessly as an owl, and vanished in a thicket of fir. As I smashed in after it, out it blew on the opposite side, making me feel creepy again till a twig cracked. That was the first sound I heard, and it told me that the thing had legs long enough to reach the ground. Twice afterward I saw it close ahead, broadening, narrowing, drifting away; but except that it was an animal, and a large one, I had no notion of what I was following. Then it vanished for good, and on my right was a gleam of the lake. I had my bearings then, and turning to the left I soon found the lost trail, making an Indian compass of broken twigs as I went.
At daybreak I was back at the place and following my Indian compass. Near the fir thicket I found the track of a large deer, but was unable to follow it on the hard ground. An hour later, as I watched the lake shore, a buck white as snow stepped out. He was an albino, the first I had ever met, and to this day I have never again seen so magnificent a specimen. It was he, undoubtedly, who had played with me in the dark woods, waiting till I came close to him, then moving on to watch my flounderings from another vantage ground. The widening of the white spot, which had so completely mystified me, was due to amomentary glimpse of his broadside as he turned away.
A second reason for the animal’s boldness has already been suggested; namely, that at night a man’s feeling undergoes a change. He is no longer confident of his superior power; as eyes fail him he grows doubtful of himself; and the wild animal is like certain dogs in that he seems able to recognize one’s mental attitude. Hunters who call moose will tell you that the bulls are extraordinarily wary after dark, and that is often true; but for this wariness the hunter, not the moose, is responsible. In the first place, your modern hunter goes out with a guide; and two men make ten times as much noise as one, and spread far more terror. Next, the hunter is eager to see, to shoot, to kill; his excitement gets into his skin, gets into the guide and the call, and a sensitive moose probably feels this contagion of excitement as he draws near it; though it might be hard to explain why or how. As Simmo the Indian says, “Moose don’t knowhowhe know somet’ing; he jus’ know.”
I think Simmo is right, and that he has an explanation of the fact that a sportsman who is most keen to kill in the calling season is often the one who must wait longest for his chance; while to the man who goes out unarmed opportunity comeswith both hands full. Though I am a very poor caller, measured by Simmo’s art, I have seldom found much difficulty in bringing out a bull; but this may be due to the fact that most of my calling has been done far from settlements, in regions where moose are seldom hunted. Yet even in Maine, where moose are literally hunted to death, during the summer or “closed” season they have no more fear than in the remote wilderness. If you meet one on the trail at night, he may come quite as near as you care to have him; and in the early part of the mating season it is not unusual to have two or three bulls answer the call. After the hunting season opens, it is much more difficult to deceive the ungainly brutes; but the difficulty is largely due to the fact that, because of the law which protects cows and so makes them abundant, the bulls are already mated and no longer interested in your wailing.
In the wilder region of northern New Brunswick, the first time I ever tried to call moose a truculent old bull burst out of the woods and chased me into my canoe. On another occasion I was sitting on a big rock in the moonlight, “talking” to a young bull that answered but was shy of showing himself, when a huge brute with magnificent antlers came silently behind me, and would, I think, have poked me off my rock had I not made a hasty exit. AsI have never done any shooting at such times, I do not know whether bulls would come as readily to my call if there were a rifle behind it; but I do know, from repeated experiment, that when I take others with me it is much harder to bring a bull into the open than when I call alone.
Perhaps the chief reason for the fearlessness of wild beasts at night is that their senses then become so acute as to produce almost perfect self-reliance. In the daytime your eyes are better than theirs; but after nightfall they have you at a disadvantage, and they seem to know it. Not only do their eyes or ears tell them of your coming, but their nostrils seem to detect your very quality or condition. This is not theory, but experience. Repeatedly animals that run from me by day have at night stood quietly beside the trail till I was almost upon them.
The nose of a beast is wonderful enough at any hour; but at night it is to him what a lamp is to you, because the moist air is then laden with odors which are quenched by the dry sunlight. No sooner does twilight fall than the forest becomes a huge bouquet. If you test the matter, you can soon learn to recognize every tree or shrub you pass by its characteristic fragrance. You can wind a beast before you see him, and can pick up from the dewy grass the musky odor of a deer, theheavy smell of a moose, the pungent reek of a fox, long after one of these animals has crossed the trail. Curiously enough, the pine and balsam needles call in their odorous messengers with the night; many flowers suspend their fragrant activity when they close their petals, and not till the sun rises will they be known once more.
From such human experience one may judge what the sense of smell must be to wild animals, which are better endowed in this respect, and which daily cultivate a gift that we neglect. Watch any beast, your dog for example, and note that he does not trust even his master till his nose brings its perfect message. When a deer with his exquisite nostrils passes through the night woods, finding at every step odors which invite or check or warn him, the sensation must be like that of a keen-eyed man who looks upon a landscape flooded with sunshine. Because a man trusts only his sight (the least trustworthy of the senses) he is timid in the darkness, and grows bold with the morning. For the same psychological reason an animal, which trusts his nose, is wary in the dry sunshine when odors are faintest, but grows confident when night falls and the woods fill with messages that he understands perfectly.
The night is better also for hearing. Sounds travel farther, more clearly and more accuratelyin the elastic air, and the animal’s keen ears are then like another pair of eyes. Even a man’s ears grow sensitive to the meaning of sounds that are mere cries or noises by day, calling of owls far or near, hunting calls, assembly calls, food calls, rain calls; hail or farewell of loons, answered by hail or farewell from another lake far away over the hills; eager or querulous barking of a mother fox, calling her cubs to the feast or chiding them for their clumsy hunting. Above these and a hundred other wild calls is that rushing sound of music which sweeps over the listening night woods, like the surge and swell of a mighty organ at an immeasurable distance.
It is commonly believed that this thrilling harmony of the night is from within, from overstrained nerves of the ear; but I think, on the contrary, that it is wholly objective, as real as the vibration of a wind harp or a ’cello string or any other instrument. I take one person into the big woods at night, and say to him: “Listen; what do you hear?” And he answers, “I hear nothing.” I take another person, and say: “Listen; what do you hear?” And a great wonder comes into his face as he answers: “I hear music. What is it?” When I am alone in the woods my ears are always tense; but on some nights the rushing harmony is everywhere, while on other nights I cannot hearit, listen as I will. Only when conditions are just right, when the air is like a stretched wire, do the woods begin to sing. Then from a distance comes a faint vibration; from the waterfall, it may be, or from some mountain edge purring under a current of air, or from ten-million trembling needles in a swaying grove of pines. The hanging leaves feel it and begin to stir rhythmically; shells of hardwood, dry and resonant as violins, fall to humming with the movement, and suddenly all the forest is musical. The strangest thing about this eerie, wonderful melody is that, when you change position to hear better, it vanishes altogether, and hours may pass before you hear it again.
Amid such conditions, which awaken even human senses from their long sleep, the animal is at home, and his ability to locate sounds is almost beyond belief. You may have heard much of moose-calling, the wailing of the guide, the tingling answer, the approach, the shot, the barbarous end; but the most astonishing thing about moose-calling I have never heard mentioned; namely, that the distant bull seems to locate your first call as accurately as if he had watched you all the way to your chosen position. And this is the way of it:
You leave camp at moonrise and make yourway silently to a little bog lying amid endless barrens, lakes, forests,—an unmapped wilderness without road or trail, in which one might lose a city. From your hiding place, a thicket exactly like a thousand others near or far, you begin to call, very softly at first, because a bull may be near and listening. When nothing stirs to your trumpet you grow bolder, sending forth the weird bellow of a cow-moose. Away it goes, whining over forest and barren, rousing up innumerable echoes; in the tense, startled air it seems that such a cry must carry to the ends of the earth. The silence grows more pronounced after that; it begins to be painful when, from a mountain looming far away against the sky, there floats down the ghost of a sound,quoh!so small that the buzz of a chilled mosquito fairly drowns it. You strain your ears, thinking you were deceived; but no, the bull answers again; he is beginning to talk. Listen!
Now you can hear his voice and something else, something almost fairylike,—a rustling, faint as the stir of a mouse in the grass, andtock!an elfin report, as the bull hits a stub in his rush and sends it crackling down.
That fellow will come if you coax him properly. Indeed, if he is not mated, he is bound to come and is already on his way. But the moon isobscured now, and the light very dim. If you would see your bull clearly, or measure his antlers, or learn a new thing, go away quickly without another sound. At daybreak you shall find him not only on this particular bog, which is as a pin point in the vast expanse, but waiting expectantly near the very thicket where you were calling.
With such senses to guide him, to tell him of your every step as you go blundering through the night, no wonder that a wild animal grows serenely confident. Even the black bear, more timid than deer or moose, sheds something of his aloofness when night falls and his nose or ears become as penetrating searchlights. Ordinarily a bear avoids you; should you meet him accidentally his every action says, “I do desire that we may be better strangers.” But if you enter his territory without disturbing him, he will sometimes let curiosity get the better of discretion, and draw near to question you in the friendly darkness.
Once on a canoe journey I found myself breaking all rules of travel by making a belated camp, having passed the sunset hour and crossed a large lake in order to sleep at an old camp ground of mine, a lovely spot, endeared by happy memories. The night was chill, the moon shining full and clear, when I arrived at the familiar place and searched it all over, as a man always searches aplace where he once camped, looking for something that he never finds, that he does not even name. Then I repaired my old “Commoosie,” made a fragrant bed of fir boughs, and was thinking of supper when, on the farther side of a bay, two bull-moose started a rumpus, grunting, smashing brush, clanging their antlers like metal blades as they charged each other savagely; all this to win the favor of a mate that cared nothing for either of them.
Silently I paddled over in my canoe, ran close to the fighting brutes, and watched till one drove the other out of hearing. When I returned it was over-late for cooking; so I supped of pilot-bread with dried fruit, and turned in to sleep without lighting a fire. The splash of a feeding trout in the shallows and the wild call of a bear,hey’-oo!like a person lost or demented, were the last sounds I heard.
A man in the open sleeps lightly, in some subconscious way keeping track of what goes on around him. Suddenly, as if someone had touched me, I was broad awake with every sense alert. Behind the great log which lay as a threshold across the open front of the “Commoosie” something moved; a shadow rose up, and there, sharply defined in the moonlight, stood a huge bear. His forepaws rested lightly on the log; his head wasraised, his whole body drawn to its utmost tension. Eyes, ears, nose, every sense and fiber of him seemed to question the sleeper with intense wonder.
When you surprise a brute like that, or especially when he surprises you, the rule is to freeze in your tracks; but you need not memorize it, since instinct will attend to the matter perfectly if you follow it without question. If you must move before he does, ignore the animal; turn half away (never move directly toward or from him) and walk quietly off at a tangent, as if going about your own affairs. But here the bear had me wholly at a disadvantage. Except to start fair upright, any move was impossible under the blankets, and a sudden motion would certainly throw the brute into a panic; in which event he might bolt away or bolt into the “Commoosie.” You can never be sure what a startled animal will do at close quarters. So I lay still, following an instinctive rather than a rational decision.
Presently the bear glided away, but falteringly, and I knew that he was not satisfied. Without a sound I reached for my heavy revolver, gripped it, and lay as I was before. Very soon the bear’s head reappeared; like a shadow his bulk moved across the opening, and again he raised himself on the threshold for a look. He probably smelled me, as I certainly smelled him, rank and doggy;but a sleeping man gives off very little scent (of a non-alarming kind, I think), and Mooween’s inquisitiveness had made a bold beast out of a timid one. He had a fine autumn coat; the short velvety fur rippled or gleamed as the moonlight touched it, giving to its lustrous black an apparent fringe of frosty white, like the pelt of a silver fox.
When I marked that perfect fur I knew it was what I had long wanted as a rug. It needed only the pressure of a finger to make it mine, and the finger was curling on the trigger when, unfortunately, I began to think.
Silence enfolded the earth in its benediction, and I must shatter that blessed silence by gunpowder. Like a veil let down from heaven the moonlight rested on every tree, on the rough ground, on my old “Commoosie,” making all things beautiful; and I must spatter that pure veil with red. No, it was not a pleasant notion; night and solitude make a man sensitive, averse to noise, violence, discord of every kind. Even a bear might have some rights, if one were fair with him. He had done no harm in the woods, and meant no harm when he came to my camp. He was simply curious, like all natural beasts. Somehow it began to appear as a greedy, an atrocious thing to kill him just for his skin; at my own door, too, where he stood timidly looking in. Besides,a dead animal is no longer interesting. In the back of my head was the desire, always present when a wild beast appears, to know what he thinks or, if that be impossible, to know at least what he does. The experience, startling enough at first, had now turned to comedy, and I wanted to see how it would end.
Thus a small moment passed, while I tried the great beast for his life; through it ran a river of thought or sentiment with the rush and dance of rapids.
Once during the trial Mooween turned away, only to return quickly. I had moved a trifle, and he heard it. When he turned a second time something in his gait or motion said that he would not come back, that he no longer dared trust his neighborhood. As he disappeared I peeked around the corner of the “Commoosie.” Straight off he went to the edge of the clearing, where he sat upon his haunches, feeling safer with the woods only a jump away, and rocked his nose up and down to catch air from different currents, still hoping for some message that would tell him who or what I was. It was a wild region; he had probably never before met a man. Then he stood erect on his hind legs for a last look, dropped on all-fours, and vanished silently among the shadows. A moment later panic struck him like a bomb;away he ran with a great smashing of brush, as if all the dogs of a parish were after him.
If you are desirous of meeting or knowing wild animals, the hour following the evening twilight is the best time to be abroad. Toward midnight the wood folk all rest, as a rule, and through the small hours the coverts are profoundly quiet till just before the dawn. On a moonlit night birds and beasts are apt to be stirring at all hours, and then is the time to learn the language of the wild, the cries, barks, hootings, yellings, rustlings, which come to you as mere noises at first, but which have all definite meaning when you learn to interpret them. Yet even on moonlit nights such voices are rather exceptional. Wild birds and beasts go their ways in silence for the most part; the typical wilderness night is so quiet, so peaceful, that an occasional cry seems part of a mighty stillness.
On other than moonlit nights you will do well to travel by canoe, keeping close to shore so as to get the fragrance of the breathing woods. They are wonderful in darkness; but if you enter them, your chief concern will probably be to find your way out again, because the depths of a primeval forest are so pitch dark that human eyes are useless. Even on a trail you must look up steadily,keeping your course by the heavens, which are always lighter than the earth. If you strive to look ahead, you will certainly lose the narrow way; but to look up is to see between the black forest bulks on either hand a pathway of light, which corresponds to every turn and winding of the trail beneath. Better still, if you are in danger of losing the path, shut your eyes; keep them shut, and trust to the guidance of your own feet. They are more familiar with the touch of mother earth than you are aware, and they will tell you instantly when you are departing from a beaten trail. But avoid burglar-proof shoes, of the absurd “sportsman” variety, when you try this enlightening experiment.
There are other things than animals, you see, to be met in the night. Perhaps the most interesting creature you will ever meet is your natural self, which lies buried but not dead under a crust of artificial habit. To break that crust and come forth, like a moth from its dry chrysalis; to feel again the joy of human senses, awakened, vibrant, responsive to every message of earth; to cast aside unworthy fear and walk in one’s birthright of confidence; to know the companionship of the night, more mysterious and more lovely than the day,—all this is waiting for you in the darkened woods. Try it and see. Leave your camp on thefirst still, moonlit evening to follow the trail alone. Look up at the trees, all fairylike, with leaves of burnished silver set amid luminous shadows, and confess that you never saw a tree in its beauty before. Smell the fragrance of the moistened woods, like an old-fashioned garden of thyme and mignonette. Listen to the night, to its small voices, to its rushing harmonies, above all to its silences. Grow accustomed to a world on which darkness has fallen like refreshing rain, until you cast aside all hallucinations of terror or struggle, and learn for yourself how friendly, how restful nature is. And when the right night comes, when the tense stillness begins to tremble and all the woods grow musical, then you will wish that some great composer could hear what you hear, and put it upon the stringed instruments, and call it his symphony of silence.