Just how did Mama Coon impart the news to the others?
There is hardly any doubt that the information came from her. Nor is it hard to imagine Mama and her family heading along one of the marsh trails one evening and being stopped by Cousin Nosey, who chitters curiously, “Hey, I see you going in this direction every night! What’s cooking?”
And Mama, recognizing kin, would no doubt tell him to tag along and find out. All this is possible, for I have often watched coons meet and chitter at each other. Usually it seemed to be only a friendly warning, like, “You keep your distance, and I’ll keep mine,” though I have a strong feeling that at times certain basic news items were exchanged. Even so, such encounters would not account for more than a dozen of my patio visitors. They could not explain the many raccoons who came from a distance to join the feast.
I am certain that they must have come from a distance, because they were inlanders, entirely different from the marsh variety of raccoons that lived around us. Mama Coon and her family were smallish brown animals with sharp, foxy faces. These inlanders were often twice her size—big, handsome gray rascals with broad heads and gleaming silvery fur that would have made a trapper’s eyes pop.
On the Gulf Coast a raccoon doesn’t have to travel far to eat his fill. Every ebbing tide leaves a bountiful feast. The pickings are just as good for the inlanders, for there’s a year-round growing season. So it is not surprising that all our patio visitors had a well-fed look. Some of the inlanders were downright fat.
The astonishing thing is that well-fed raccoons would travel deep into strange territory for food they didn’t need.
The only way I can explain it is that some receiving portion of their minds picked up, from a distance, three alluring bits of information from Mama Coon. Not that Mama intended to broadcast it to all the world. More likely her joy was so great that she couldn’t contain it.
The three bits of information were simply these: (1) an absolutely out-of-this-world kind of goodie was being given to all members of the Masked Brotherhood who called at Marshy Point; (2) there was plenty of it every evening for everyone; and (3) Marshy Point, glory be, was a safe place to dine.
It would have taken something like that to entice a well-fed raccoon so far. And, knowing man for the murderous wretch he is, they would never have accepted personal handouts from the creature without the assurance that there would be no treachery. Even so, our big gray visitors were very wary at first, nor did they ever approach as close as the other raccoons who lived near us.
As I considered that raccoon experience, I felt that I had taken a definite step into the unknown, on the track of something strange.
A dog named Turk gave me even more to think about.…
4
WILD DOG
MY NEIGHBOR the beekeeper lives alone down the valley in an old weather-beaten cottage on the mountainside. He is not really alone, for, besides his bees, he has a host of friends in the branches overhead and in the forest behind him. With most of them—the cardinals, the chickadees, assorted songsters, and one trusting doe—he is on close speaking terms. If he has any real hate in him, it is reserved for two kinds of creatures only—deer hunters and wild dogs.
When I told him about the raccoons, he did not seem surprised. “News gets around in the woods,” he said quietly.
“How?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Don’t ask me how. It just gets around. Those raccoons prove it. An’ it’s the same with the deer. If a hunter’s on the prowl, they’ll know it. If I put out a fresh block of salt for the doe, they’ll know that too. It’s a queer thing.”
I was tempted to tell him about Turk, for I wanted his opinion on the matter. But I decided it would be better if I didn’t. On the subject of wild dogs he can become grim indeed. “If you ever saw one of those devils catch a doe with a fawn …,” he muttered once, shaking his head.
I have seen wild dogs at work, and I hate them too. So does everyone in the valley. But Turk was different. Most dogs that go wild in the mountains run in packs, and they have homes of sorts they can return to on occasion. Turk had no home. He was a loner, and he had no use for man. But he did like Alice.
All animals like Alice. Maybe, unconsciously, she sends out waves of love for four-footed things, to which they cannot help responding. If there is a stray cat in the valley, it always finds her. I have lost count of the number of stray or abandoned dogs that have come to her to be fed and helped.
Naturally, it was she who saw Turk first and called my attention to him. He was about fifty yards upstream from the house, motionless on the bank of the creek that rushes down past the studio. The fearless and yet calculating way he stood looking back at us made me think of a wolf. He was about the size of a wolf, but he had the short yellow hair of a dingo, and the same broad, flat head and powerful shoulders.
Alice placed food out near the terrace wall for him, but he refused to come close until we had gone back into the house. We were feeding two other dogs at the time, and when both arrived unexpectedly at the eating area, I was sure there would be trouble. There wasn’t. Turk merely glanced at them, gave the faintest of growls, and they instantly knuckled under like a pair of cowed privates before a general.
The next day he wagged his tail happily at Alice and permitted her to pet him, but ten feet was as close as he would allow me to come. At that distance he would look at me hard and, though he made no sound, his lip would curl ever so slightly. He seemed to say, Keep away from me, and I’ll not bother you.
The message was absolutely clear. If I had been stupid enough to miss it, the little chill that went up my back would have set me straight in an instant. He was willing to tolerate me because of Alice, but I must stay well away and never attempt to touch him.
Wild animals have given me warnings before, but this was the first time one had ever made me feel his thoughts. I was soon to learn that Turk was capable of much greater mental feats. In the next few days he taught me a lesson I shall never forget, and at the same time he cleared up a mystery that had been nagging at me for years.
It had happened back on the coast before we came to the mountains. In a small palm grove beyond our place, a neighbor had placed a pair of goats to graze, tying each with a long rope to keep it from wandering away. One afternoon Alice and I went out to the station wagon, intending to ride into town for our mail. Before we could open the doors, one of the goats suddenly appeared. It rushed up to Alice, stared hard into her face, then whirled around to me and did the same thing.
I couldn’t understand, and neither could Alice. Puzzled, we opened the doors and started to get into the wagon, but the goat jumped in ahead of us. I pulled him out, and we got in quickly and closed the doors, but when we started to drive off, the stubborn goat planted himself directly in front of the car and refused to budge.
“What’s the matter with the crazy thing?” I muttered.
“It’s not crazy,” said Alice. “And it’s not stupid.”
Goats are definitely not stupid, as I knew from experience. I remembered the goat Louis Bromfield told about, when writing of his farm. It was always managing to reach the opposite side of a fence that was much too high to jump. The truth gave everyone something to think about. The goat had formed a partnership with a donkey. By standing on the donkey’s back, it could leap the fence with ease.
Worriedly we got out of the wagon, wondering what was wrong. The goat looked at us again, gave an entreating little “Ba-a-a!” and began hastening down the lane with the two of us following.
When we reached the palm grove where it had been tied, we found the other goat unconscious on the ground. It was being strangled by its line, which had become looped tightly around its neck. Had we reached it a few minutes later, it would have been dead.
I don’t know how the first goat, in a desperate effort to save his companion, ever managed to break his own line in order to go for help, and I shudder to think how slow we were to comprehend. It was a profoundly moving ex
perience, and I shall never forget how hard he looked into our faces, silently trying to tell us something that any other animal would have understood.
Not, of course, until I met Turk did I begin to realize that the goat was trying to tell us something in nature’s language, and became almost frantic when we failed to understand it. Naturally he went to Alice first because where animals are concerned, she is what might be called simpático.
Simpático is a Spanish word that means a great deal more than just sympathetic, as it is usually translated. If others find you simpático, they feel in you an unusual understanding, a sort of closeness and kinship that is far beyond the ordinary.
It had brought the goat straight to Alice without hesitation, and it brought Turk also—after he had sized me up and decided he could handle me. When he told me to keep my distance, he looked straight into my eyes, exactly as the goat had done long before. But Turk’s message was a threat, the simplest and strongest message that can be conveyed to a dull-witted human. Several days later Turk looked at me again, using that same hard, peculiar stare. But this time he wasn’t giving information. He was getting it.
Here is the reason: Bob, our woodsman friend, stopped by one afternoon and saw Alice feeding Turk. He was fascinated. “What a dog!” he whispered. “I’d sure like to have him.” He added, “I’ve seen that feller before, chasin’ deer. He’s a wild ’un. If the warden ever gets a shot at ’im …”
Turk had become a worry. The cats were afraid of him. So were the other dogs. Furthermore, our part of the valley is a deer crossing, a fact that Turk knew only too well. Our game warden was always on the watch for deer killers and had disposed of several of them in sight of the house. Obviously, if Turk hung around very long, he was in for trouble.
We talked it over. It seemed much better for Bob to have Turk and train him, than for the dog to run afoul of the warden. But how were we to catch him?
Bob solved it by appearing every afternoon so that Turk would become accustomed to him. Alice, somewhat against her will, agreed to snap a leash on Turk at the right moment and give him to Bob.
An afternoon came when all seemed to be in order. Turk was used to Bob and allowed us to approach within thirty feet of him while Alice fed him. Then I made the mistake of asking Bob how he intended to train such a dog.
“Why, I reckon I’ll do it jest like I always do it,” he said. “You gotta let ’im know who’s boss.”
Into my mind at that instant came a sharp vision of Bob’s little mountain farm, with a pair of woebegone hounds tied to a tree near the house. Bob had a fine reputation as a trainer of hunting dogs, but like most men in the region he believed in using an iron hand to achieve results. Suddenly I could see Turk tied like the hounds but, unlike them, refusing to submit, and refusing all food in his utter hatred of confinement.
As the vision became unpleasantly clear in my mind, I saw Turk staring at me, his brown agate eyes boring deep into mine. Then he looked intently at Bob. All at once he backed away from Alice, whirled around, and trotted swiftly up the creek. At the spot where we had first noticed him, he paused briefly and glanced back.
He seemed to say, “No one shall confine me. No one. I am free. Or don’t you know what freedom is?”
That, as nearly as I can express it, is the thought that came to me at that moment. He turned and trotted out of sight upstream. We never saw him again.
The more I thought about it afterward, the more certain I became that he knew Bob’s intention from the first. The only reason he remained near us till the last possible moment was his feeling for Alice. She was simpático—probably the only creature in his life who was.
5
INSECTS HAVE FEELINGS?
THOUGH I WAS CAREFUL not to mention Turk to the beekeeper, I tried to draw him out on other matters that might help in my search for answers. He has a surprising knowledge of the wild world around us, and much of it is not to be found in books. Also, I suspected he was aware of secrets I would find quite startling if I could get him to talk. But prying a truth out of him isn’t easy.
“Do you think dogs can read minds?” I asked.
“Why not?” he answered. “Other things do.”
“What other things?”
“Look around,” he said. “You’d be surprised. There are all sorts of goings-on right under people’s noses, but mighty few of us ever notice ’em. You know why? It’s because most of us think we’re better’n anything else, and smarter. But we’re not.”
“You don’t think humans are superior to other creatures?”
“Pshaw! Everything that lives is superior in some way to everything else. Doesn’t that make us all sort of equal?”
“It’s a good point to remember,” I admitted.
“Well, you’ve got to approach animals as an equal before you can become acquainted with them or learn much about them. Anyway, we make an awful poor showing when compared to some creatures. You’ve read about dolphins?”
I told him I had. I had been staggered to learn that dolphins not only have a highly developed language, but a memory that puts ours in the shade, and a brain that works many times faster than a human’s.
“Then there’s the wolf,” he said. “Stack him up against us, and he comes out way ahead. He’s a better animal all the way around, and a finer gentleman.”
I have met only one wolf in my life, but the meeting was memorable. We came upon each other suddenly at the corner of a northern field, and we both stopped short and stared at each other. At that moment, while I was blinking and trying to tell myself I was seeing a stray dog and not a wolf, he instantly sized me up as being utterly harmless and practically beneath contempt. He went calmly on his way and disappeared into the growth at the side of the field, not even bothering to glance back at me.
At the time I did not know how he felt about me. But I’ll never forget the look he gave me. It was exactly the same hard and penetrating stare that came from Turk.
If the wolf hadn’t known I was harmless, he would have looked back to see what I was going to do. Moreover, if I had had a gun in my hand at the time and had been in a hunting mood, I doubt that I would have seen him at all. He would have known I was dangerous long before he came near me, and he would have been careful to avoid me.
The beekeeper’s views are shared by many thoughtful people. In fact, it is almost impossible for us to grasp the truth about other creatures as long as we consider ourselves far above them. We must come humbly down to another level and meet them as equals. And we must realize that every one of them, be it a dolphin, wolf, crow, or even a grasshopper, is an individual and actually superior to us in some way.
As an individual, every animal is another living being on the same spaceship as ourselves, traveling toward the same unknown destination. Like us, it is equipped with special talents, a means of communication with other life around it, and a complete set of feelings. It knows joy and fear, love and hate, anxiety and grief, pride, yes, and even compassion.
Insects have feelings? Certainly they have! Who has never been stung by an angry wasp or an anxious bee? Who has never watched a happy fly circling in the sun? As for language, a grasshopper has a vocabulary of nearly five hundred different chirping sounds. Just because he makes them by rubbing a leg against a wing, instead of wagging a tongue, does not lessen their significance as a means of communication.
I don’t know whether the housefly has his own special sound language, as most creatures seem to have, but he doesn’t really need one. He is a very sensitive little fellow. And like Turk and the wolf, all the cats and dogs I have known, and innumerable other creatures who have looked hard into my eyes to discover what message lurked behind them, he is quite capable of picking up my thoughts.
Anyone who has trouble believing this can try stalking a fly with murder in his mind and a swatter in his hand. Watch carefully how the fly acts. Better yet, one can find a copy of J. Allen Boone’s curious book Kinship with All Life and learn some amazing truths
he will never forget. The chances are that he will never want to swat another fly.
Allen Boone, a well-known Hollywood figure and friend of animals, was the man who tutored Strong-heart, probably the most intelligent of all the great movie dogs. Early in their relationship Boone discovered that Strongheart could read his mind. This fact not only accounted for the dog’s uncanny acting ability, but it was the undoing of many a crook, for he would not tolerate a dishonest person in his presence.
Boone soon learned what primitive man learned ages ago—that all creatures have the ability to read the thoughts of those around them. It is almost as necessary for their safety as their sense of smell. Some, like Strongheart, Turk, and my wolf, have this ability to a much higher degree than others. But all creatures have it, even mosquitoes and houseflies.
After Allen Boone discovered this, he actually made a fly his friend and trained it to come to his call and alight on his finger!
How did he manage it? By forgetting his supposed superiority and meeting the fly as an equal!
This is a good place to remember Albert Schweitzer, medical missionary and one of the world’s greatest thinkers. He had a feeling for insects that was as remarkable as Boone’s. In Dr. Schweitzer’s philosophy, all life is related and closely bound together, and he did not believe in killing anything, not even a mosquito.
That idea rather shook me at first, for at the time when I read the doctor’s work I was being thoroughly bitten by mosquitoes. During my angry slapping, most of Dr. Schweitzer’s philosophy went in through one eye and out the other. Soon I learned that a bright mosquito can pick up a swatter’s thoughts and actually outwit him! So, much against my will, I was forced to respect the rascal.
Even so, it took some doing before I could accept Dr. Schweitzer’s point of view. Acceptance came in time, as my understanding grew, and with it my feeling of human superiority took a tumble. It tumbled even more after Zan caught the doves and we began asking questions that were hard to answer.
The Strange White Doves Page 2