[CHAPTER VIII]
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MOSES
I know of nothing in the way of affection and loyalty among animals that can exceed that of my devoted Moses. Not only was he tame and tractable, but he never tired of caressing me, and being caressed by me. For hours together he would cling to my neck, play with my ears, lips and nose, bite my cheek, and hug me like a last hope. He was never willing for me to put him down from my lap, never willing for me to leave my cage without him, never willing for me to caress anything else but himself, and never willing for me to discontinue that. He would cry and fret for me whenever we were separated, and I must confess that my absence from him during a journey of three weeks, hastened his sad and untimely death.
From the second day after we became associated, he appeared to regard me as the one in authority. He would not resent anything I did to him. I could take his food out of his hands, which he would permit no one else to do. He would follow me, and cry after me like a child; and as time went by his attachment grew stronger and stronger. He gave every evidence of pleasure at my attentions, and evinced a certain degree of appreciation and gratitude in return. He would divide any morsel of food with me, which is, perhaps, the highest test of the affection of any animal. I cannot say that such an act was genuine benevolence, or an earnest of affection in a true sense of the term, but nothing except deep affection or abject fear impels such actions, and certainly fear was not his motive.
There were others whom he liked and made himself familiar with; there were some he feared and others he hated; but his manner towards me was that of deep affection. It was not alone in return for the food he received, because my boy gave him food more frequently than I did, and many others from time to time fed him. His attachment was like an infatuation that had no apparent motive, was unselfish and supreme.
The chief purpose of my living among the animals being to study the sounds they uttered, I gave strict attention to those made by Moses. For a time it was difficult to detect more than two or three distinct sounds, but as I grew more and more familiar with them I could detect a variety of them, and by constantly watching his actions and associating them with his sounds I learned to interpret certain ones to mean certain things.
In the course of my sojourn with him I learned a certain sound that he always uttered when he saw anything that he was familiar with, such as a man or a dog, but he could not tell me which of the two it was. If he saw anything strange to him he could tell me, but not so that I knew whether it was a snake or a leopard or a monkey, yet I knew that it was something of that kind. I learned a certain word for food, hunger, eating, &c., but he could not go into any details about it, except that a certain sound indicated good or satisfaction, and another meant the opposite.
Among the sounds that I learned was one that is used by a chimpanzee in calling another to come to it. Some of the natives assured me that the mothers always used it in calling their young to them. When Moses wandered away from the cage into the jungle, he would sometimes call me with this sound. I cannot express it in letters of the alphabet, nor describe it so as to give a very clear idea of its character. It was a single sound or word of one syllable, and easily imitated by the human voice. At any time that I wanted Moses to come to me I used this word, and the fact that he always obeyed it by coming confirmed my opinion as to its meaning. I do not think when he addressed it to me that he expected me to come to him, but he perhaps wanted to locate me in order to be guided back to the cage by the sound. As he grew more familiar with the surrounding forest he used it less frequently, but he always employed it in calling me or the boy. When he was called by it he answered with the same sound; but one fact that we noticed was that if he could see the one who called he never made any reply by sound. He would obey it, but not answer it; he probably thought if he could see the one who called that he could be seen by him, and it was therefore useless to reply.
The speech of these animals is very limited, but it is sufficient for their purpose. It is none the less real because of its being restricted, but it is more difficult for man to learn, because his modes of thought are so much more ample and distinct. Yet when one is reduced to the necessity of making his wants known in a strange tongue, he can express many things in a very few words. I have once been thrown among a tribe of whose language I knew less than fifty words, but with little difficulty I succeeded in conversing with them on two or three topics. Much depends upon necessity, and more upon practice. In talking to Moses I mostly used his own language, and was surprised at times to see how readily we understood each other. I could repeat about all the sounds he made except one or two, but I was not able in the time we were together to interpret all of them. These sounds were more than a mere series of grunts or whines, and he never confused them in their meaning. When any one of them was properly delivered to him, he clearly understood and acted upon it.