A couple of years later, on a clear, cold Thanksgiving Day, we had walked off some five miles to chop out a bridle-path which had become choked with down-timber; the two elder of our little boys were with us. The sun had set long ere our return; we were walking home on a road through our own woods and were near the house. We had with us a stanch friend, a large yellow dog, which one of the children, with fine disregard for considerations of sex, had named Susan. Suddenly Susan gave tongue off in the woods to one side and we found he had treed a possum. This time I was hardhearted and the possum fell a victim; the five-year-old boy explaining to the seven-year-old that “it was the first time he had ever seen a fellow killed.”
Susan was one of many dogs whose lives were a joy and whose deaths were a real grief to the family; among them and their successors are or have been Sailor Boy, the Chesapeake Bay dog, who not only loves guns, but also fireworks and rockets, and who exercises a close and delighted supervision over every detail of each Fourth of July celebration; Alan and Jessie, the Scotch terriers; and Jack, the most loved of all, a black smooth-haired Manchester terrier. Jack lived in the house; the others outside, ever on the lookout to join the family in rambles through the woods. Jack was human in his intelligence and affection; he learned all kinds of tricks, was a high-bred gentleman, never brawled, and was a dauntless fighter. Besides the family, his especial friend, playfellow, and teacher was colored Charles, the footman at Washington. Skip, the little black-and-tan terrier that I brought back from the Colorado bear hunt, changed at once into a real little-boy’s dog. He never lets his small master out of his sight, and rides on every horse that will let him—by preference on Algonquin the sheltie, whose nerves are of iron.
FAMILY FRIENDS
The first night possum hunt in which I ever took part was at Quantico, on the Virginia side of the Potomac, some twenty miles below Washington. It was a number of years ago, and several of us were guests of a loved friend, Hallett Phillips, since dead. Although no hunter, Phillips was devoted to outdoor life. I think it was at this time that Rudyard Kipling had sent him the manuscript of “The Feet of the Young Men,” which he read aloud to us.
Quantico is an island, a quaint, delightful place, with a club-house. We started immediately after dark, going across to the mainland, accompanied by a dozen hounds, with three or four negroes to manage them and serve as axemen. Each member of the party carried a torch, as without one it was impossible to go at any speed through the woods. The dogs, of course, have to be specially trained not to follow either fox or rabbit. It was dawn before we got back, wet, muddy, and weary, carrying eleven possums. All night long we rambled through the woods and across the fields, the dogs working about us as we followed in single file. After a while some dog would strike a trail. It might take some time to puzzle it out; then the whole pack would be away, and all the men ran helter-skelter after them, plunging over logs and through swamps, and now and then taking headers in the darkness. We were never fortunate enough to strike a coon, which would have given a good run and a fight at the end of it. When the unfortunate possum was overtaken on the ground he was killed before we got up. Otherwise he was popped alive into one of the big bags carried by the axemen. Two or three times he got into a hollow log or hole and we dug or chopped him out. Generally, however, he went up a tree. It was a picturesque sight, in the flickering glare of the torches, to see the dogs leaping up around the trunk of a tree and finally to make out the possum clinging to the trunk or perched on some slender branch, his eyes shining brightly through the darkness; or to watch the muscular grace with which the darky axemen, ragged and sinewy, chopped into any tree if it had too large and smooth a trunk to climb. A possum is a queer, sluggish creature, whose brain seems to work more like that of some reptile than like a mammal’s. When one is found in a tree there is no difficulty whatever in picking it off with the naked hand. Two or three times during the night I climbed the tree myself, either going from branch to branch or swarming up some tangle of grape-vines. The possum opened his mouth as I approached and looked as menacing as he knew how; but if I pulled him by the tail he forgot everything except trying to grab with all four feet, and then I could take him by the back of the neck and lift him off—either carrying him down, held gingerly at arm’s length, or dropping him into the open mouth of a bag if I felt sufficiently sure of my aim.
In the spring of 1903, while in western Kansas, a little girl gave me a baby badger, captured by her brother, and named after him, Josiah. I took Josiah home to Sagamore Hill, where the children received him literally with open arms, while even the dogs finally came to tolerate him. He grew apace, and was a quaint and on the whole a friendly—though occasionally short-tempered—pet. He played tag with us with inexhaustible energy, looking much like a small mattress with a leg at each corner; he dug holes with marvellous rapidity; and when he grew snappish we lifted him up by the back of the neck, which rendered him harmless. He ate bread and milk, dead mice and birds, and eggs; he would take a hen’s egg in his mouth, break it, and avoid spilling any of the contents. When angered, he hissed, and at other times he made low guttural sounds. The nine-year-old boy became his especial friend. Now and then he nipped the little boy’s legs, but this never seemed to interrupt the amicable relations between the two; as the little boy normally wore neither shoes nor stockings, and his blue overalls were thin, Josiah probably found the temptation at times irresistible. If on such occasions the boy was in Josiah’s wire-fenced enclosure, he sat on a box with his legs tucked under him; if the play was taking place outside, he usually climbed into the hammock, while Josiah pranced and capered clumsily beneath, tail up and head thrown back. But Josiah never bit when picked up; although he hissed like a teakettle as the little boy carried him about, usually tightly clasped round where his waist would have been if he had had one.
At different times I have been given a fairly appalling number of animals, from known and unknown friends; in one year the list included—besides a lion, a hyena, and a zebra from the Emperor of Ethiopia—five bears, a wildcat, a coyote, two macaws, an eagle, a barn owl, and several snakes and lizards. Most of these went to the Zoo, but a few were kept by the children. Those thus kept numbered at one end of the scale gentle, trustful, pretty things, like kangaroo rats and flying squirrels; and at the other end a queer-tempered young black bear, which the children named Jonathan Edwards, partly because of certain well-marked Calvinistic tendencies in his disposition, partly out of compliment to their mother, whose ancestors included that Puritan divine. The kangaroo rats and flying squirrels slept in their pockets and blouses, went to school with them, and sometimes unexpectedly appeared at breakfast or dinner. The bear added zest to life in more ways than one. When we took him to walk, it was always with a chain and club; and when at last he went to the Zoo, the entire household breathed a sigh of relief, although I think the dogs missed him, as he had occasionally yielded them the pleasure of the chase in its strongest form.
JOSIAH