A little brother to the bear, and other animal studies

by William J. Long

At three o'clock I brought K'dunk from his meditations under the door-step and set him down in the cage, screening him with a big rhubarb leaf so that the sun would not dazzle his eyes too much. Then I took out my watch and sat down on a rock to count.

In the first ten minutes K'dunk got barely a dozen flies. They were wary of him in the bright light, and he was not yet waked up to the occasion. Then he crouched down between the rat and the scraps, worked a hollow for himself where he could turn without being noticed, and the red tongue-play began in earnest. In the next half hour he got sixty-six flies, an average of over two a minute. In an hour his record was a hundred and ten; and before I left him he had added two dozen more to the score of our enemies. Then the flies ceased coming, as the air grew cool, and I carried him back to the door-step. But that night, later than usual, he was off to the garden again to keep up his splendid work.

When the summer glow-worms came (lightning-bugs the boys called them) we saw another curious and pretty bit of hunting. One night, as we sat on the porch in the soft twilight, I saw the first lightning-bug glowing in the grass, and went to catch it as a jewel for a lady's hair. As I reached down my hand under a bush, the glow suddenly disappeared, and I put my fingers on K'dunk instead. He, too, had seen the glow and had instantly adopted jacking as his mode of hunting.

Later I caught a lightning-bug and put it in a tiny bottle, and dropped it in front of K'dunk as he started across the lawn in the late twilight. He saw the glow through the glass and took a shot at it promptly. As with the hairy caterpillar, he shut his eyes as he gulped down the imaginative morsel, and when he opened them again there was another lightning-bug glowing in the grass just where the first had been. So he kept the tiny bottle jumping about the lawn at the repeated laps of his tongue, blinking and swallowing betweenwhiles until the glow-worm, made dizzy perhaps by the topsy-turvy play of his strange cage, folded his wings and hid his little light. Whereupon K'dunk hopped away, thinking, no doubt, in his own way, that while lightning-bugs were unusually thick that night and furnished the prettiest kind of hunting, they were very poor satisfaction to a hungry stomach,—not to be compared with what he could get by jumping up at the insects that hid on the under side of the leaves on every plant in the garden.

It needed no words of mine by this time to convince the good Mrs. James that K'dunk was her friend. Indeed she paid a small boy ten cents apiece for a half dozen toads to turn loose about the premises to help K'dunk in his excellent work. And the garden flourished as never before, thanks to the humble little helpers. But K'dunk's virtues were more than utilitarian; he was full of unexpected things that kept us all constantly watching with delight to see what would happen next. As I said, he soon learned to come to the call; but more than that, he was fond of music. If you whistled a little tune softly, he would stay perfectly still until you finished before going off on his night's hunting. Then, if you changed the tune, or whistled discordantly, he would hop away as if he had no further use for you.

Sometimes, at night, a few young people would gather on the porch and sing together,—a proceeding which often tolled K'dunk out from under the door-step, and which, on one occasion, brought him hopping hurriedly back from the garden, whither he had gone an hour before to hunt his supper. Quiet hymns he seemed to like, for he always kept still as a worshiper,—which pleased the Reverend James immensely,—but "rag-time" music he detested, if one could judge by his actions and by the unmistakable way he had of turning his back upon what did not appeal to him or touch his queer fancy.

One evening a young girl with a very sweet natural voice was singing by an open window on the porch. She was singing for the old folks' pleasure, that night, some old simple melodies that they liked best. Just within the window the piano was playing a soft accompaniment. A stir in the grass attracted my attention, and there was K'dunk trying in vain to climb up the step. I called Mrs. James' attention quietly to the queer guest, and then lifted K'dunk gently to the piazza. There he followed along the rail until he was close beside the singer, where he sat perfectly still, listening intently as long as she sang. Nor was she conscious that night of this least one among her hearers.

Two or three times this happened in the course of the summer. The girl's voice seemed to have a fascination for our homely little pet, for at the first sweet notes he would scramble out from his hiding and try to climb the steps. When I lifted him to the porch he would hop along till close beside the singer, where he would sit, all quietness and appreciation, as long as she sang. Then, one night when he had sat humble and attentive at her feet through two songs, a tenor who studied in New York, and who sometimes gave concerts, was invited to sing. He responded promptly and atrociously with "O Hully Gee,"—which was not the name of the thing, but only the academy boys' version of a once popular love-song. Had K'dunk been a German choir-leader he could not have so promptly and perfectly expressed his opinion of the wretched twaddle. It was not the fool words, which he could not fortunately understand, nor yet the wretched tingle-tangle music, which was past praying for, but rather the voice itself with its forced unnatural quality so often affected by tenors. At the first strident notes K'dunk grew uneasy. Then he scrambled to the edge of the porch and fell off headlong in his haste to get down and away from the soul-disturbing performance.

The sudden flight almost caused a panic and an awful breach of hospitality among the few who were quietly watching things. To cover an irrepressible chuckle I slipped away after K'dunk, who scrambled clear to the pie-plant patch before he stopped hopping. As I went I heard the gentle Mrs. James, soul of goodness and hospitality, coughing violently into her handkerchief, as if a rude draught had struck her sensitive throat; but it sounded to me more like a squirrel that I once heard snickering inside of a hollow pumpkin. However, the tenor sang on, and all was well. K'dunk meanwhile was engaged in the better task of ridding the garden of noxious bugs, sitting up at times, in a funny way he had, and scratching the place where his ear should be.

It was soon after this, when we all loved K'dunk better than ever, that the most astonishing bit of his queer life came to the surface. Unlike the higher orders of animals, K'dunk receives no training whatever from his elders. The lower orders live so simple a life that instinct is enough for them; and so Nature, who can be provident at times, as well as wasteful, omits the superfluous bother of teaching them. But many things he did before our eyes for which instinct could never account, and many difficulties arose for which innate knowledge was not sufficient; and then we saw his poor dull wits at work against the unexpected problems of the universe.