A little brother to the bear, and other animal studies

by William J. Long

The most elemental kind of surgery is that which amputates a leg when it is broken, not always or often, but only when the wound festers from decay or fly-bite and so endangers the whole body. Probably the best illustration of this is found in the coon, who has a score of traits that place him very high among intelligent animals. When a coon's foot is shattered by a bullet he will cut it off promptly and wash the stump in running water, partly to reduce the inflammation and partly, no doubt, to make it perfectly clean. As it heals he uses his tongue on the wound freely, as a dog does, to cleanse it perhaps, and by the soft massage of his tongue to reduce the swelling and allay the pain.

So far this may or may not be pure instinct. For I do not know, and who will tell me, whether a child puts his wounded hand to his mouth and sucks and cleanses the hurt by pure instinct, or because he has seen others do it, or because he has had his hurts kissed away in childhood, and so imitates the action unconsciously when his mother is not near?

Most mother animals tongue their little ones freely. Now is that a caress, or is it some hygienic measure begun at birth, when she devours all traces of the birth-envelopes and licks the little ones clean lest the nose of some hungry prowler bring him near to destroy the family? Certainly the young are conscious of the soft tongue that rubs them fondly, and so when they lick their own wounds it may be only a memory and an imitation,—two factors, by the way, which lie at the bottom of all elemental education. That explanation, of course, leaves the amputated leg out of the question; and the surgery does not stop here.

When a boy, and still barbarian enough to delight in trapping, partly from a love of the chase that was born in me, and partly to put money into a boy's empty pocket, I once caught a muskrat in a steel trap that slid off into deep water at the first pull and so drowned the creature mercifully. This was due to the careful instructions of Natty Dingle, at whose feet I sat to learn woodcraft, and who used the method to save all his pelts; for often an animal, when caught in a trap, will snap the bone by a twist of his body and then cut the leg off with his teeth, and so escape, leaving his foot in the trap's jaws. This is common enough among fur-bearing animals to excite no comment; and it is sad now to remember that sometimes I would find animals drowned in my traps, that had previously suffered at the hands of other trappers.

I remember especially one big musquash that I was going to shoot near one of my traps, when I stopped short at noticing some queer thing about him. The trap was set in shallow water where a path made by muskrats came up out of the river into the grass. Just over the trap was a turnip on a pointed stick to draw the creature's attention and give him something to anticipate until he should put his foot on the deadly pan beneath. But the old musquash avoided the path, as if he had suffered in such places before. Instead of following the ways of his ancestors he came out at another spot behind the trap, and I saw with horrible regret that he had cut off both his fore legs, probably at different times, when he had been twice caught in man's abominable inventions. When he came up out of the stream he rose on his hind legs and waddled through the grass like a bear or a monkey, for he had no fore feet to rest upon. He climbed a tussock beside the bait with immense caution, pulled in the turnip with his two poor stumps of forearms, ate it where he was, and slipped back into the stream again; while the boy watched with a new wonder in the twilight, and forgot all about the gun as he tended his traps.

It does not belong with my story, but that night the traps came in, and never went out again; and I can never pass a trap now anywhere without poking a stick into it to save some poor innocent leg.

All this is digression; and I have almost forgotten my surgery and the particular muskrat I was talking about. He, too, had been caught in some other fellow's trap and had bitten his leg off only a few days before. The wound was not yet healed, and the amazing thing about it was that he had covered it with some kind of sticky vegetable gum, probably from some pine-tree that had been split or barked close to the ground where Musquash could reach it easily. He had smeared it thickly all over the wound and well up the leg above it, so that all dirt and even all air and water were excluded perfectly.

An old Indian who lives and hunts on Vancouver Island told me recently that he has several times caught beaver that had previously cut their legs off to escape from traps, and that two of them had covered the wounds thickly with gum, as the muskrat had done. Last spring the same Indian caught a bear in a deadfall. On the animal's side was a long rip from some other bear's claw, and the wound had been smeared thickly with soft spruce resin. This last experience corresponds closely with one of my own. I shot a big bear, years ago, in northern New Brunswick, that had received a gunshot wound, which had raked him badly and then penetrated the leg. He had plugged the wound carefully with clay, evidently to stop the bleeding, and then had covered the broken skin with sticky mud from the river's brink, to keep the flies away from the wound and give it a chance to heal undisturbed. It is noteworthy here that the bear uses either gum or clay indifferently, while the beaver and muskrat seem to know enough to avoid the clay, which would be quickly washed off in the water.

Here are a few incidents, out of a score or more that I have seen, or heard from reliable hunters, that indicate something more than native instinct among animals. When I turn to the birds the incidents are fewer but more remarkable; for the birds, being lower in the scale of life, are more subject to instinct than are the animals, and so are less easily taught by their mothers, and are slower to change their natural habits to meet changing conditions.