I am sometimes asked, “What is the most interesting thing you find in the woods?” the question calling, no doubt, for the name of some bird or beast or animal habit that may challenge our ignorance or stir our wonder. The answer is, that whether you search the wood or the city or the universe, the only interesting thing you will ever find anywhere is the thrill and mystery of awakening life. That the animal is alive, and alive in a way you ought to be but are not, is the last and most fascinating discovery you are likely to make in nature’s kingdom. After years of intimate [[36]]observation, I can hardly meet a wild bird or beast even now without renewed wonder at his aliveness, his instant response to every delicate impression, as if each moment brought a new message from earth or heaven and he must not miss it or the consequent enjoyment of his own sensations. The very sleep of an animal, when he seems ever on the thin edge of waking, when he is still so in touch with his changing world that the slightest strange sound or smell or vibration brings him to his feet with every sense alert and every muscle ready,—all this is an occasion of marvel to dull men, who must be called twice to breakfast, or who meet the violent clamor of an alarm-clock with the drowsy refrain:
Yet a little sleep, a little slumber,
A little more folding of the hands to sleep!
You will better understand what I mean by the animal’s aliveness, his uncloying pleasure in the sensation of living, if you can forget any tragical theories or prejudices of animal life which you have chanced to read, and then frankly observe the first untrammeled creature you meet in the outdoor world. Here at your back door, for example, is a flock of birds that come trooping from the snowy woods to your winter feast of crumbs. See how they dart hither and yon between mouthfuls, [[37]]as if living creatures could not be still or content with any one thing, even a good thing, in a world of endless variety. Look again, more closely, and see how they merely taste of the abundance on your table, and straightway leave it for a morsel that the wind blows from under their beaks, and that they are bound to have if it takes all winter. Every other minute they flit to a branch above the table, look about alertly, measure the world once more, make sure of the dog that he is asleep, and of the sky that it holds no hawk; then they wipe their bills carefully, using a twig for a napkin, and down to the table they go to begin all over again. So every bite is for them a feast renewed, a feast with all the spices of the new, the fresh, the unexpected and the adventurous in it.
Or again, when you enter the wilderness remote from men, here is a deer slipping shadow-like through the shadowy twilight, daintily tasting twenty varieties of food in as many minutes, and keeping tabs on every living or moving or growing thing while she eats; or a fox, which seems to float along like thistle-down in the wind, halting, listening, testing the air-smells as one would appreciate a varied landscape, playing Columbus to every nook or brush-pile and finding in it something that no explorer ever found before. Such is [[38]]the natural way of a fox, which makes a devious trail because so many different odors attract him here or there.
In fine, to watch any free wild creature is to understand the singing lines from “Saul”:
How good is man’s life, the mere living, how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!
It is to understand also the spirit of Browning, who is hardly a world poet, to be sure, but who has the distinction of being the only famous poet who is always alive and awake. Homer nods; Dante despairs and mourns; Shakespeare has a long period of gloom when he can write only terrible tragedies of human failure; other great poets have their weary days or melancholy hours, but Browning sings ever a song of abounding life. Even his last, the Epilogue to “Asolando,” is not a swan-song, like Tennyson’s; it is rather a bugle-call, and it sounds not the “taps” of earth, but the “reveille” of immortality. But we are wandering from our woodsy trail.
Those who make an ornithology of mere feathers, or who imagine they know an animal because they know what the scientists have said about him, see in this instant responsiveness of the wild creature only a manifestation of fear, and almost every book of birds or beasts repeats the story [[39]]of terror and tragedy. Yet every writer of such books probably owns a dog that displays in less degree (because he is less alive) every single symptom of the wild creature, including his alleged fears; and the dog, far from leading a tragic or terror-governed life, is hilariously disposed to make an adventure or a picnic of every new excursion afield. Moreover, if one of these portrayers of animal fears or tragedies has ever had an adventure of his own; if he has penetrated a wild region on tiptoe, or run the white rapids in a canoe, or heard the wind sing in his ears on a breakneck gallop across country, or trailed a bear to his covert, or hunted bandits in the open, or followed the bugles when they blew for war,—then he must know well that these unforgetable moments, when a man’s senses all awaken and his nerves tingle and he treads the earth like a buck in spring, are the only times in a man’s dull life when he feels himself wholly alive and a man. That a naturalist should forget this when he sees an alert wild animal, and deny his dog and his own experience of life by confounding alertness with fear, is probably due not so much to his own blindness as to his borrowed notions, such as the “struggle for existence,” the “reign of terror,” and other hallucinations which have been packed into his head in the name of science or natural history. [[40]]