It may be said that the trout simply followed their food-supply; but I doubt this, since trout apparently feed very little in winter; and in formulating any theory of the matter one must account for the fact that big fish or little fish moved shoreward whenever the wind blew south. The phenomenon may appear less foreign to our experience, though not less mysterious to our reason, if we remember that an old wound or a corn may by its aching foretell a storm, or that a person suffering from nervous prostration may by his sudden depression know that the barometer will soon be falling.
The same bodily sensitiveness appears unchanged in our domestic animals. I once saw a deer and her two fawns kneel down in the woods, and watched them in astonishment as they rested for some time on their knees, as if in supplication; then the ground rocked under me, and I knew that their feet had felt the tremor of an earthquake long before I was sensible of it. Such an observation seemed wonderful to me till I learned that our sheep are equally sensitive in their [[48]]elastic hoofs, and that our pigs respond not only to vibration of earth or air, but also to some finer vibration set in motion, apparently, by human excitement.
Moreover, I have known one dog, old and half deaf, that, whether asleep or awake, would respond to the faint tremor of his master’s automobile before it came into sight or hearing. And what there is in the tremor of one machine to distinguish it from another of the same make and power is something that the unaided ear can hardly measure. The dog lived under a hilltop, on a highway over which scores of automobiles passed daily; and on holidays, when his master was at home, the scores would increase to hundreds. He would sleep for hours on the veranda, paying no heed to the noise or smell or dust of the outrageous things, till suddenly he would jump up, bark, and start for the gate; and in a moment or two we would see the master’s auto rise into sight over the brow of the hill.
The instant response of deer or dog to minute external impressions, though startling enough, is probably wholly physical, a matter of vibrations on one side and of nerves on the other; but there are other phenomena of sensitiveness (and these bring us nearer to our trail of animal communication) [[49]]for which it is much harder to find a satisfactory physical explanation. Such is the feeling or warning of unsensed danger, or the premonition that some one unseen and unheard is approaching—a phenomenon which seems to be common among animals, to judge from repeated observation, and which appears often enough in human beings to make not only the inquisitive Society for Psychical Research but almost every thoughtful man or woman take some note of it.
For example, a man awake in his bed sees his son, whom he thinks safely ashore in a foreign country, fall overboard from a steamer to his death, at the very hour when the son did fall overboard, as was afterward learned. Or a woman, the wife of a sea-captain, sitting on the veranda at home in the bright moonlight, sees the familiar earth vanish in a world of water, and looks suddenly upon her husband’s ship as it reels to the gale, turns over to the very edge of destruction, and then rights itself with half its crew swept overboard—and all this while the precise event befell a thousand miles away. Such things, which spell a different kind of sensitiveness from that with which we are familiar, have happened to people well known to me; but as they have happened to others also, and as almost every town or village has a convincing example of its own, I [[50]]forbear details and accept the fact, and try here to view or understand it as a natural phenomenon.
At first you may strongly object even to my premise, calling it incredible that sense-bound mortals should feel a danger that their eyes cannot see or their ears hear; but there are at least two reasonable answers to your objection. In the first place, we are sense-bound only in the sense of limiting ourselves unnecessarily, confining our perception to five habitual modes, shamefully neglecting to cultivate even these, and ignoring the use or the existence of other and perhaps finer means of contact with the external world. Again, it is not a whit more incredible that sensitive creatures, whether brute or human, should feel the coming or going of a person than that they should feel his look or glance, as they certainly do.
This last is no cloudy theory; it is a plain fact which endures the test of observation. Almost any man of strong personality can disturb or awaken a sleeping wild animal simply by looking at him intently; and the nearer the man is the more certain the effect of his gaze on the sleeping brute. The same is true in less degree of most Indians and woodsmen, and of many sensitive women and children, as you may prove for yourself. Go into a room where a sensitive or “high-strung” person is taking a nap—not sleeping [[51]]heavily, as most men sleep, but lightly, naturally, as all wild animals take their rest. Make no noise, but stand or sit quietly where you can look intently into the sleeper’s face; and commonly, by a change of position or a turning away of the head or a startled opening of the eyes, the sleeper will show that he feels your look and is trying subconsciously to avoid it. The awakening, whether of animals or of men, does not always follow our look, most fortunately, but it happens frequently enough under varying conditions to put the explanation of chance entirely out of the question.
When I was a child I used to sit long hours in the woods alone, partly for love of the breathing solitude, and partly for getting acquainted with wild birds or beasts, which showed no fear of me when they found me quiet. At such times I often found within myself an impression which I expressed in the words, “Something is watching you.” Again and again, when nothing stirred in my sight, that curious warning would come; and almost invariably, on looking around, I would find some bird or fox or squirrel which had probably caught a slight motion of my head and had halted his roaming to creep near and watch me inquisitively. As I grew older the “feel” of living things grew dimmer; yet many times in later years, when [[52]]I have been in the wilderness alone, I have experienced the same impression of being watched or followed, and so often has it proved a true warning that I still trust it and act upon it, even when my eyes see nothing unusual and my ears hear nothing but their own ringing in the silence.
I remember once, when I was sitting on the shore of a lake at twilight, that I began to have an increasing impression that some living thing unseen was near me. At first I neglected it, for I had my eyes on a deer that interested me greatly; but the feeling grew stronger till I obeyed it and rose to my feet. At the first motion came a startling woof! and from some bushes close behind me a bear jumped away for the woods. No doubt he had been there some time, watching me or creeping nearer, knowing that I was alive, but completely puzzled by my shapelessness and lack of action. A similar thing has happened several times, in other places and with other animals, and always at a moment when I was most in harmony with the environment and a sharer of its deep tranquillity.[1]