How animals talk

by William J. Long

The same “secret” is shared by the few men who have the gift of managing horses, and who can do more by a word or even a look than another man by bit and harness. I have heard the gift described by a professional horse-trainer as the “power of the human eye”; but that is nonsense set to melodrama. An eye is a bit of jelly, and [[143]]means nothing without a will or communicating impulse behind it. When the spirit of a horse is once broken (and most of them are broken rather than trained by our methods) almost anybody can manage him, the blind as well as the seeing; but when a horse keeps the spirit of his wild ancestors, their timidity, their flightiness, their hair-trigger tendency to shy or to bolt, then I envy the man who can cross the gulf of ages and put something of his own steadiness into the nervous brute.

This steadying process seems to be wholly a matter of spirit, so far as I have observed it, and whatever passes from man to brute passes directly, without need of audible speech. For example, a friend of mine, a very quiet man of few words, once brought home a magnificent “blooded” horse which he had bought for a song because “nobody could handle him.” The horse was not vicious in any way, but seemed to have a crazy impulse to run himself to death—an impulse so strong that even now, when he is past twenty years old, he cannot be turned loose for a moment in a farm pasture. He had never been driven save with a powerful curb; even so, he would drag the carriage along by the reins, and an hour of such driving left a strong man’s arms half paralyzed by the strain. Yet at the first trial his new owner put a soft rubber bit in his mouth, flipped the lines [[144]]loosely across his back, and controlled him by a word.

Some years later I was riding behind that same horse, jogging quietly along a country road, when my friend, with an odd twinkle in his eye, said, “Take the reins a moment while I get out this robe.” I took them, and what followed seemed like magic or bedevilment. I had noticed that the reins were loose, just “feeling” the horse’s mouth; I shifted them to my hand very quietly, without stirring a hair, and blinders on the bridle prevented the horse from seeing the transfer. Yet hardly had I touched them when something from my hand (or from my soul, for aught I know) flowed along the leather and filled the brute with fire. He flung up his head, as if I had driven spurs into him, and was away like a shot.

Again, I was crossing the public square of Nantucket one morning when I saw a crowd of excited men and boys eddying at a safe distance around a horse—an ugly, biting brute that had once almost torn the side of my face off when I passed too close to him, minding my own affairs. Now he was having one of his regular tantrums, squealing, kicking, plunging or backing, while his driver, who had leaped to the ground, alternately lashed and cursed him. I heard an angry voice near me utter the single word “Fools!” and saw a [[145]]stranger brush some men aside and stand directly in front of the horse, which grew quiet on the instant. The stranger went nearer, pulled the horse’s head down and laid his face against it; and there they stood, man and brute, like carved statues. It was as if one were whispering a secret, and the other listening. Then the man said, “Come along, boy,” and walked down the square, the horse following at his heels like a trained dog.

Watching the scene, my first thought was that the horse recognized a former and kinder master; but the man assured me, when I followed him up, that he had never spoken to the animal till that moment, and that he could do the same with any refractory horse he had ever met. “Try it with that one,” I said promptly, pointing to a nervous horse that, feeling the excitement of the recent affair, was jerking and frothing at his hitch-rope. The man smiled his acceptance of the challenge, stepped in front of the horse, and looked at him steadily. What he thought or willed, what feeling or impulse he sent out, I know not; but certainly some silent communication passed, which the horse recognized by forward-pointing ears and a low whinny of pleasure. Then the man unsnapped the rope from the bridle ring, turned away without a word, and the horse followed [[146]]him across the square and back again to the hitching-post.

When I asked how the thing was done, the man answered with entire frankness that he did not know. It “just came natural” to him, he said, to understand horses, and he had always been able to make them do almost anything he wanted. But he had no remarkable power over other animals, so far as I could learn, and was uncommonly shy of dogs, even of little dogs, regarding them all alike as worthless or dangerous brutes.

Some of my readers may recall, in this connection, the shabby-genteel old man who used to amuse visitors in the public gardens of Paris by playing with the sparrows, some twenty-odd years ago. So long as he went his way quietly the birds paid no more attention to him than to any other stroller; but the moment he began to chirp some wild and joyous excitement spread through the trees. From all sides the sparrows rushed to him, alighting on his hat or shoulders, clamoring loudly for the food which they seemed to know was in his pockets, but which he would not at first give them. When he had a crowd of men and women watching him (for he was vain of his gift, and made a small living by passing his hat after an entertainment) he would single out a cock-sparrow from the flock and cry, “What! you here again, Bismarck, you [[147]]scoundrel?” Then he would abuse the cock-sparrow, calling him a barbarian, a Prussian, a mannerless intruder who had no business among honorable French sparrows; and finally, pretending to grow violently angry, he would chase Bismarck from bench to bench and throw his hat at him. And Bismarck would respond by dodging the hat, chirping blithely the while, as if it were a good joke, and would fly back to peck at the crust of bread which the old man held between his lips or left sticking out of his pocket.

One might have understood this as a mere training trick if Bismarck were always the same; but he was any cock-sparrow that the man chanced to pick out of a flock. After playing with the birds till they wearied of it, he would feed them, pass the hat, and stroll away to repeat his performance with another flock in another part of the gardens. That these wary and suspicious birds, far more distrustful of man than the sparrows of the wilderness, understood his mental attitude rather than his word or action; that he could make them feel his kindliness, his camaraderie, his call to come and play, even while he pretended to chase them,—this was the impression of at least one visitor who watched him again and again at his original entertainment.

Some kind of communication must have passed [[148]]silently between the actor and one of his audience; for presently, though I never spoke to the old man, but only watched him keenly, he picked me out for personal attention. Whereupon I cultivated his acquaintance, invited him to dine and fed him like a duke, and thought I had gained his confidence by taking him to see a big wolf of mine that might well have puzzled any student of birds or beasts. The wolf was one of a wild pack that had recently arrived at the zoo from Siberia, where they had been caught in a pit and shipped away with all their savagery in them. Through some freak of nature this one wolf had attached himself to me, like a lost dog; by some marvelously subtle perception he would recognize my coming at a distance, even in a holiday crowd, and would thrust his grim muzzle against the bars of his cage to howl or roar till I came and stretched out a hand to him, though he was as wild and “slinky” as the rest of the pack to everybody else, even to the keeper who fed him. That interested the sparrow-tamer, of course; but he was silent or too garrulous whenever I approached the thing I wanted to know. He would not tell me how he won the birds, but made a mystery and hocus-pocus of the natural gift by which he earned a precarious living.

The same “mystery” cropped out later, amid [[149]]very different scenes, in the interior of Newfoundland. Coming down beside a salmon river one day, my Indian, a remarkable man with an almost uncanny power of calling wild creatures of every kind, pointed to a hole high on the side of a stub, and said, “Go, knock-um dere; see if woodpecker at home.” I went and knocked softly, but nothing happened. “Knock-um again, knock-um little louder,” said Matty. I knocked again, more lustily, and again nothing happened. Then the Indian came and rapped the tree with his knuckles, while I stood aside; and instantly a woodpecker that was brooding her eggs stuck her head out of the hole and looked down at her visitor inquisitively.