The next day at the same place we repeated the same performance precisely, after our morning fishing; and again the interesting thing to me was, not the bird’s instant appearance at the Indian’s summons, but the curiously intent way in which she turned her head to look down at him. When he showed his craft again and again, at the doors of other woodpeckers that were not interested in my knocking, I demanded, “Now, Matty, tell me how you do it.”
But Matty only laughed. When we are alone in the woods he has a fine sense of humor, though grim enough at other times. “Oh, woodpecker [[150]]know me; he look down at me,” he said; and that was all I could ever get out of him.
So, though I have seen the gift in operation several times, I have not yet found the man who had it and who could or would give me any explanation. There is no doubt in my own mind, however, that the negro, the Frenchman, and the Indian, and all others who exercise any unusual influence over animals, do so by reason of their subconscious power to “talk” or to convey impulses without words, as gregarious wild creatures commonly talk among themselves. At least, I can understand much of what I see among birds and brutes by assuming that they talk in this fashion.
Such a power seems mysterious, incredible, in a civilized world of sense and noise; but I fancy that every man and woman speaks silently to the brute without being conscious of the fact. “If you want to see game, leave your gun at home,” is an accepted saying among hunters; but the reason for the excellent admonition has not been forthcoming. When you have hunted six days in vain, and then on a quiet Sunday stroll come plump upon noble game that seems to have no fear, you are apt to think of the curiosities of luck, but even here also are you under the sway of psychological law and order. As you go quietly [[151]]through the woods, projecting your own “aura” of peace or sympathy, it may be, in an invisible wave ahead of you, there is nothing disturbing or inharmonious in either your thoughts or your actions; and at times the wild animal seems curiously able to understand the one as well as the other, just as certain dogs know at first glance whether a stranger is friendly or hostile or afraid of them. When you are excited or lustful to kill, something of your emotional excitement seems to precede you; it passes over many wild birds and beasts, all delicately sensitive, before you come within their sense range; and when you draw near enough to see them you often find them restless, suspicious, though as yet no tangible warning of danger has floated through the still woods. At the first glimpse or smell of you they bound away, your action in hiding or creeping making evident the danger which thus far was only vaguely felt. But if you approach the same animals gently, without mental excitement of any kind, sometimes, indeed, they promptly run away, especially in a much-hunted region; but more frequently they meet you with a look of surprise; they move alertly here or there to get a better view of you, and show many fascinating signs of curiosity before they glide away, looking back as they go.
Such has been the illuminating experience of [[152]]one man, at least, repeated a hundred times in the wilderness. I have been deep in the woods when my food-supply ran low, or was lost in the rapids, or went to feed an uninvited bear, and it was then a question of shoot game or go hungry; but the shooting was limited by the principle that a wild animal has certain rights which a man is bound to respect. I have always held, for example, that a hunter has no excuse for trying long shots that are beyond his ordinary skill; that it is unpardonable of him to “take a chance” with noble game or to “pump lead” after it, knowing as he does that the chances are fifty to one that, if he hits at all, he will merely wound the animal and deprive it of that gladness of freedom which is more to it than life. So when I have occasionally gone out to kill a buck (a proceeding which I heartily dislike) I have sometimes hunted for days before getting within close range of the animal I wanted. But when, in the same region and following the same trails, I have entered the big woods with no other object than to enjoy their stillness, their fragrance, their benediction, it is seldom that I do not find plenty of deer, or that I cannot get as near as I please to any one of them. More than once in the woods I have touched a wild deer with my hand (as recorded in another chapter) and many times I have had them within reach of my fishing-rod. [[153]]
It is even so with bear, moose, caribou and other creatures—your best “shots” come when you are not expecting them, and it is not chance, but psychological law, which determines that you shall see most game when you leave your gun at home. A hunter must be dull indeed not to have discovered that the animal he approaches peaceably, trying to make his eyes or his heart say friendly things, is a very different animal from the one he stalks with muscles tense and eyes hard and death in the curl of his trigger finger.
I once met an English hunter, a forest officer in India, who told me that for the first year of his stay in the jungle he was “crazy” to kill a tiger. He dreamed of the creatures by night; he hunted them at every opportunity and in every known fashion by day; he never went abroad on forest business without a ready rifle; and in all that time he had just one glimpse of a running tiger. One day he was led far from his camp by a new bird, and as he watched it in a little opening, unarmed and happy in his discovery, a tiger lifted its huge head from the grass, not twenty steps away. The brute looked at him steadily for a few moments, then moved quietly aside, stopped for another look, and leaped for cover.
That put a new idea into the man’s head, and the idea was emphasized by the fact that the unarmed [[154]]natives, who had no desire to meet a tiger, were frequently seeing the brutes in regions where he hunted for them in vain. As an experiment he left his rifle at home for a few months; he practised slipping quietly through the jungle without physical or mental excitement, as the natives go, and presently he, too, began to meet tigers. In one district he came close to four in as many months, and every one acted in the same half-astonished, half-inquisitive way. Then, thinking he understood his game, he began to carry his rifle again, and had what he called excellent luck. The beautiful tiger skins he showed me were a proof of it.
To me this man was a rare curiosity, being the only Indian or African hunter I ever met who went into the jungle alone, man fashion, and who did not depend on unarmed natives or beaters or trackers for finding his game. His excellent “luck” was, as I judge, simply a realization of the fact that human excitement may carry far in the still woods, and be quite as disturbing, as the man-scent or the report of a rifle.