Once, before I learned better than to handle any helpless cub, I saw a doe drive her own fawn roughly away from her, out of my sight and hearing. I had petted the fawn a little (a very little, I am glad to remember) and looked with wonder on the mother’s anger, not understanding it till some time later, when I learned of a similar incident with a sadder ending. Not far from my camp a sportsman with his guide found a fawn hidden near the stream where they were fishing, and being completely won by the beautiful innocent, as most men are, they petted him to their hearts’ content. When an old doe, the mother presumably, appeared heading in their direction they thoughtfully withdrew, hiding at a distance to watch the family reunion. The doe seemed to hasten her steps when she saw that the fawn was on his feet, instead of lying close where she had left him; but when near him she suddenly stiffened, with the hair bristling on her neck. Two or three times she thrust out her nose, only to back away, and [[194]]once she raised the harsh alarm-cry that a doe utters when she smells danger. Then, as the little fellow trotted up to her on his wabbly legs, she leaped upon him in fury and trampled him to death.
[[195]]
VIII
On Keeping Still
To return to our first lesson, of quietude: it was impressed upon me unconsciously, like most good lessons, before I had any thought that I was learning the true way of the woods. The teacher was Nature herself (she seldom fails to quiet boy or man if left alone with him), and the school-room was a lonely berry-pasture surrounded by pine and hardwood forests. The berry-pickers, a happy and carefree lot, often let me go with them while I was yet too small to find my way among the tall swamp-blueberry bushes, and would leave me under a tree at the edge of the woods, with an armful of berry-laden branches to keep me busy while they wandered far away in [[196]]search of the best picking. Sitting there in the breathing solitude, occupied with the task of filling my tin cup with berries and well content with my lot (for the woods always had a fascination for me, and seemed most friendly when I was alone), I would presently “feel” that something was watching me. There was never any suggestion of fear in the impression, only an awakening to the fact that I was not alone, that some living thing was near me. Then, as I looked up expectantly, I would almost always find a bird slipping noiselessly through the branches overhead, or a beastie creeping through the cover at my side; and in his bright eyes, his shy approach, his withdrawal to appear in another spot, I read plainly enough that he was asking who I was or what I was doing there. And by a whistled tune or a drumming on my cup, or by flashing a sunbeam into his eyes from a pocket glass, I always tried to hold him as long as I could.
This curious sense or feeling of being watched, by the way, is very real in some men, who do not regard it as a matter of chance or imagination. I have known of two elaborate courses of “laboratory” experiments which aimed to determine how far such a feeling is trustworthy, and both resulted in a neutral or fifty-fifty conclusion; but I wonder, if the experiments had been tried on [[197]]Indians or natural men under natural conditions, whether the result might not have been quite different. The fact that the first fifty men you meet get lost or turned around in a trackless forest is significant for the fifty, and for the vast majority of others; but it means nothing to the one bushman who can go where he will without thought or possibility of being lost, because of his sure sense of direction.
So, possibly, with this feeling of being watched: it may be too intangible for experiment, or even for definition. Many times since childhood when I have been alone in the big woods, fishing or holding vigil by a wilderness lake, I have the feeling, at times vaguely and again definitely, that strange eyes were upon me. Occasionally, it is true, I have found nothing on looking around, either because no animal was there or because he was too well hidden to be seen; but much more often the feeling proved true to fact—so often, indeed, that I soon came to trust it without doubt or question, as Simmo my Indian still does, and a few other woodsmen I have known. It is possible that one’s ears or nose may account for the feeling; that some faint sound or odor may make itself felt so faintly that one has the impression of life without knowing through what channel the impression is received. Of that I am not at all sure; at the moment it [[198]]seems that some extra sense is at work, more subtle than smell or hearing; and, whether rightly or wrongly, it is apparently associated with the penetrating stare of an animal’s eyes on your back.