Jungle days

By William Beebe

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Title: Jungle days

Author: William Beebe

Release date: January 17, 2026 [eBook #77723]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1925

Credits: Tim Lindell, chenzw, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JUNGLE DAYS ***

[Illustration: Indian Hut on the Mazaruni River]

JUNGLE DAYS

WILLIAM BEEBE

AUTHOR OF
“GALÁPAGOS: WORLD’S END,” ETC.

[Illustration]

_Illustrated_

G.P. Putnam’s Sons
New York & London
The Knickerbocker Press
1925

[Illustration]

Made in the United States of America

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I.--A CHAIN OF JUNGLE LIFE 3

II.--MY JUNGLE TABLE 26

III.--A MIDNIGHT BEACH COMBING 49

IV.--FALLING LEAVES 71

V.--THE JUNGLE SLUGGARD 92

VI.--MANGROVE MYSTERY 113

VII.--THE LIFE OF DEATH 137

VIII.--OLD-TIME PEOPLE 166

IX.--THE BIRD OF THE WINE-COLORED EGG 182

ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING
PAGE

INDIAN HUT ON THE MAZARUNI RIVER _Frontispiece_

“AND THERE WAS A GRANDMOTHER FROG” 14

“WELL WITHIN THE REALM OF BLACK MAGIC” 32

“SILENT AND SMOOTH AS A MIRROR” 60

“THE JUNGLE _du Printemps Eternel_” 80

“A FITTING INHABITANT OF MARS” 100

“IN THE SUNSHINE AND WARMTH OF THE MANGROVE TANGLE” 122

“THE GIANT ETABALLI FELL LAST NIGHT” 154

“ONE WISTFUL LITTLE CHAP” 176

THE TINAMOU 192
From a painting by Helen Damrosch Tee Van.

JUNGLE DAYS

Jungle Days

A CHAIN OF JUNGLE LIFE

_This is the story of Opalina
Who lived in the Tad,
Who became the Frog,
Who was eaten by Fish,
Who nourished the Snake,
Who was caught by the Owl,
But fed the Vulture,
Who was shot by Me,
Who wrote this Tale,
Which the Editor took,
And published it Here,
To be read by You,
The last in The Chain,
Of Life in the tropical Jungle._

I offer a living chain of ten links--the first a tiny delicate being,
one hundred to the inch, deep in the jungle, with the strangest home
in the world--my last, you the present reader of these lines. Between,
there befell certain things, of which I attempt falteringly to write.
To know and think them is very worth while, to have discovered them
is sheer joy, but to write of them is impertinence, so exciting
and unreal are they in reality, and so tame and humdrum are any
combinations of our twenty-six letters.

Somewhere today a worm has given up existence, a mouse has been slain,
a spider snatched from the web, a jungle bird torn sleeping from its
perch; else we should have no song of robin, nor flash of reynard’s
red, no humming flight of wasp, nor grace of crouching ocelot. In
tropical jungles, in Northern home orchards, anywhere you will,
unnumbered activities of bird and beast and insect require daily toll
of life.

Now and then we actually witness one of these tragedies or
successes--whichever point of view we take--appearing to us as an
exciting but isolated event. When once we grasp the idea of chains of
life, each of these occurrences assumes a new meaning. Like everything
else in the world it is not isolated, but closely linked with other
similar happenings. I have sometimes traced even closed chains, one of
the shortest of which consisted of predacious flycatchers which fed
upon young lizards of a species which, when it grew up, climbed trees
and devoured the nestling flycatchers!

One of the most wonderful zoological “Houses that Jack built,” was this
of Opalina’s, a long, swinging, exciting chain, including in its links
a Protozoan, two stages of Amphibians, a Fish, a Reptile, two Birds and
(unless some intervening act of legislature bars the fact as immoral
and illegal) three Mammals,--myself, the Editor, and You.

As I do not want to make it into a mere imaginary animal story, however
probable, I will begin, like Dickens, in the middle. I can cope,
however lamely, with the entrance and participation of the earlier
links, but am wholly out of my depth from the time when I mail my tale.
The Akawai Indian who took it upon its first lap toward the Editor
should by rights have a place in the chain, especially when I think
how much better he might tell of the interrelationships of the various
links than can I. Still, I know the shape of the owl’s wings when it
dropped upon the snake, but I do not know why the Editor accepted this;
I can imitate the death scream of the frog when the fish seized it, but
I have no idea why You purchased this volume nor whether you perceive
in my tale the huge bed of ignorance in which I have planted this
scanty crop of facts. Nor do I know the future of this book, whether
it will go to the garret, to be ferreted out in future years by other
links, as I used to do, or whether it will find its way to mid-Asia or
the Malay States, or, as I once saw a magazine, half buried, like the
pyramids, in Saharan sands, where it had slipped from the camel load of
some unknown traveller.

I left my Kartabo laboratory one morning with my gun, headed for the
old Dutch stelling. Happening to glance up I saw a mote, lit with the
oblique rays of the morning sun. The mote drifted about in circles,
which became spirals; the mote became a dot, then a spot, then an
oblong, and down the heavens from unknown heights, with the whole of
British Guiana spread out beneath him from which to choose, swept a
vulture into my very path. We had a quintet, a small flock of our own
vultures who came sifting down the sky, day after day, to the feasts of
monkey bodies and wild peccaries which we spread for them. I knew all
these by sight, from one peculiarity or another, for I was accustomed
to watch them hour after hour, striving to learn something of that
wonderful soaring, of which all my many hours of flying had taught me
nothing.

This bird was a stranger, perhaps from the coast or the inland
savannas, for to these birds great spaces are only matters of brief
moments. I wanted a yellow-headed vulture, both for the painting of its
marvellous head colors, and for the strange, intensely interesting,
one-sided, down-at-the-heel syrinx, which, with the voice, had
dissolved long ages ago, leaving only a whistling breath, and an
irregular complex of bones straggling over the windpipe. Some day I
shall dilate upon vultures as pets--being surpassed in cleanliness,
affectionateness and tameness only by baby bears, sloths and certain
monkeys.

But today I wanted the newcomer as a specimen. I was surprised to see
that he did not head for the regular vulture table, but slid along a
slant of the east wind, banked around its side, spreading and curling
upward his wing-finger-tips and finally resting against its front edge.
Down this he sank slowly, balancing with the grace of perfect mastery,
and again swung round and settled suddenly down shore, beyond a web of
mangrove roots. This took me by surprise, and I changed my route and
pushed through the undergrowth of young palms. Before I came within
sight, the bird heard me, rose with a whipping of great pinions and
swept around three-fourths of a circle before I could catch enough of
a glimpse to drop him. The impetus carried him on and completed the
circle, and when I came out on the Cuyuni shore I saw him spread out on
what must have been the exact spot from which he had risen.

I walked along a greenheart log with little crabs scuttling off on each
side, and as I looked ahead at the vulture I saw to my great surprise
that it had more colors than any yellow-headed vulture should have,
and its plumage was somehow very different. This excited me so that I
promptly slipped off the log and joined the crabs in the mud. Paying
more attention to my steps I did not again look up until I had reached
the tuft of low reeds on which the bird lay. Now at last I understood
why my bird had metamorphosed in death, and also why it had chosen
to descend to this spot. Instead of one bird, there were two and a
reptile. Another tragedy had taken place a few hours earlier, before
dawn, a double death, and the sight of these three creatures brought to
mind at once the chain for which I am always on the lookout. I picked
up my chain by the middle and began searching both ways for the missing
links.

The vulture lay with magnificent wings outspread, partly covering a
big, spectacled owl, whose dishevelled plumage was in turn wrapped
about by several coils of a moderate-sized anaconda. Here was an
excellent beginning for my chain, and at once I visualized myself and
the snake, although alternate links, yet coupled in contradistinction
to my editor and the vulture, the first two having entered the chain
by means of death, whereas the vulture had simply joined in the
pacifistic manner of its kind, and as my editor has dealt gently with
me heretofore, I allowed myself to believe that his entrance might also
be through no more rough handling than a blue slip.

The head of the vulture was already losing some of its brilliant chrome
and saffron, so I took it up, noted the conditions of the surrounding
sandy mud, and gathered together my spoils. I would have passed within
a few feet of the owl and the snake and never discovered them, so close
were they in color to the dark reddish beach, yet the vulture with
its small eyes and minute nerves had detected this tragedy when still
perhaps a mile high in the air, or half a mile up river. There could
have been no odor, nor has the bird any adequate nostrils to detect it,
had there been one. It was sheer keenness of vision. I looked at the
bird’s claws and their weakness showed the necessity of the eternal
search for carrion or recently killed creatures. Here in a half minute,
it had devoured an eye of the owl and both of those of the serpent. It
is a curious thing, this predilection for eyes; give a monkey a fish,
and the eyes are the first titbits taken.

Through the vulture I come to the owl link, a splendid bird clad in
the colors of its time of hunting; a great, soft, dark, shadow of a
bird, with tiny body and long fluffy plumage of twilight buff and ebony
night, lit by twin, orange moons of eyes. The name “spectacled owl”
is really more applicable to the downy nestling which is like a white
powder puff with two dark feathery spectacles around the eyes. Its
name is one of those which I am fond of repeating rapidly--_Pulsatrix
perspicillata perspicillata_. Etymologies do not grow in the jungle and
my memory is noted only for its consistent vagueness, but if the owl’s
title does not mean _The Eye-browed One Who Strikes_, it ought to,
especially as the subspecific trinomial grants it two eye-brows.

I would give much to know just what the beginning of the combat was
like. The middle I could reconstruct without question, and the end was
only too apparent. By a most singular coincidence, a few years before,
and less than three miles away, I had found the desiccated remains
of another spectacled owl mingled with the bones of a snake, only
in that instance, the fangs indicated a small fer-de-lance, the owl
having succumbed to its venom. This time the owl had rashly attacked
a serpent far too heavy for it to lift, or even, as it turned out,
successfully to battle with. The mud had been churned up for a foot
in all directions, and the bird’s plumage showed that it must have
rolled over and over. The anaconda, having just fed, had come out of
the water and was probably stretched out on the sand and mud, as I have
seen them, both by full sun and in the moonlight. These owls are birds
rather of the creeks and river banks than of the deep jungle, and in
their food I have found shrimps, crabs, fish and young birds. Once a
few snake vertebræ showed that these reptiles are occasionally killed
and devoured.

Whatever possessed the bird to strike its talons deep into the neck
and back of this anaconda, none but the owl could say, but from then
on the story was written by the combatants and their environment. The
snake, like a flash, threw two coils around bird, wings and all, and
clamped these tight with a cross vise of muscle. The tighter the coils
compressed the deeper the talons of the bird were driven in, but the
damage was done with the first strike, and if owl and snake had parted
at this moment, neither could have survived. It was a swift, terrible
and short fight. The snake could not use its teeth and the bird had
no time to bring its beak into play, and there in the night, with the
lapping waves of the falling tide only two or three feet away, the two
creatures of prey met and fought and died, in darkness and silence,
locked fast together.

A few nights before I had heard, on the opposite side of the bungalow,
the deep, sonorous cry of the spectacled owl; within the week I had
passed the line-and-crescents track of anacondas, one about the size
of this snake and another much larger. And now fate had linked their
lives, or rather deaths, with my life, using as her divining rod, the
focussing of a sky-soaring vulture.

The owl had not fed that evening, although the bird was so well
nourished that it could never have been driven to its foolhardy feat by
stress of hunger. Hopeful of lengthening the chain, I rejoiced to see
a suspicious swelling about the middle of the snake, which dissection
resolved into a good-sized fish--itself carnivorous, locally called a
basha. This was the first time I had known one of these fish to fall
a victim to a land creature, except in the case of a big kingfisher
who had caught two small ones. Like the owl and anaconda, bashas are
nocturnal in their activities, and, according to their size, feed on
small shrimps, big shrimps, and so on up to six or eight inch catfish.
They are built on swift, torpedo-like lines, and clad in iridescent
silver mail.

From what I have seen of the habits of anacondas, I should say that
this one had left its hole high up among the upper beach roots late in
the night, and softly wound its way down into the rising tide. Here
after drinking, the snake sometimes pursues and catches small fish
and frogs, but the usual method is to coil up beside a half-buried
stick or log and await the tide and the manna it brings. In the van
of the waters comes a host of small fry, followed by their pursuers
or by larger vegetable feeders, and the serpent has but to choose. In
this mangrove lagoon then, there must have been a swirl and a splash,
a passive holding fast by the snake for a while until the right
opportunity offered, and then a swift throw of coils. There must then
be no mistake as to orientation of the fish. It would be a fatal error
to attempt the tail first, with scales on end and serried spines to
pierce the thickest tissues. It is beyond my knowledge how one of these
fish can be swallowed even head first without serious laceration. But
here was optical proof of its possibility, a newly swallowed basha, so
recently caught that he appeared as in life, with even the delicate
turquoise pigment beneath his scales, acting on his silvery armor
as quicksilver under glass. The tooth marks of the snake were still
clearly visible on the scales,--another link, going steadily down the
classes of vertebrates, mammal, bird, reptile and fish, and still my
magic boxes were unexhausted.

Excitedly I cut open the fish. An organism more unlike that of the
snake would be hard to imagine. There I had followed an elongated
stomach, and had left unexplored many feet of alimentary canal. Here,
the fish had his heart literally in his mouth, while his liver and
lights were only a very short distance behind, followed by a great
expanse of tail to wag him at its will, and drive him through the
water with the speed of twin propellers. His eyes are wonderful for
night hunting, large, wide, and bent in the middle so he can see
both above and on each side. But all this wide-angled vision availed
nothing against the lidless, motionless watch of the ambushed anaconda.
Searching the crevices of the rocks and logs for timorous small fry,
the basha had sculled too close, and the jaws which closed upon him
were backed by too much muscle, and too perfect a throttling machine to
allow of the least chance of escape. It was a big basha compared with
the moderate-sized snake but the fierce eyes had judged well, as the
evidence before me proved.

[Illustration: “And there was a Grandmother Frog”]

Still my chain held true, and in the stomach of the basha I found
what I wanted--another link, and more than I could have hoped for--a
representative of the fifth and last class of vertebrate animals
living on the earth, an Amphibian, an enormous frog. This too had been
a swift-forged link, so recent that digestion had only affected the
head of the creature. I drew it out, set it upon its great squat legs,
and there was a grandmother frog almost as in life, a Pok-poke as the
Indians call it, or, as a herpetologist would prefer, _Leptodactylus
caliginosus_,--the Smoky Jungle Frog.

She lived in the jungle just behind, where she and a sister of hers
had their curious nests of foam, which they guarded from danger, while
the tadpoles grew and squirmed within its sudsy mesh as if there were
no water in the world. I had watched one of the two, perhaps this one,
for hours, and I saw her dart angrily after little fish which came too
near. Then, this night, the high full-moon tides had swept over the
barrier back of the mangrove roots and set the tadpoles free, and the
mother frogs were at liberty to go where they pleased.

From my cot in the bungalow to the south, I had heard in the early part
of the night, the death scream of a frog, and it must have been at that
moment that somehow the basha had caught the great amphibian. This frog
is one of the fiercest of its class, and captures mice, reptiles and
small fish without trouble. It is even cannibalistic on very slight
provocation, and two of equal size will sometimes endeavor to swallow
one another in the most appallingly matter-of-fact manner.

They represent the opposite extreme in temperament from the pleasantly
philosophical giant toads. In outward appearance in the dim light of
dusk, the two groups are not unlike, but the moment they are taken in
the hand all doubt ceases. After one dive for freedom the toad resigns
himself to fate, only venting his spleen in much puffing out of his
sides, while the frog either fights until exhausted, or pretends death
until opportunity offers for a last mad dash.

In this case the frog must have leaped into the deep water beyond the
usual barrier and while swimming been attacked by the equally voracious
fish. In addition to the regular croak of this species, it has a most
unexpected and unamphibian yell or scream, given only when it thinks
itself at the last extremity. It is most unnerving when the frog,
held firmly by the hind legs, suddenly puts its whole soul into an
ear-splitting _peent! peent! peent! peent! peent!_

Many a time they are probably saved from death by this cry which
startles like a sudden blow, but tonight no utterance in the world
could have saved it; its assailant was dumb and all but deaf to aerial
sounds. Its cries were smothered in the water as the fish dived and
nuzzled it about the roots, as bashas do with their food,--and it
became another link in the chain.

Like a miser with one unfilled coffer, or a gambler with an unfilled
royal flush, I went eagerly at the frog with forceps and scalpel. But
beyond a meagre residuum of eggs, there was nothing but shrunken organs
in its body. The rashness of its venture into river water was perhaps
prompted by hunger after its long maternal fast while it watched over
its egg-filled nest of foam.

Hopeful to the last, I scrape some mucus from its food canal, place it
in a drop of water under my microscope, and--discover Opalina, my last
link, which in the course of its most astonishing life history gives me
still another.

To the naked eye there is nothing visible--the water seems clear, but
when I enlarge the diameter of magnification I lift the veil on another
world, and there swim into view a dozen minute lives, oval little
beings covered with curving lines, giving the appearance of wandering
finger prints. In some lights these are iridescent and they then will
deserve the name of Opalina. As for their personality, they are oval
and rather flat, it would take one hundred of them to stretch an inch,
they have no mouth, and they are covered with a fur of flagella with
which they whip themselves through the water. Indeed the whole of their
little selves consists of a multitude of nuclei, sometimes as many as
two hundred, exactly alike,--facial expression, profile, torso, limbs,
pose, all are summed up in rounded nuclei, partly obscured by a mist of
vibrating flagella.

As for their gait, they move along with colorful waves, steadily and
gently, not keeping an absolutely straight course and making rather
much leeway, as any rounded, keelless craft, surrounded with its own
paddle-wheels, must expect to do.

I have placed Opalina under very strange and unpleasant conditions in
thus subjecting it to the inhospitable qualities of a drop of clear
water. Even as I watch, it begins to slow down, and the flagella move
less rapidly and evenly. It prefers an environment far different,
where I discovered it living happily and contentedly in the stomach
and intestines of a frog, where its iridescence was lost, or rather
had never existed in the absolute darkness; where its delicate hairs
must often be unmercifully crushed and bent in the ever-moving tube,
and where air and sky, trees and sun, sound and color were forever
unknown; in their place only bits of half-digested ants and beetles,
thousand-legs and worms, rolled and tumbled along in the dense gastric
stream of acid pepsin; a strange choice of home for one of our fellow
living beings on the earth.

After an Opalina has flagellated itself about, and fed for a time in
its strange, almost crystalline way on the juices of its host’s food,
its body begins to contract, and narrows across the center until it
looks somewhat like a map of the New World. Finally its isthmus thread
breaks and two Opalinas swim placidly off, both identical, except
that they have half the number of nuclei as before. We cannot wonder
that there is no backward glance, or wave of cilia, or even memory of
their other body, for they are themselves, or rather it is they, or
it is each: our whole vocabulary, our entire stock of pronouns breaks
down, our very conception of individuality is shattered by the life of
Opalina.

Each daughter cell or self-twin, or whatever we choose to conceive it,
divides in turn. Finally there comes a day (or rather some Einstein
period of space-time, for there are no days in a frog’s stomach!) when
Opalina’s fraction has reached a stage with only two nuclei. When
this has creased and stretched, and finally broken like two bits of
drawn-out molasses candy, we have the last divisional possibility.
The time for the great adventure has arrived, with decks cleared for
action, or, as a protozoölogist would put it, with the flagellate’s
protoplasm uni-nucleate, approximating encystment.

The encysting process is but slightly understood, but the tiny
one-two-hundredth-of-its-former-self--Opalina curls up, its
paddle-wheels run down, it forms a shell, and rolls into the current
which it has withstood for a Protozoan’s lifetime. Out into the world
drifts the minute ball of latent life, a plaything of the cosmos,
permitted neither to see, hear, eat, nor to move of its own volition.
It hopes (only it cannot even desire) to find itself in water, it must
fall or be washed into a pool with tadpoles, one of which must come
along at the right moment and swallow it with the débris upon which it
rests. The possibility of this elaborate concatenation of events has
everything against it, and yet it must occur or death will result. No
wonder that the population of Opalinas does not overstock its limited
and retired environment!

Supposing that all happens as it should, and that the only chance in a
hundred thousand comes to pass, the encysted being knows or is affected
in some mysterious way by entrance into the body of the tadpole. The
cyst is dissolved and the infant Opalina begins to feed and to develop
new nuclei. Like the queen ant after she has been walled forever into
her chamber, the life of the little Onecell would seem to be extremely
sedentary and humdrum, in fact monotonous, until its turn comes to
fractionize itself, and again severally to go into the outside world,
multiplied and by installments. But as the queen ant had her one
superlative day of sunlight, heavenly flight and a mate, so Opalina,
while she is still wholly herself, has a little adventure all her own.

Let us strive to visualize her environment as it would appear to her if
she could find time and ability, with her single cell, to do more than
feed and bisect herself. Once free from her horny cyst she stretches
her drop of a body, sets all her paddle-hairs in motion and swims
slowly off. If we suppose that she has been swallowed by a tadpole an
inch long, her living quarters are astonishingly spacious or rather
elongated. Passing from end to end she would find a living tube two
feet in length, a dizzy path to traverse, as it is curled in a tight,
many-whorled spiral,--the stairway, the domicile, the universe at
present for Opalina. She is compelled to be a vegetarian, for nothing
but masses of decayed leaf tissue and black mud and algæ come down
the stairway. For many days there is only the sound of water gurgling
past the tadpole’s gills, or glimpses of sticks and leaves and the
occasional flash of a small fish through the thin skin periscope of its
body.

Then the tadpole’s mumbling even of half-rotted leaves comes to an end,
and both it and its guests begin to fast. Down the whorls comes less
and less of vegetable detritus, and Opalina must feel like the crew of
a submarine when the food supply runs short. At the same time something
very strange happens, the experience of which eludes our utmost
imagination. Poe wrote a memorable tale of a prison cell which day by
day grew smaller, and Opalina goes through much the same adventure.
If she frequently traverses her tube, she finds it growing shorter
and shorter. As it contracts, the spiral untwists and straightens
out, while all the time the rations are cut off. A dark curtain of
pigment is drawn across the epidermal periscope and as books of dire
adventure say, the ‘horror of darkness is added to the terrible mental
uncertainty.’ The whole movement of the organism changes; there is no
longer the rush and swish of water, and the even, undulatory motion
alters to a series of spasmodic jerks,--quite the opposite of ordinary
transition from water to land. Instead of water rushing through the
gills of her host, Opalina might now hear strange musical sounds, loud
and low, the singing of insects, the soughing of swamp palms.

Opalina about this time, should be feeling very low in her mind from
lack of food, and the uncertainty of explanation of why the larger her
host grew, the smaller, more confined became her quarters. The tension
is relieved at last by a new influx of provender, but no more inert
mold or disintegrated leaves. Down the short, straight tube appears
a live millipede, kicking as only a millipede can, with its thousand
heels. Deserting for a moment Opalina’s point of view, my scientific
conscience insists on asserting itself to the effect that no millipede
with which I am acquainted has even half a thousand legs. But not to
quibble over details, even a few hundred kicking legs must make quite
a commotion in Opalina’s home, before the pepsin puts a quietus on the
unwilling invader.

From now on there is no lack of food, for at each sudden jerk of the
whole amphibian there comes down some animal or other. The vegetarian
tadpole with its enormously lengthened digestive apparatus, has crawled
out on land, fasting while the miracle is being wrought with its
plumbing, and when the readjustment is made to more easily assimilated
animal food, and it has become a frog, it forgets all about leaves and
algæ, and leaps after and captures almost any living creature which
crosses its path and which is small enough to be engulfed.

With the refurnishing of her apartment and the sudden and complete
change of diet, the exigencies of life are past for Opalina. She has
now but to move blindly about, bathed in a stream of nutriment, and
from time to time, nonchalantly to cut herself in twain. Only one other
possibility awaits, that which occurred in the case of our Opalina.
There comes a time when the sudden leap is not followed by an inrush
of food, but by another leap and still another and finally a headlong
dive, a splash and a rush of water, which, were protozoans given to
reincarnated memory, might recall times long past. Suddenly came a
violent spasm, then a terrible struggle, ending in a strange quiet:
Opalina has become a link.

All motion is at an end, and instead of food comes compression,
closer and closer shut the walls and soon they break down and a new
fluid pours in. Opalina’s cyst had dissolved readily in the tadpole’s
stomach, but her own body was able to withstand what all the food of
tadpole and frog could not. If I had not wanted the painting of a
vulture’s head, little Opalina, together with the body of her life-long
host, would have corroded and melted, and in the dark depths of the
tropical waters her multitude of paddle-hairs, her more or fewer
nuclei, all would have dissolved and been re-absorbed, to furnish their
iota of energy to the swift silvery fish.

This flimsy little, sky-scraper castle of Jack’s, built of isolated
bricks of facts, gives a hint of the wonderland of correlation. Facts
are necessary, but even a pack-rat can assemble a gallon of beans in
a single night. To link facts together, to see them forming into a
concrete whole; to make A fit into ARCH and ARCH into ARCHITECTURE,
that is one great joy of life which, of all the links in my chain, only
the Editor, You and I--the Mammals--can know.

MY JUNGLE TABLE

Many, many, many years ago, in some distant place, among trees or
rocks, perhaps on the banks of a river, certainly in the warm light of
the sun, one of your ancestors and mine became tired of squatting on
a branch or on the ground, and sat himself--or herself--on a fallen
log. If it was himself then he must soon have felt the need of a lap
on which to rest things--his hands if nothing else. And from that day
to this, his male descendants still feel that lack down to the last
unfortunate who is handed a cup of tea or a three-legged egg-shell
of cocoa, a serviette and a cake with no support other than wholly
inadequate knees.

Of the first table I can relate nothing with certainty, but of the last
I could gossip endlessly, limited only by writer’s cramp and my supply
of adjectives. For I am at this moment sitting at the last table ever
made--last because it is not quite finished. I am forever tacking on a
little shelf or an annex at one side, and so I feel a right to place
it at the opposite end of our distant forebear’s piece of bark or
stiff frond or whatever it was that he balanced on his hairy, bowed
knees. And yet his table and mine are much more alike than the mahogany
roll-top with swinging telephone and octave of assistants’ push buttons
to which our more sophisticated but less happy bank presidents sit down.

That reminds me, however, that my laboratory table is also of mahogany,
because here in the jungle of British Guiana it is the cheapest
material in the form of boards.

The crab-wood top grew in this very jungle, its first, rich red-brown
cells fashioned from the water and earth and sun at least a century
and a half ago. It is possible to detect the double character of the
rings, indicating the two annual rainy seasons--the two springs which
quickened the sap and leafage, and the two periods of drought when the
life of the tree slowed down. Close to the heart of the great board is
a strange ring, or rather node between rings--a wide, even space, which
my reckoning places about 1776; about the time when our fore-fathers
were fighting for freedom, whose memory we cannot toast even in wine;
they had just penned a Declaration of Independence, whereas we are
considering passing a law to keep monkeys in their proper place. I
pause in my table talk long enough to thank heaven that we are still
allowed to believe in the rotundity of the earth, that the Indians’
gift of tobacco is still permitted us, and that tea is not yet thrown
overboard!

The year 1776 at Kartabo was one of almost continual rain,--so much
my broad, crab-wood space shows--with no slack-growth period for
this slender sapling. And imagination helps us still farther when we
recall something of the human history of the place. Ever since 1600
the Dutch had strived to make this region habitable. The little fort,
on the island off shore had barely pointed its guns down river, had
fired its well-weathered cannon in victory, and had silenced them in
defeat to English and French privateers (often an old-fashioned way of
pronouncing pirate!). Hundreds of Indian slaves had worked on the four
large plantations and only in 1772 had the settlers admitted that this
region was fit only for jungle, wild animals, and future enthusiastic
scientists with tables. And now I realized that my table-top had
sprouted in the very year that the Dutch left for the coast--one of the
first wild things to spring up in their retreating footsteps, a pioneer
in again “letting in the jungle.”

The magic of my jungle table is always apparent in one way or another.
No thoughts which it generates, nor happenings on its surface are
aught but vivid, vital, memorable: It is an event to hurry out to
in early morning, it is a regret to leave for jungle tramps and for
meals, it is only exhaustion which excuses its midnight abandonment.
A magic carpet transports one’s body from place to place, whereas my
table impels mental gamuts from quiet meditation to dire tragedy, from
righteous anger, to wonder at the marvellous sights it vouchsafes me,
and despair at thought of their interpretation. Only once have I ever
become impatient with my artificial lap, when an injury to my foot
compelled me to remain indoors for a time. Then indeed the jungle
called and _les affaires de ma table_ palled,--a commentary on my lack
of philosophy.

The first magic which my table made was to prove to be alive. The top
was undeniably dead, well seasoned and inert, but my black boy Sam had
cut the legs from jungle saplings. I put my hand down one day and felt
a soft tissue something, half way to the floor. It seemed a moth’s
wings or a tangle of dense cobwebs, but to my surprise I saw that my
table was sprouting leaves, rather pale and dwarfed, limp and flabby,
to be sure, but of rapid growth, and besides there were four other buds
just started. I had put cans of water on the floor beneath the legs to
discourage ants, and the sap of the new-cut poles had greedily sucked
this up, and even in the dimness of the laboratory light had begun
to spread into foliage. It was proving a real jungle table and I was
rather thrilled to see that the warfare of the wilderness had already
begun at arm’s reach,--a tiny caterpillar had crawled from somewhere
to the new blown leaves and had eaten out a bit. I pictured my table
as sprouting, growing higher and higher, until, in lieu of Alice’s
toadstool, I cut jungle saplings for my chair legs too, and mounted
with the table! The Indian summer of my table legs soon passed however,
the sap dried, the leaves wilted, and from saplings they became
furniture.

But the magic continued. If the crab-wood boards of the top were not
quickened into even passing vitality, they could do equally surprising
things, the first of which was to become vocal. Day after day there
arose a low grating throb, lasting for a few seconds, and sometimes
increasing in rapidity and pitch until it assumed a true musical
quality. Its direction eluded me until I happened to have my ear close
to the table, when the vibrations seemed to sound at my very ear-drum.
Then one day I noticed a tiny pile of sawdust on the floor and traced
it to a rounded hole from which at intervals came the sound. For three
months my musical table continued its monotone, day and night, until
in the quiet of midnight it became part of the silence, and I was aware
of it only with effort. Then it ceased, and its cessation held my
attention more than its occurrence had done.

Months later when the last of my small table furnishings had been
packed, I tipped up the table to carry it away, and there in the hole
from which the monotone and the sawdust had flowed there hung suspended
a gorgeous, mummified beetle, its long antennæ of salmon and black
curved up and over its back, while its fluted cuirass shone through
dust and dim light, deep forest green framed with a delicate border of
primuline yellow. My table top had furnished nourishment, sanctuary,
sounding board, through all the long period of immaturity, but at the
climax of this little life, the hardened vegetable fibre had held firm,
despite all the efforts of the green beetle, and cruelly withheld
freedom by some slight, needless entanglement of its hind legs. So
passed two tragedies of my table,--the first vegetable, the second
animal.

Usually my table is littered with beautiful mysterious things which,
to a casual onlooker, could have absolutely no meaning. There is a
small, exquisitely molded bony cup or vase, partly covered at the top,
and with a long, daintily curved handle, which I keep suspended as
a receptacle for pins. It might well be a delicate netsuke carved in
pre-democratic Japan by some craftsman who wrought for love; it might
be almost anything but a music-box. And now my reverie was interrupted
by a sound from the neighboring jungle,--a sound common but never old.
As the bony box might have been far other than it was, so the deep
vibrations could well be elemental,--a distant wind, sinister as if
it came straight from blowing across terrible fields after battle,
or through cities wracked with pestilence; the eaves around which it
had howled must have been very evil, roofing ancient castles which
sheltered thoughts of treachery and deeds of unfair violence. But I
knew that the rich primeval resonances came echoing from bog bony
boxes exactly like my pin holder, in the throats of a tree-top circle
of beings like aged, thick-necked dwarfs squatting high on swaying
branches, looking out toward me over the expanse of quicksilver water.
At the climax, when it seemed impossible that any one animal could
produce such an appalling volume of sound, a blur swiftly feathered the
surface of the river, as if the impinging ululations of monkey voices
had actually been translated into visibility--as liquid in a glass is
troubled in sympathy with certain chords of music. My ear changed
focus, and like a search-light shifting from distant cloud to airplane,
attended a sound at my very elbow, throbbing, muffled--and again my
table sang.

[Illustration: “Well within the realm of black magic”]

Amazing things, things apparently well within the realm of black magic
occur and recur on my table. Late this evening a windless tropical
rain fell so evenly and steadily that the monotone on the bamboos
seemed intended for some other sense than the ear. I sat describing
the delicate arrangement of the tiny bones and muscles of the syrinx
of a flycatcher, striving to understand how there could emanate from
this instrument such an intricate vocabulary of screams and whistles,
trills and octaves as this bird and its fellows uttered every day in
the laboratory compound.

Suddenly something flew swiftly past my face and alighted clumsily
among my vials and instruments. I saw a giant wood roach all browns and
greys, with marbled wings, strange as to pigment and size, but with the
unmistakable head and poise and personality of a New York “Archie.” The
insect had flown through the rain and into the window, but a glance
showed that it was in dire extremity, being in the grasp of a two-inch
ctenid spider. The eight long legs held firmly, but had not been able
to prevent the roach from flying. At the moment of alighting the
arachnid shifted its grip, and secured the wings so that further escape
was impossible. Both were desirable specimens and I instantly slipped
a deep stender dish over them and again lost myself in my binocular
microscope.

Fifteen minutes later I looked up and saw a sight so strange that
Sime himself would hesitate to delineate it. The spider still clung
tenaciously to its victim, but the wood roach had her revenge. She
was barely alive, yet in a quarter of an hour she had changed from a
strong, virile creature to an empty husk, dry and hollow, while over
her and the spider, over glass and table-top scurried fifty-one active
roachlets. They had burst from their mother fully equipped and ready
for life, leaving her but a vacant, gaping shell, a maternal film, the
ghost of a roach: Tiny, green, transparent, fleet, they raced back and
forth over the spider. He grasped in vain at their diminutive forms at
the same time still clutching the dying, flavorless shred of a mother
roach, holding fast as though he hoped that this unnatural miracle
might reverse itself at any moment, and his victim again become fat and
toothsome.

I knew that some of the fish swimming in the aquarium near by lay
thousands of eggs, and that other insects leave myriads of offspring,
yet this magic of the wood roach, this resolution of one into fifty
made wonderfully vivid the reproductive powers of tropical creatures.
When in a moment of time, relatively speaking, a single insect can
be broken up into half a hundred active, functioning duplicates of
herself, the chance for variation, for new adjustments, for survival of
the more delicately adapted is faintly understood. Here was spontaneous
generation with a vengeance.

To hark back again to sounds and voices; I could fashion a whole essay
on the calls and songs and noises which come to me at my table, from
river, compound and jungle. On very still days I can hear the giant
catfish thrumming deep beneath the water, and the cry of hawk-eagles
high in the heavens; at hot, high noon Attila, the brain-fever Cotinga,
calls and calls and calls, while through the hush of midnight there
comes the hopeless cadence of the poor-me-one; I know from a sudden
babel of humming-bird squeaks and frenzied shrieks of flycatchers that
a tree snake has been discovered in the bamboos; I am certain without
looking that it is very close to five o’clock, when the first old witch
cuckoo begins whaleeping on its regular evening excursion for a drink
in the river, and so on.

Probably by virtue of my table’s magic, I have learned, like Chubu
and Sheemish, to work a little miracle all by myself. My principal
technical work just now is the study of the syrinx of birds, their
remarkable, complex organ of voice placed far down beyond the throat,
in the very body itself, and the correlation of its structure with
the actual voice of the bird. At present I try to solve some knotty
problems of tinamous, strange, bob-tailed game-birds, related both
to fowls and to ostriches, which live on the jungle floor, lay eggs
like burnished turquoise and age-purpled jade, and call to one another
with sweet, liquid whistles. My Indians bring in numbers of these
birds for the mess, so I have an abundance of material for study. I
try an experiment on my table which has been already successful in
other cases. I decapitate a bird before it is plucked for the pot, and
holding it firmly on its back, I strike a sharp blow on the muscles of
the breast. Nothing results, so I shift position and try again. This
time a short, high note is produced. I draw out the neck a little and
obtain a lower note, still further and strike a half tone lower in the
scale. If I could prolong these I could reconstruct the whole plaintive
evening call of the variegated tinamou here on my very table top.

Then I take the windpipe and carefully work out the wonderful
architecture of the whole organ, the delicate adaptation and adjustment
of each part fulfilling its special function, the whole working
together as no man-made machine ever could. From throat to syrinx
the windpipe extends, composed of thin membranous tissue, kept open
by a series of a hundred and twenty-five perfect rings. Here we have
assurance of an entrance for air forever clear and open, so mobile
that it bends back double, yet with no chance of closure through any
contortion of the neck. The throat end is guarded by a slit which opens
and closes at the slightest need; the opposite end marks the top of
the syrinx and the division into two tubes each leading to a lung.
For twenty rings above this point, the windpipe is slightly enlarged
and almost solid, forming a bony sounding board which acts, in a
less degree, like the throat box of the red howling monkeys; giving
resonance and carrying power to the voice.

The syrinx itself is boxed in by four pairs of large rings and
semi-rings, which protect two pairs of cartilage pads. The pads of
each pair touch one another along their inner sides, and when the
windpipe is relaxed the seam between them is closed tight. A slight
tug, as in my decapitated bird, corresponding to a raising of the
head and neck in a live individual, and the pads revolve slightly,
bringing a constricted part of each into the seam, forming a tiny
gap. Through this the air from the lungs and air-sacs rushes and we
have the mechanism of the first, high, clear note of the call, a
superlatively sweet whistle on middle C, carrying a mile through the
thick jungle. Although quite another story, my mind rushes on, away
from the technical anatomical problem, to the realization that this
sound is a summons from the very advanced female of this species to
any unattached male bird, an announcement that she is ready to lay an
egg for him, provided he will incubate it, hatch it and assume entire
charge of the young bird. And I do not know whether to cheer or blush
for my sex when I state that the woods hereabouts are full of amiable,
domestically inclined males who are eager and willing to agree to this
rather one-sided contract. Their syringes are almost identical but the
loud evening calls are invariably those of the idler sex. Notes for
Women! must have been the slogan of the long since successful tinamou
suffragists.

It is amusing to trace a circular gamut of human interest in animal
sounds: Listening to various screams, warbles, whistles, roars, chirps,
trills and twitters in the jungle, an intelligent interest impels us
to desire to know the author; having accomplished this by patient
stalking and watching, and if needs be, shooting, the wish is aroused
to discover the accompanying emotion, the incentive, and then the
fascinating problem presents itself of the answer, whether in terms
of action or vocal, whether filial, amorous, pugnacious, or merely
companionable. This is more difficult, but in many cases possible.
Almost always this ends the quest, while it is still incomplete. The
method, the physical mechanism is after all, the foundation of the
phenomenon, and when we have secured a specimen, taken it to our
table,--a tinamou in the present instance--then we may produce the
call artificially, and by tireless and detailed dissection detect air
channel, resonance chamber, syrinx mechanism, vocal chords, controlling
muscles, and envy the enormous bodily reservoir of air--lungs, sacs,
the very hollow bones themselves. Leaning back and listening to a
living, wild tinamou calling in the neighboring forest, feeling rich in
the possession of its Who! Why! and How!, we realize the fullest joy of
intimacy with the furtive beings of earth, with the elusive small folk
of the jungle.

After a long jungle tramp I was leaving Hacka Trail for the Station
clearing when I caught sight of a group of small objects on the under
side of a gigantic bromeliad leaf. If the leaf had been fifty feet up
they might have been great fruit bats, if twenty feet their size would
have equalled that of vampires, but as they were only of arms’ reach
above my head they could not be more than an inch in length. When I had
hacked off the leaf and dodged its fall, I found nine little chrysalids
clustered together, and even on close scrutiny their resemblance to
a group of diminutive bats was still absurdly real. This intimate
association of chrysalids is a rare thing, as rare as the nocturnal
association of butterflies sleeping in jungle glades.

I carried off the leaf curved into a great emerald arch, and fastened
it over my table, where it dried into a fluted dome of green tissue.
Three days passed with no sign of change from the chrysalids swinging
from their silken pendants, when my eye caught a glint of silver far
down the under side of this same leaf, near the tip. Another glance
made me think them inexplicable dewdrops, a third crystalized them into
pearl-like consistency, while a fourth careful scrutiny showed me they
were two eggs of a scarlet and black heliconid butterfly, the kind
which fluttered fearlessly ahead of me along the jungle paths. Here was
a splendid example of oblique discovery, of scientific second sight.

I wondered what sculpture the surface would show,--these two isolated
spheres, shining like the third zodiacal sign against a dark green
heaven. At the first look through the microscope I forgot all about
surface and possible spines or hexagonal lattice-work; it was the
contents which drew and held my attention. A butterfly egg in due
course of time should yield a caterpillar, which before it emerges is
wound into a curve to fit its minute spherical home. But here was a
new cosmos,--a planetful of slowly moving creatures which had nothing
in common with a heliconian caterpillar. Slowly they milled around
their little world, living, like some Gulliverian organisms, on the
inside looking out. The egg was an opalescent sphere, a twelfth of an
inch across, and in my microscope field it seemed really suspended in
space,--in a dark chlorophyll ether. More than once as my eye tired
in watching I seemed to see the whole egg revolving while the inmates
remained stationary. Now and then one of the egg-beings turned and went
against the current, setting up a traffic whirlpool which caused all to
cross and recross in confusion. The film of eggshell was translucent
and clear immediately beneath my eye, clouding into exquisite purplish
pearl at the periphery. One of the inmates came to rest directly
beneath the surface, and I saw it was a tiny grub, legless, searching
about blindly, feeling, sensing, living, after whatsoever manner
grubs live who find themselves prisoned in a butterfly egg. The grub
hastened on, fell into wriggle with its companions and soon slipped
from view below the edge of its world. Doubtless in a few seconds it
completed its internal orbit and again crossed my field of view, but
like a circulating Roman army on the stage, or the sequence of ideas
in some sphere not attached to jungle leaves, all seemed identical. I
could never tell when the same one appeared again; indeed while they
moved I could make no estimate even of their numbers. I only knew that
some minute hymenopteron, doubtless a member of the wonderful tribe of
Chalcids, had, a few days before, thrust her ovipositor through this
translucent pearl and left within as many eggs as there now were grubs,
then flown on to the next egg. I once was fortunate enough to observe
this fairy egg-laying,[1] and now I was trembling with excitement at
the unexpected treasure trove I had unwittingly brought to my table.

[1] _Edge of the Jungle_, pp. 38-40.

Closest examination from every side with high power lens revealed to me
no hint of the place of entrance. Once when I crawled from the heart of
great Cheops out through the robbers’ tunnel, and finally scraped and
squeezed through the narrow crevice through which they had broken in,
I thought it small indeed. But here was a phenomenon far more wonderful
than a full-rigged ship in a bottle, a snow-storm in a paper weight, or
the thieving Arabs’ entrance in the pyramid.

Four days passed, the wonderful globes lay before me, and then I
examined them again. A remarkable change had been wrought, a living
planet had devolved into a dead satellite; the egg had become a
sarcophagus with a dozen mummies. The little cases were arranged around
a central core of débris, some standing on end as in the Egyptian
room of a museum, a group facing one another as some wordless gossip
passed from one sealed mouth to the next. A single mummy doll rested
against the opal shell, with eyes pressed close to the translucent
pane, eyes which at present existed only in outward form as insensitive
tissue. This one individual had chosen for his final pupal change a
position at the very outer rim, where the first nerve tingles of sight
would reflect the mysteries of the world beyond that sphere of food
and fellows which had heretofore bounded his existence; my pronouns
masculine are merely adumbrative.

So passed a week with the little silent mummies still unchanged; seven
days,--sufficient time, Biblically speaking, for the creation of the
world. But just as all the glorious truth and beauty of evolution is
concealed within the metaphor of Genesis, so, hidden from our groping
senses, miracles of change were being wrought within the butterfly’s
egg. The following morning the spell had broken, and the sphere again
seethed with life, resurrected, reincarnated. On the central compost
heap were piled twelve suits of second-hand pupal skins, tissue paper
cartoons of their wearers, glimmering weirdly through the shell. The
tiny wasps had all emerged and were active, and already there was a
hole bitten through, with small ships of splintered opal scattered
outside. As I watched, a wasp midget shoved aside a group of idlers,
pushed his way to the door and began to gnaw with all his might. His
great bulging scarlet eyes blocked the way as he tried time after time
to press through. The whole eggful knew that something of great import
was happening, and the outside air must have carried exciting tidings,
for all moved about as quickly as their crowded quarters permitted.
Twice the Gnawer left his labors and walked about nervously, once
making the entire circuit of the egg. His leadership, his pioneer
daring was marked not only by action; I found that I could readily
distinguish him from the others. He was a shade smaller, his lines were
trimmer, and upon his back was a round insignium of gold which the
others lacked.

Several others came to the opening, tried to pass and turned
aside--none made attempt to aid in the escape from prison. Back
came the ambitious one and fell to with all his strength. He lacked
leverage, and only when three of his companions came up at once, was
he able, by pressing his hind legs against their faces and bodies,
to break off an unusually large bit of the horny shell. This made a
splendid gap, and after two smaller bits had been chewed off, the
little insect wriggled through the jagged hole, and stood upon the
summit of his world. Tiny though he was, needing thirty-five of him to
cover an inch of space, his coloring was exquisite; eyes dull scarlet,
sparsely covered with golden hair, body armor of glistening black from
head to tip of abdomen, with badge of yellow gold shining from between
his wings. These wings were small, paddle-shaped and almost free of
veining, while the scales on their surface glowed with iridescent play
of lilac, yellow and pale green.

Now ensued an elaborate cleaning of every part of his body, and then
he ran off at top speed. Several quick turns near-by on the leaf and
back he came, gave a final wipe to his forelegs, climbed up, antennæd
the hole and took his stand a wasp’s length away. This action came
as a complete surprise; I never expected him to return after such a
laborious escape.

Soon a second wasp came to the breach and squeezed through. Hardly
had its combing and scraping been completed when, to my astonishment,
the Gnawer rushed forward, roughly seized the second wasp and began
to bang its head most unmercifully. At every push, the head of the
unfortunate insect wobbled as if about to fall off. Suddenly it rose
to its feet and the first wasp mated with it. I then realized that
instead of assault and battery, this was courtship, that in place of
horrible fratricide, this was the nuptials of brother and sister.
The mating lasted but a second, when the first wasp returned to its
watchful waiting, and the other spun its paddle-shaped wings and flew
off as far as the confines of the covered glass dish permitted. I never
took my eye from the lens as the miracle continued. One after another
the sister wasps emerged, to the number of eleven, and in each case
the male enacted his rough courtship and mated for not longer than two
seconds. In each case, without a moment’s hesitation, the female flew
swiftly away. Once, when three emerged quickly one after the other,
they did not leave the egg but waited quietly for the male.

The whole thing began and ended so quickly that it was some time before
I could review the whole wonderful performance from the conjectured
laying of the eggs, through the grub, pupa and now the adult stage.
I looked again at these midgets, only a thirty-fifth of an inch in
length, and considered their necessities in life,--food, mate and
a butterfly’s egg, and I realized the enormous advantage of this
simplification of the mating problem. But the most astonishing thing
of all was the thought of the anticipation, of the perfect adjustment
of sex in the unformed organisms, the pre-natal compulsory affiancing,
together with the apparently satisfactory disregard of inbreeding
adumbrated in the very eggs themselves of the original mother wasplet.

No matter how imperfectly I have translated this event, disregarding
my futile phrases and in spite of my inadequate description, it was
a most wonderful happening, which for a time completely eclipsed all
other affairs of my table top. In delicate achievement, astounding
unexpectancy and magical matter-of-factness, it left the onlooker with
a supreme realization of ignorance and a dominant sense of awe.

And so as I sit at my table, my little cosmos of space and time
presents deaths by violence, and lives of quiet, unperturbed peace;
acrid, burning odors and smashing, sweeping brilliancy of color; living
skin soft and smooth as clay, or fretted like shagreen; voices almost
high enough to become visible; comedy so delicate that appreciation
never reaches laughter, and tragedy so cruel and needless that it stirs
doubts of the very roots of things. All these and many more, begin,
occur and pass before me,--things which go to make up a world.

III

A MIDNIGHT BEACH COMBING

A tropical night may be quiet and calm, and yet full of a strange
restlessness. It was such a one when I lay in my bathing suit close to
the grey granite of Boom-boom Point, and watched the low-hung North
Star twinkling through the fretwork of mangrove roots. Three great
planets added their separate lustre, Mars overhead in the very heart
of Scorpio, Jupiter well down to the west, and Venus just setting,
shining with the light of a half moon. It was, however, predominantly,
a Night of the Milky Way. The great luminous highway stretched from
horizon to horizon, illuminating hundreds of the tiny mica facets in
my rocky couch. Great Cygnus climbed slowly, majestically, along the
glowing path, and Pegasus reared his head just above the horizon. Has
the composite light of these myriad stars the same sinister psychic
effect as the moon rays? Else why were I and so many creatures
restless? Only the giant tree-frogs, the Maximas, wahrooked in
endless, stoical reiteration, unaffected by stars or planets, as
endless as an after-dinner speech and as unintelligible. Now and then
a trio of Typhon’s toads exploded in a short, hysterical outburst,
as if intercalating _Hear! Hear!_ or _Cut it out!_--a very impudent,
undesirable, nervous protest against the brain-fever repetitions of the
great frogs.

I was ready for something unusual, and it came,--merely a sound,
but one which will probably be as mysterious on the day of my death
as it is now. Without warning through the air overhead, against the
translucent celestial glow, came an _izzzzzzzz-wonk! wonk! wonk!_ as
evanescent as the low twang of a bullet, wholly indescribable in its
true weirdness and richness. No beetle ever turned as quickly as the
_wonk! wonk! wonk!_ indicated; no bat ever achieved a twang with its
velvet wings. It was no sound of bird or insect that I knew; and it
came again and again from the same direction, and seemed to emanate
from some creature which watched me. The _wonk! wonk!_ as of sudden,
banking flight, happened close in front, over the water. I flashed
my electric torch and saw nothing, although the sound continued, and
for half an hour one or more mysterious beings swept about me close
overhead. As once before, my mind went to Pterodactyls and I imagined
a pair of the little web-fingered creatures launched out from some
secret crevice in the distant mountains, for a brief time to hawk
about in the light of the Milky Way, peering down with their great
eyes, toothed beaks half open, whipping back and forth through the
air, now and then snapping up a bat, and stirring the imagination of a
curiosity-tortured human, who would willingly give a year of his life
to see such a sight.

I had meant to spend part of the night among the mangroves, but the
glimmer of the white sand drew me up instead of down the shore, and I
crept over the rocks and padded silently over the sand to our swimming
beach.

[Illustration: “Silent and smooth as a mirror”]

The tide was half-way down, silent and smooth as a mirror with every
star doubled. As I watched, they were erased, one by one as if the
reflections had become water-logged and sunk, and looking up I saw a
mist swept by the high trade-winds across the sky, while around me not
a breath of air stirred. I wriggled into a form half below the surface
of the sand; I worked down lower and lower until I was at the very edge
of the water, which is one of the most wonderful spots in the world.
Being there is the very least part of it. Thousands of people are there
all through the summer at Coney Island and Margate, but never think
themselves anywhere but swimming at Coney Island or bathing at Margate.

Between tides is really the wildest place left in the world, the truest
no-man’s-land, for while you may sail in all waters just beyond or loll
in a hotel a few yards behind, you cannot remain where you are except
anchored and in a diver’s suit. And whatever man erects there is sooner
or later smashed into joyful chunks of cement by the storm waves. The
delight of it is to feel yourself as I did at this moment, a third
under water, a third buried in solid sand, and the rest of me bathed
in and breathing the air. We sometimes feel a thrill at bestriding the
border line of two states or countries. How tremendously more wonderful
to snuggle close to the three states of matter, solid, liquid and
gaseous, and then indeed to realize it and thrill to it with what seems
a fourth state--the mental and spiritual.

The crunch of the sand grains, the lap of the water, the breath of
air,--it makes the world very primitive and new. Without my flash I can
detect no hint either of vegetable or animal kingdom--my little cosmos
at the meeting place of the elements is wholly inorganic and mind. If
only earth-fire were added, it would be complete, and here, a hundred
feet from my cot, there would truly be an epitome of the primeval
earth. I wonder however, whether it is all not more adumbrative of ages
to come, when the last animal has fallen, the last leaf shrivelled, and
only the inorganic and spirit remain, than of the infinite past.

My day-dreams or rather nocturnal meditations were leading me into
hypnotic depths when, with a single bound, I deserted my most ancient
medium, water. Momentarily I even left my more recently ancestral
acquisition, earth, and entered the third which I had conquered only
during the last eight years. Gravitation, faithful through all physical
and mental vicissitudes, brought me down with a resounding thump. At
first I was simply dazed. What had happened? From the infinite calm
of abstract meditation I had been galvanized into the most violent
paroxysm, and here I was sitting on the sand, unhurt, stupidly wide
awake, with my heart trip-hammering. Then all at once the physical me
calmed down and the mental took charge, first in a thrill of excitement
at realization of what had happened, then in joyous recognition that,
as at a well-planned dramatic dénouement of a play, the miracle had
happened. Nature, tired of being ignored, had entered my inorganic
make-believe cosmos, completed it and split it apart with a vengeance.
Instead of sending a firefly into my ken, she had been more subtle,
and an electric eel had brushed against the sole of my foot, and
discharged his diminutive broadside. The shock had been slight, but
unprepared as I was and completely relaxed, it had seemed to my
nerves like the discharge from a third rail. With my flash I caught a
momentary glimpse of the lithe black chap, and I dabbled my hand in his
direction, but he eeled away and became one with the dark water.

I could not get back to my former isolation, even if I greatly desired
to do so; the eel had changed all that. He seemed so modern, so
conventional and specialized an organism drawing the lightning down
into the dark waters, and liberating it at the will of his fishy brain.

I rolled over and flattened myself, and with my electric torch held at
eye height, horizontally, I entered one of the strangest of worlds,--a
beach at black midnight. My mind kept wandering back to my trio of
elements, and I thought of the water ouzel which has conquered them
all. In the wilderness of western China I have seen this delicate,
thrush-like bird run rapidly in and out of a tangle, over leaves and
sand to the edge of a high river bank, and then taking wing, fly in and
out between the boulders of the stream, finally to dive headlong into
the swift water and creep along the bottom, feeding as it went. Here,
in the space of a minute or two, was exhibited mastery of earth, air
and water; only the phœnix could claim superiority.

This evening I was to find a living rival to the ouzel, an insect,
a cricket, which, like so many wonders, was not in the heart of
the Asiatic continent, but at the very door of my British Guiana
laboratory. In the level glare of my flash all the beach creatures
became unreal and of low visibility, while their shadows took full
possession. This fanciful phrase reflected a very real and interesting
scientific fact, that the reason for this lay, not in the unusual
lighting, as much as in the color of the little people themselves.
Picking its way over the sand came a low-swung, weird, blackish thing,
whose silhouetted head swung from side to side, and just above it
there appeared a fearful thing, on long emaciated legs, which crept
nearer and nearer, and finally rushed at the first and sank down upon
it. The attack was so sudden and the images relatively so huge that I
involuntarily sat up and raised my light. The two images rushed toward
me and vanished and my eyes suddenly shifted to nearer focus. I had
been watching the shadows of a small insect and a daddy-long-legs,
the substance of which now appeared ridiculously small and close
to me, with their shadows well under control beneath them. Slowly
I lowered the flash again, and in spite of all I could do, my eyes
gradually lost the creatures themselves and followed back along the
lengthening lines of legs, to the gargoylesque false phantoms,--the
gyrating monstrous phantasmagoria on the sands. Never have I seen a
more completely sense-deceiving phenomenon. Sitting up, I looked down
upon small, slowly moving, barely distinguishable beach beings; prone,
I was surrounded by unnamable apparently ectoplasmic ghosts. If I
should accurately describe their anatomy and actions as revealed by
my low-hung light they would fit into no living or fossil phylum of
earthly organisms. By shifting back and forth I again focussed on the
terrible battle going on at my side, and now the giant had lifted the
lesser beast bodily in its jaws, and was staggering about, mumbling it
as it went. My scientific terms locustid and phalangid faded from mind
with their substance, and I lay watching the midnight shadow struggle
between Plash-goo and Lrippity Kang.

I had always thought of daddy-long-legs as harmless living skeletons,
who clambered aimlessly about and dropped their legs at a touch. Now
I found that they could be ravenous beasts, their dwarfed and rounded
body swung high aloft on their eight thready legs, creeping over the
sand, and actually running down, pouncing on and killing insects as
large as themselves. In this case it was a green grasshopper nymph who
was seized, bitten and worried with an unnecessary amount of dragging
about and vicious chewing. I leaned slowly forward with my hand lens
until I could see every detail, and if daddy-long-legs were magnified
in life only fifteen times I should flee in terror from what would be
a worse danger than any wold. The horrid eyes, grouped in their solid
clump seemed to be even now watching me malignantly, and the great
needle-sharp fangs were sunk deep in the grasshopper, and being worked
back and forth as the juices of the still living insect were sucked up.

Soon the creature set to work to sever the abdomen from the rest of the
insect, and the head and legs fell to the sand, the feet waving slowly
and vaguely. The daddy-long-legs did not move, except now and then to
lift one or two legs and hold them aloft when a passing ant brushed
against them; twenty minutes later it was still there, draining the
last drop from the shrivelled grasshopper.

My attention was attracted to the approaching shadow of another
spectre, only in this case the shadow was indefinite, humped; it might
have enshrouded a low fluttering moth or awkward beetle. Instead of
which, when I followed down the shadow path to its substance there
loomed suddenly a figure even more terrifying than the daddy-long-legs.
But this was awful in a wholesome way. You started at first sight, then
smiled, then felt a liking for the apparition. It was decidedly the
Personality of the beach, claiming full attention as long as it was in
sight, clownlike in its comicality, and childlike in its seriousness
and the affection it aroused. Many will doubtless wonder mildly at
thought of the possibility of holding a mole cricket in affection or
esteem. Yet it is true that when I return in memory to Kartabo, my
thoughts of beauty go to the great blue morpho butterflies, of grace to
the soaring vulture, of adorableness to infant sloths, and of amusement
and affection to the jolly white mole crickets of the sand.

These are the chaps who fairly outdo the water ouzel, outflying,
outrunning and outswimming that bird, and in addition being powerful
leapers and the most perfect burrowing machines in the world. Unlike
their neighboring relations of the jungle these shore crickets have
taken on the color of the sand, keeping only a few hieroglyphics of
dark pigment. Their eyes alone remain solid black. No matter how
deserted the beach, how lifeless the tropical jungle may seem, I was
always certain of finding these optimists abroad after dark, scurrying
here and there, or popping unexpectedly up from the wet sand which a
few minutes before had been covered with the tide.

As my new visitor approached, after my first emotion I was able to call
him by name, a name as bristling with sharp-angled syllables as the
tips of his front legs. Indeed his sponsors must have been profoundly
impressed with these great limbs for in _Scapteriscus oxydactylus_ they
dubbed him the Shovel-winged, Sharp-fingered One.

In the month of March I found little spurts of wet sand on the upper
beach, and following down each tiny hole for an inch, I surprised a
diminutive white cricket, almost a replica of the large ones, just
hatched and bravely starting out in life for itself. In the following
months their numbers sadly diminished and the size of the few remaining
individuals increased, being gaugeable exactly by the calibre of their
hole which they open when the tide goes down. Now, later in the year,
the adult mole crickets were in the full prime of life, vital, virile,
meeting on equal terms all the dangers and advantages of nocturnal life
on a tropical beach. I appreciated these insects all the more because
of their local distribution, being found nowhere up or down the river,
except on our short stretch of sandy beach.

The hind legs are swollen with muscles for leaping, and with broad,
flat soles for pushing, the middle legs are normal supports, but the
front ones are a study as scientific, mechanically perfect excavators.
There are sharp, horny, downward-projecting pickaxes, lighter
pitchforks, backed by spade-shape implements, and bordered with stiff,
broom-straw edges for sweeping away the loose débris. In fact this
little insect has everything but dynamite for making easy its passage
underground. It even has long feelers behind as well as in front of the
body.

Like the kick-off of a big football game, or Fred Stone, or a shark on
your fish line, when one of my mole crickets came into sight, I knew
that something exciting was certain to follow. On this midnight, while
the big insect had zigzagged toward me, the tide undermined my sandy
elbow-rest, and I slipped. At the first scrape of sand, he put both
oxydactyl hands together over his head and half buried himself with
three flicks. But he was neither coward nor ostrich and after a moment
he had turned and rested his great arms upon the mound of sand, the
strangest parody upon Raphael’s cherubs imaginable. His head turned
from side to side as he watched, and, I almost added, listened, for the
source of danger. I remembered in time that his ears were on his
front arms just below the elbows, sandwiched between the pitchfork and
the shovel. He twisted sharply to the left at the same instant that
a miniature hidden mine was sprung, and a spray of sand shot upward.
Almost before my eye could follow, a second mole cricket appeared, and
each saw in the other the summation of all past troubles and future
hatreds; they hesitated not a second, but flew at each other.

At first there was considerable side-stepping and feinting, and they
whirled about one another until a well-marked ring was worn in the
damp sand. Then they clinched and to my horror a leg flew up and off
into the darkness. Now the timeworn, and at best inadvisable simile
was reversed, and ploughshares as well as shovels, brooms, scissors
and pitchforks were in a twinkling transformed into slap-sticks,
swords, pikes and daggers. Twice the insects reared up on their hind
legs, their arms working like flails. Now and then the lace-like wings
unrolled and shot out as balancers, glistening like metal in the light
of my flash. One cricket fell for a moment, the other pounced and a
whole front arm rolled away. Nothing daunted, and indeed apparently
lightened by the loss of his left arm, my cricket leaped at the other
and bowled him over. I cheered--they both reared again--and were
washed away in a tiny swirl of water,--the tide had turned and the
first of the trios of incoming wavelets had caught all of us unawares.
_Le duel minuit de les courtilières_ was over. Each opponent had lost
a leg, yet they scampered off and dug in with little appearance of
crippling,--one limped a bit and the other sank his well somewhat
obliquely, that was all. I remembered my first experience with these
crickets, when I confined four together in a glass dish, and next
morning found but one, large, plump and happy, surrounded with the
crumbs of eighteen limbs; and I recalled the diminution in numbers of
the broods of infant crickets, and I wondered whether I had better not
slur over part of the home life of my little friends if I wished the
mirror of my affection to remain untarnished.

I turned my light toward the water which was lapping shoreward, and on
the surface were two white spots, mole crickets again, scurrying here
and there with short strokes of the forearms, which had now become
efficient oars. They soon sculled to shore and vanished, and a threat
of moralizing came into my mind; how wonderful it would be if any of us
could so completely master the conditions of life in our environment!
Here were two sandy depressions where the crickets had disappeared;
in a few minutes the tide would cover them, and for eight hours
thereafter the two bundles of vitality would remain buried beneath the
waves, able somehow to breathe and to resurrect, to scamper about on
their business of life on what remained of their legs, to spread their
wings and fly wherever they wished--one place at least being to the
lighted lamp on my laboratory table.

The wash of the tide made me restless and I swept my flash about in a
last survey, when I saw a multitude of little orange-red lamps drifting
toward me. Holding the light obliquely I saw the wraiths of many
shrimps with their periscope eyes illumined by my electric wire. They
swam steadily ahead, half blinded by the glare, until suddenly there
came Nemesis with a rush and a swirl. I caught sight of long waving
tentacles, a gaping mouth, flash after flash of glittering silver, and
there at my feet was a catfish, half stranded with its headlong rush.
Mindful of poisonous spines I flicked him up the beach with a hand
blanket of sand, where he lay protesting with rasping twitters and
peevish grunts until I salvaged him.

My last glance at the beach showed something so strange that I turned
back, and discovered a wholly new field for enthusiasm. Many years
ago I found that tracks in the snow could best be observed and
photographed in slanting rays of the sun, and now my final, casual
sweep threw out into strong relief a series of rabbit tracks; this in
spite of the fact that I was some two thousand miles from the nearest
bunny. Looking down at the tracks they completely vanished, not a
depression or marking could be detected, but oblique lighting showed
the scar of claw marks, all four feet close together, with a good
eighteen inches between leaps. I puzzled long over it, I traced it
almost to the water and up to the soft, dry sand. At last a thought
came to me, and I went up to where I knew there would be, day or night,
a file of leaf-cutting ants. There solemnly watching, and waiting
for some favorable omen to begin her midnight supper, squatted my
pseudo-rabbit, a huge, friendly grandmother of a toad. She blinked, and
I reached down and tickled her side, whereat she grunted and puffed out
prodigiously.

At this moment my eye wandered to a near-by bush and I made a discovery
which whole hours and half days of intensive search and watch had up
to this time failed to reveal. The line of leaf-cutting Atta ants
led up this low shrub and many scores were deployed over the leaves
busy on their eternal work of cutting off circular pieces. For years
I had watched them carry these leaves back, and had seen the free
rides which many small individual ants took back to the nest on these
wavering bits of leaf. Here, in the light of my flash, a medium-sized
ant staggered along beneath a load, as if a man should balance a barn
door on edge on his head. Like small boys hitching on behind a wagon,
there were seven small ants clinging to the top and sides of the bit
of leaf, probably doubling the weight, and altering the whole centre
of gravity. I have seen a Japanese acrobat in the circus balancing a
ladder with several men clinging to it, but this feat was infinitely
more difficult. And there was no display to this. It was all in the
night’s work. These ants know not the meaning of play or vacations or
any moment of unnecessary rest, and yet here were seven of them for
their own convenience making much more difficult the labor of their
larger brother, or rather sister. I knew there was some vital reason,
some _quid pro quo_, but hitherto I had been able only to guess at it.

The small bush made all clear. There were enemy ants in the bush,
who were attempting to drive away the Attas, and their scouts made
attack after attack on the busy harvesters. Unless actually attacked
and bitten, the Atta workers paid no attention to their assailants.
I saw one partly crippled and yet go on with his load as best he
could, playing pacifist for duty’s sake. Their work was definite and
inviolable, to cut a leaf and to transport it to the nest. The huge
Atta soldiers, fat and enormous, who guard the depths of the nest and
occasionally wander aimlessly along the line of march, getting in the
way of their fellows, were nowhere to be seen, but the battalions of
the Minims were in full action. They were too small to cut leaves or
carry them, and had not even strength enough to walk both ways, to and
from the nest. But on the leaves, facing the legions of the giant tree
ants, they showed their worth, their _raison d’être_. I have never seen
such fighters. They equalled the army ants, and lost leg after leg,
even the whole abdomen, without slacking their efforts in the least.

On one leaf I saw a most exciting engagement. Three workers were
cutting along the edge near the tip, and five small Minims were
standing about with jaws raised suspiciously, when three black tree
ants came on at once. One got past on the under side, tackled a worker
and was seized in turn by one of the tiny bulldogs. The black ant let
go the worker and tried to get at his tormentor, who had a good grip on
his tender antenna. Chop went a leg of the Atta, but then another came
to the rescue and got his jaws in a crevice of the armor beneath the
black body. This was too much and the trio fell from the leaf, out of
the range of my light, into the darkness of the sand below. There were
left three Minims and two black ants, the latter four times their size,
and yet so furiously did the little chaps wage battle that the invaders
had no chance to get past to the workers at the leaf edge. Another
black ant now appeared, but close on his heels six Minims, and in the
face of this squad they all fled minus a leg or two, and carrying three
Minims with them who refused to let go, one of which had little of him
left but his jaws which still retained their grip.

I saw only two workers killed or forced to drop their loads in spite
of all the black tree ants could do. All the time new contingents
of Minims were arriving, and in the midst of the hardest fighting,
a little warrior would now and then climb upon a passing leaf and
settle down for a rough trip home. It was as if they belonged to some
autocratic labor union and had to punch a time clock at the nest,
regardless of how things were going in the front line trenches. So the
Mediums are the workers, the providers. The Maxims are the home guard,
and the Minims are the standing army for border warfare, trudging
bravely as far as they are needed to convoy the outgoing workers, but
after battle or their share of watchful waiting getting a free ride
home on any passing chlorophyll lorry.

Immensely pleased with the discovery of another detail of the Attas’
life history I returned to my search for more sand tracks. Walking
along the reeds with light held low, I saw clearly where an opossum
had come out shortly before, dug a little in the sand and passed on,
and most amusing was the record, in an isolated patch of clear, soft
sand, of where a young one had fallen from her back, and straightway
clambered on again. Farther on a big lizard had shuffled along, but the
next track took me thousands of miles northward to New England sands in
autumn,--the fairy footwork of a pair of spotted sandpipers which that
evening, had teetered along the edge of this tropical river.

One last thrill my beach gave when, drawn by some instinct, I scanned
the sand just beyond a clump of sedge. There, fresh and strongly
etched, was a broad, sinuous line up from the water’s edge, flanked
alternately by crescents, deep bitten into the wet surface. This had
been made by no creature with legs, but by some long, heavy body,
alternately pushed up the beach,--the line and crescent sand signet
of a great anaconda--king of all these waters, who, while I watched
shadows a few feet away, had slowly drawn his mighty length past me,
up into the gully beyond,--who shall say where or why!

No wonder this night, so calm and peaceful on the surface had aroused
an ill-defined suspicion of hidden things far otherwise. I looked out
over the water, again alight with reversed constellations, I listened
to the soft lapping of the rising tide, felt the first faint breath of
the new day, and thought of the tragedies I had witnessed--the mole
crickets nursing their wounds in their dugouts deep beneath sand and
water, of the dead grasshopper nymph, the shrimp, the fire in whose
orange eyes was forever quenched, and of the death struggles of the
ants going on in the darkness at my feet.

The opossum was searching for food for itself and its young, and
somewhere the great snake was coiled, watching with lidless, untiring
eyes for its share in some life of lesser strength. It seemed somehow
so cruel, this eternal alternation of life and death. If only the lower
animals,--and then I remembered that perhaps at this very moment my
Indian hunter was pulling trigger on an unsuspecting agouti or curassow
or peccary for my next dinner; it came to me that the very emotions of
compassion and sympathy which moved me, were materialized and sustained
by the strength derived from the sacrifice of many, many lives of
these same lower animals. I stopped thinking, stepped carefully over
the line of insanely industrious Attas, and went to my hammock.

FALLING LEAVES

Next to the dynamic crashing syncopation of a regimental band, or the
subtle, infinitely more emotionally hypnotic beat of a tomtom, comes
the thrilling rhythm hour after hour, of a double row of paddles
tearing and eddying through water in unison, not only the thump and
splash from the dugouts of tropical savages but the deep-dipped rush
and swirl from bark canoes. This is the obvious, the much-described,
but how many of us have listened for, and heard, the low, sibilant
swish of the blades through the air, as they reach forward for the
next stroke. Until mind and ear are focussed it is inaudible, but
when once caught it out-sings more blatant sounds of water and voice.
The blind spots of our perceptions conceal many phases of delicate
beauty in the things around us, aspects which are dulled by the
opacity of familiarity, passed over by the unseeing activity of our
surface-skimming minds.

The living leaf--both singly and in foliage mass--has been epitaphed,
eulogized, sung, praised and similed for centuries, but except for
occasional references to the “sere and yellow leaf,” dying, falling and
dead leaves have been left where they lie, with only the incense of
their funeral pyres woven into the haze of Indian Summer.

I have seen an orang-utan build him a sleeping platform of leaves
in less than three minutes, so it is not improbable that the first
artificial home our more direct ancestors knew was a leafy nest. Leaves
at least formed the sole clothing of our early parents, according to
Scripture, and from nursery days we have always known that falling
leaves were a shroud for the babes in the wood. More than this,
botanists tell us that the leaf is the foundation of flower and fruit,
so that it was really only a mass of highly specialized leaves which
introduced Newton to gravitation.

But the importance and interest of falling leaves in this world
needs no brief from me. I merely want to know them better for my own
pleasure, I wish to hear and see and feel them, and so I leave my
laboratory after a day of intensive technical work and slip into the
jungle, where millions of leaves are falling during my lifetime, and
hundreds of millions fell before I was born.

I am sitting at the edge of a tropical swamp and for the moment trying
to close my mind and sense to the sounds and sights of birds and
insects, and focus on leaves, and especially dead ones. This is no more
difficult than it would have been to have forgotten Caruso and the
orchestra in order to meditate on the kind of wood of which the chairs
were fashioned.

Further than this I am putting out of my mind the letters L E A V E S
and thinking of them innominately as a vast multitude of spread-out
sheets of green and brown tissue. They are really the jungle, for
without them it would be like the bare masts and rigging of a vessel.
High overhead beyond the clouds of chlorophyll are other white clouds
of moisture, driven swiftly westward by the steady trade-wind. Around
me the air is as quiet as in a room, and, as so often the case, of just
the right temperature to be forgotten, neither too hot nor too cold, a
distinct effort being necessary to realize that I am not in some great
enclosed chamber; so calm and equable are the surroundings.

It is the dry season, and the short daily shower does little to
soften the crackle of the fallen leaves. Even after a month of heavy
unseasonable rain when our records show that it is the dry season,
the noise of treading on the jungle floor reveals the actual lack of
humidity at times other than actual precipitation. Now and then, near
my feet, a leaf draws its edges together, turns a little and rustles
gently all by itself as if even in death it dreamed of some pleasant
trifle, something which would please a green leaf, in sunlight, swaying
high in air. Then, like a crumpled bit of paper in a wastebasket, it
settles lower among its fallen fellows. Here it will wait patiently for
the impact of the heavy rains, three or four months hence, to soften
its stiff, crinkling tissues, and re-mold it into incarnations of other
leaves to come.

Fallen leaves have a wind song all their own which is to be heard only
when listened for consciously. When a fitful breeze is blowing, if
the ear is held close to the ground, a low intermittent clatter and
shuffling is audible, with occasionally a real rustle as a delicately
balanced leaf is blown over. Stand up and the carpet of dead leaves
becomes silent, their gentle talk lost in the hubbub of living, moving
foliage.

In this quiet, cool swamp I am impressed with the vast number of leaves
which have started to fall but have not reached the earth. Some have
landed in crotches, or become entangled in masses of vines, others have
driven their stems clear through the live tissue of leaves in their
downward path and hang dangling. Just above me a living and a dead
palmated frond have their leafy fingers intertwined like the outer
points of fighting buckles, with no chance of release until the death
and fall of the second leaf.

As I watched, three leaves fell, each with characteristic motion. I
once made a key to more than a dozen kinds of jungle trees, based on
the way the leaves fell, and to anyone who wishes to enter an untrodden
botanical field I commend this idea. The third leaf fluttered and
eddied, fighting with all its expanse of plane against the pull of
gravitation, and at the very last, came to rest on a mattress of fern
frond--a respite merely, for the first real gust would send it to the
ground. As it touched the fern a butterfly rose, a black heliconian,
with a large red spot on each wing. Its flight was astonishingly like
that of the descending leaf, a tremulous fluttering just carrying it
along, now rising, now descending--a flight wholly deceiving, for
these butterflies can thread the mazes of jungle vines all day without
tiring. But this butterfly was also like the leaf in its sear and faded
garb. The wings were frayed and torn--the black was a thread-bare
brown, the red weathered to faded salmon, and the seams of its wings
showed plainly. Life was nearly over, yet weak as it was, it would
probably die no violent death. The most awkward bird or predatory
insect could catch it at will, yet it flew slowly along, unmolested
by jacamars and cuckoos, dragon and robber flies. Its conspicuous
colors and slow, tantalizing flight, like all else in the jungle, had
a reason--it was its own advertisement of inedibility. Soon, however,
this Wandering Jew of a butterfly would slip from its sleeping porch,
and, like the fluttering leaf, make a last ineffectual struggle against
the pull of earth and its wings would lie among the leaves.

Before the butterfly passed from view, I was startled by a sudden,
rough rip of sound,--and just overhead a macaw put all the harshness of
its beak and the blatancy of its coloring into its voice, and almost
the leaves around me seemed to rustle. Into a clear space of sky four
great, flame-winged birds passed, and with flight direct as arrows,
but otherwise exactly like the falling leaf and the butterfly, they
vibrated northward.

Without intention, but very happily, I found I had chosen my seat
between extremes in leaves. Close along one side lay a fallen leaf
which began eight feet behind and extended twenty-three feet in
front,--thirty-one feet of palm frond. In its fall it had crushed
several young mora saplings and many lesser growths. The least movement
near it aroused a crashing which could be heard to the river. The
leaflets, two hundred in number, lay stretched out four to six feet on
each side, and the mighty stem was like a length of channel iron, with
edges sharp as razors. It was parched and shrunken and had probably
hung dead for a long time before it fell. A billion ordinary leaves
fall unnoticed in the tropics, while in the north we lump this vast
assemblage of happenings under the one word “autumn.” But the fall of
a palm leaf is an event. Once as I was leaving my Station for a trip
north, I noticed that one of the leaves of our sentinel cuyuru palm
was drooping and browned. Months later when I returned, it was still
hanging, and two weeks afterwards fell in the night with a crash which
wakened us all. Dynasties of history might be dated by the falling of
such a leaf, and if I could have been present at the dropping of all
the leaves of my palm, whose scars were still so plain, there would be
material for an epic. The remark of Charles the Second on his deathbed
could be applied to the dead leaf at my side, for these gigantic
fronds grow and live their lives much more rapidly than they die and
disintegrate. Years from now I could probably find traces of the
reinforced cellulose-hardened main stem.

And now my faded and forlorn heliconian butterfly fluttered again
toward me, and almost alighted on this paper, but turning at the
last moment, it rose a bit, and came to rest at my elbow, on a stem
lined with small leaflets. Hardly had the insect furled its wings,
when it fluttered and took to flight again. The cause delighted me
beyond measure,--it had been unseated and frightened by the movement
of a living leaf! At the impact of its delicate feet, the leaflets
of the sensitive plant closed abruptly together and the stem sank.
So exquisite was the reaction that the several leaflets beyond the
insect were unmoved. A few seconds later while I was still watching,
an adjoining twiglet closed every one of its leaflets and dropped
120° upon its parent branch. Nothing had touched it, no breath of air
had moved it. I was puzzled. Lifting it very gently, it broke off and
fell to the ground, green, fresh,--as far as I could see quite without
cause. I picked it up and examined the base and there I found the
source of the trouble. A tiny beetle had cut it almost off, and the
slight fall of the twig, together with my touch had parted the few
remaining fibres. The beetle was very small and must have been laboring
for a long time, and it was a mystery why the featherdom tread of a
butterfly’s feet had accomplished what the hacking and sawing of the
beetle’s jaws had not.

All the leaves on the mimosa would not have equalled one of the lesser
leaflets of the palm frond, and on the ground they were almost
invisible, sinking almost at once into the mold. The sensitive leaves
had the semblance of animal nerves and movement; the palm leaf would
have brained me if it had fallen while I passed beneath.

In these jungles a falling leaf has a whole scale of sounds, as it runs
the descending gamut of collisions. From the top of a tall tree a leaf
may take fifteen or twenty seconds to reach the earth, disregarding the
very good chance of lodgment, and each touch of vine, leaves,--living
and dead,--the caroming off of branches and ripping through thorns,
gives forth a different sound, of which our poor ears can distinguish
very few, and which our language, spoken and written, is wholly
helpless in reproducing. I would like very much to find a word or
sound which would bring to mind the fall of a leaf upon leaves. I know
it perfectly--the generic timbre--the composite echo etched into my
mind by a thousand conscious listenings. But it will not get past my
consciousness to my lips, and utterly refuses to siphon down my arm and
pen.

Fallen leaves are of tremendous importance to those of us who do much
hunting in the jungle, and chiefly on account of their susceptibility
to moisture in the air. In the wet season it is possible to creep up
to some of the wariest of animals, the thick mat of soft, damp leaves
forming an admirable muffler. In the dry season this is hopeless, every
step is ascream with crackling, and only when a leaf-rattling breeze is
blowing can one pass through the jungle without blatant advertisement.
This, however, is of slight assistance in hunting, for the blowing of
the leaves conceals as well the audible whereabouts of the game. When
the fallen leaves are dry the only method is to walk to some favorable
spot, and there sit and wait for approaching or passing animals to
register their footfalls. In estimating the abundance of jungle life I
have constantly to check a tendency to underestimate numbers in the wet
season. Ameiva lizards appear to be many times as abundant in times of
drought, crashing along with the noise of a peccary, yet they have no
season of æstivation, but only of silent progress.

We do not realize the acuteness of hearing of wild animals until we
try to stalk them over dry leaves. A giant leaf may crash down from
branch to branch and never cause a curassow or deer to start. I have
seen a labba feeding in late afternoon under a nut tree when a whole
branch with clusters of dead leaves hurtled to earth a few yards away,
and the big, spotted rodent merely glanced up, casually munching as
it looked. My next step slipped an inch sideways and crumbled a tiny
leaf crust, and without a second’s investigation the animal gave one
terrified squeal and fled headlong.

There are silent and there are boisterous leaves. Some, with finely
pinnated foliage, have a pact of silence with the elements, from which
wind and rain strive in vain to awaken them. Even when these filigree
ones are dead and cling long to the branches, they give before the
blasts, they let the rain drip from their finger tips without a sound.
But a single, half-loose cecropia frond can imitate a rainstorm, the
roar of a flushed covey of pheasants or a passing troop of monkeys,
all by itself. More than this, it will begin uncannily to quiver and
shake and rattle wildly about, while every adjacent leaf dangles as
silently as if painted. Thus does its sensitive balance and crinkled
shard betray the wandering little wind spouts which are born deep in
the jungle, and, like other aquatic cousins, stretch straight upward in
a tiny, clean-cut whorl of air.

A book could be written upon burning leaves--how they meet their
cremation, how they curl when this new, devastating long-bottled-up sun
heat chars their tissues. How they shout and crack in the wind of their
own swan song, and how they look when the heat and roar have passed
and the cold ash remains. A month of drought at Kartabo once made
the thick mat of bamboo leaves about the compound considerable of a
menace. So we had a great raking and bonfire of the ten million and one
elongated slivers of pale brown leaves. (Even the color of dead leaves,
like the plumage of hen pheasants, is far more subtle and beautiful
than we suspect, for after the above sentence, I try to match a dead
bamboo leaf color in Ridgway’s color book and fail utterly. It lies
between vinaceous-buff and olive-buff and is of no human-named color.)

The ashy souls of leaves differ to as great a degree as do their shapes
and life-greens. Some are so ethereal that they vanish in a curl of
faint blue smoke and leave scarcely a trace of ponderable greyness. The
bamboos are far otherwise. There is nothing quiet or sad about their
cremation. They snap and crackle joyously in the flames, with more gust
than ever they rattled in the trade winds. And indeed their passing
is far less of a radical change than for most leaves. They are so
surcharged with silica that the alchemy of glowing heat merely alters
their hue to silvery white, and when the furnace of their tissues has
cooled, they lie unchanged in shape and outline. A heavy rain or big
wind shatters this crystalline ghost of a _feuille_, and the various
salts are washed into the soil, ready for their next great adventure.

Before I lived under bamboos I never realized how friendly fallen
leaves could be. Trees with heavy, leaded-stemmed leaves drop them
straight to the ground. But bamboo leaves are like zeppelins when they
are launched and, with the slightest breeze float along on even keels,
drifting sometimes far into the laboratory. When at tea one day I idly
watched a leaf dangling high up from one of the lofty stems, so far
away I could not tell whether it was brown or green. A slight gust came
and it broke off and, revolving slowly, scaled obliquely down, through
the verandah and launched in my teacup.

These leaves register very accurately the force of the wind, and I have
seen a thick bed of ashes of burned bamboo leaves studded thickly as
a porcupine’s skin with the javelins of recent falls, two lots having
speared the ashes at different angles. One was almost upright, having
landed in a gentle wind that afternoon, the other at an oblique angle,
after volplaning on the stronger trades of morning.

Leaves in death still mirror many of the characteristics of their
living fellows. In the tropics a host of plants flower once or at
most twice a year, but attract insects at all times by setting forth
a little bowl of nectar on each leaf stalk. I have observed a small
bush with forty-nine leaves and counted nine and forty ants thereon,
one guest to each nectar-cup,--each having visited, sipped and
remained--perhaps by their jealous gormandizing keeping away other more
harmful insects. On fallen leaves the sides of the bowls still seem to
contain some sweetness, and to these come other ants (as we used to
love to scrape the emptied ice-cream freezer), who gnaw eagerly at the
shrivelled cups and the sweet crusts which have fallen from the table
of the jungle.

There are parts of jungle clearings which I hardly know in early
morning, while their foliage is still asleep. Some leaves are
surprisingly drowsy and not until the sun actually fillips them with
its beams do they raise their heads, twist on their stalks in a leafy
yawn, and eat to their daily stint in their chlorophyll factory. These
leaves die in the position of sleep, so that if we had a fallen twigful
we would know their somnolent attitude in life.

By far the phase of dominant interest in fallen or dead leaves is
the part they have played in the evolution of animal life. If we can
infer the position of sleep from that in death, how vastly greater is
possible the reconstruction of dead vegetation from living creatures
of the jungle. If every leaf and twig, flower and fruit, branch and
trunk were to vanish suddenly from the earth, their memory would remain
deeply impressed in form, size, movement, pattern and color of a host
of creatures, while we would still have even the jungle lights and
shadows etched upon fur and feathers. As we go down the scale in life
we find more and more marvels of resemblance, and it would be an easy
matter to reconstruct an entire plant of animals. I have caught monster
walking-stick insects over a foot in length, which were dead wood to
the keenest eye. Smaller ones carry the resemblance to an inordinate
extreme. Not only do they look like twigs and stems, but they _act_
like them, clinging with four feet and dangling the other two out in
midair, while every now and then the whole insect sways gently, as does
a tiny twig moved by a breath. Things such as this make a scientist’s
work wonderful and holy beyond Bryan’s utmost conception of these words.

From day to day in the jungle I add to my animal-plants. I discover
giant katy-dids so green and flat, so veined and stemmed, that no
passing observer could say, “This is leaf, this insect.” Others
have spoiled the symmetry and perfection of their sham chlorophyll
with simulated holes, and apparent tears and spots of fungi, and
the droppings of birds. All the diseases, parasites and injuries
of leaves have been photographed upon the wings of insects, in
unconscious endeavor to escape observation. At this point we come upon
interactions, complications, subtleties of great delicacy, such as are
shown by mantids, or “rar’hor’ses” as they are called in the Southern
States. These are incarnated, material sophists, camouflaged under
chlorophyll color not for protection but for attack. As the white fox
creeps upon the white ptarmigan over the white snow, so here in the
tropics, the mantids re-enact a similar, but viridescent drama.

Passing on from growing leaves we find flower bugs and orchid spiders,
the latter being forced to conceal their brilliant pigments in the
shadow of under-leaf, until some particular blossom appears. Then, with
their colors and patterns so exact that they might have been fashioned
in the same petal shop the spiders take their place on or near the
flowers. Some even eat away the heart of the blossom, substituting
their stamen leg and pistil palpi, and with the unharmed nectary still
giving forth perfume, these deadly frauds of flowers await the visiting
bees.

Caterpillars gnaw out bits of leaf and then fill up the space with
their own painted bodies, but butterflies and moths are the veritable
reflections of leaves, they would indeed be naked and blatant to
the world were foliage to vanish. Here again not only are color and
pattern invoked but even the movement in falling. I have had a brown
butterfly flutter in short, oblique eddies to my feet, and there alight
warelessly and sway from side to side. Dozens of times I have crept
up and enmeshed a dead leaf in my net, and as many times have brushed
heedlessly by a dead leaf only to have it take wings to itself and fly
away.

Two adventures which befell me yesterday had to do with leaves, and
touched the extremes of the gamut of an explorer’s life--from the
danger of death to the glory of new discovery. Every morning a bird
had been calling from a certain tree-top--a short, raucous, unpleasant
call, but a new one. So ventriloquil was it that it had wholly
baffled me. Only by triangulation, the successive focussing from
three distant points, could I ever hope to find it. I was creeping
slowly on my second lap, lifting my feet high to clear twigs and
vines, when something drew my eyes from the tree overhead to the dead
leaves below. This has happened to me perhaps a score of times and I
hope will continue in the future--the sudden, inexplicable perception
of a poisonous snake on which my foot is about to descend. A large
fer-de-lance, more like dead leaves than the leaves themselves, was
coiled less than two feet away. On its scales it mirrored the brown
dead leaves, the dark fungus spots, the shadows of the curled-up edges,
the high lights of the burnished surface sheen. Optically there was no
interruption of the floor of dead foliage; actually a horrible death
lay twelve inches beneath my upraised foot. The lethal mat was coiled
as evenly as a rope on a battleship and in the exact center lay the
arrow head with its unwinking eyes and the flickering tongue. As I
withdrew my foot and began to breathe again, I forgot my raucous-voiced
bird and sat down to ponder this. I took my strong butterfly net and
drew the netting taut across the ring and behind this barrier I slowly
approached. Closer and closer I drew until I could see the slit-like
pupil and the green and livid mottling of the iris. When I almost
touched the sharp snout with the other side of the mesh, I sniffed
carefully and repeatedly, dulling every other sense but that of smell.
There came to my nostrils a faint but distinct odor, an unpleasant
musk, which, once detected, remained vivid. It was a faint adumbration
of that strong, repulsive smell which permeates the cage where one of
these reptiles is confined, and I believe that, without invoking any
more radically psychic process, my attention is attracted and focussed
at these times by the faint, unconsciously stimulating odor of the
snake on the jungle floor. I cannot otherwise explain my invariable
detection at the last minute, of creatures who more than any others are
of the leaves, leafy.

My second adventure was also a thrilling one but from a wholly
different point of view. I was walking along a trail after a shower,
looking idly at a big, palmated leaf at my very elbow when there
suddenly materialized upon it a large lizard. It was one of the
most beautiful of all lizards and fortunately had been named with
imagination--_Polychrus marmoratus_--the many-colored Marble One. It
was sprawled flat upon the great green expanse, its scales shimmering
leaf-green with enough spots here and there to be a convincing portion
of the full-grown, insect-defaced foliage. I leaned toward it and it
began slowly to creep away. The long, slender tail was curled and
twisted into a lifeless tendril, and the toes dangled half in midair
like no imaginable piece of any live reptile. Progress was by means of
the forefeet alone, one after the other being pushed ahead stealthily,
taking hold and dragging the rest of the creature onward. The body,
hind legs and tail simply scraped over the leaf.

When it reached the thick, brown twig, magic began before our
eyes--for fortunately I had two companions to share this wonder. As
it left the green tissue and crawled slowly out along the twig its
course was traceable not only by its position in space, but by most
exquisitely adjusted and timed pigmental change,--at the exact edge of
the leaf the green gradually faded and a wave of brown swept down the
reptile. Never have I seen a more perfect use of obliterative color.
In captivity these polychrus will often run through their whole little
palatal gamut from mere emotion, or light and shadow. The whole soul
of my lizard on the leaf was concentrated in his half-closed eyes
watching my every motion, yet it must have been through the eye alone
that the amazingly accurate somatic color change was dictated and
regulated. Here was surely the ultimate example of vegetable imitation,
twigs, leaves--both green and brown--tendril swaying movement, all
in one organism. Not for anything would I have betrayed the lizard’s
trust in the magnificent shield which nature had built up about it. We
pretended to be completely deceived and left it--an irregular bit of
half-greenness on the second leaf, and half brownness on the twig.

A classic volume will some day be written on the adventures of
fallen leaves, for when a leaf has evaded the inroads of insects and
fungi, has resisted wind and rain, succumbing finally to the pull
of gravitation, there awaits it, in addition to ultimate mold and
desiccation, a host of possible adventures on the jungle floor.

[Illustration: “The jungle _du printemps eternel_”]

With all my desire to clothe the fallen leaf with dramatic interest and
an abstract vitality, my first and last thoughts are those of sadness.
Alien as I am to these tropical jungles, a mere transient injection
from the North, the sear and yellow leaf means to me the end of a
season, of a year--a very appreciable fraction of lifetime--and even in
this evergreen land, this jungle _de le printemps éternel_, the dead
leaf eddying to earth is a sad and a tragic happening.

THE JUNGLE SLUGGARD

[Illustration: “A fitting inhabitant of Mars”]

Sloths have no right to be living on the earth today; they would be
fitting inhabitants of Mars, where a year is over six hundred days
long. In fact they would exist more appropriately on a still more
distant planet where time--as we know it--creeps and crawls instead
of flies from dawn to dusk. Years ago I wrote that sloths reminded
me of nothing so much as the wonderful Rath Brother athletes or of a
slowed-up moving picture, and I can still think of no better similes.

Sloths live altogether in trees, but so do monkeys, and the chief
difference between them would seem to be that the latter spend their
time pushing against gravitation while the sloths pull against it.
Botanically the two groups of animals are comparable to the flower
which holds its head up to the sun, swaying on its long stem, and, on
the other hand, the over-ripe fruit dangling heavily from its base.
We ourselves are physically far removed from sloths--for while we can
point with pride to the daily achievement of those ambulatory athletes,
floor-walkers and policemen, yet no human being can cling with his
hands to a branch for more than a comparatively short time.

Like a rainbow before breakfast, a sloth is a surprise, an unexpected
fellow breather of the air of our planet. No one could prophesy a
sloth. If you have an imaginative friend who has never seen a sloth
and ask him to describe what he thinks it ought to be like, his
uncontrolled phrases will fall far short of reality. If there were no
sloths, Dunsany would hesitate to put such a creature in the forests
of Mluna, Marco Polo would deny having seen one, and Munchausen would
whistle as he listened to a friend’s description.

A scientist--even a taxonomist himself--falters when he mentions the
group to which a sloth belongs. A taxonomist is the most terribly
accurate person in the world, dealing with unvarying facts, and his
names and descriptions of animals defy discretion, murder imagination.
Nevertheless when next you see a taxonomist disengaged, approach
him boldly and ask him in a tone of quarrelsome interest to what
order of Mammalia sloths belong. If an honest conservative he will
say, “Edentata,” which, as any ancient Greek will tell you, means a
toothless one. Then if you wish to enrage and nonplus the taxonomist,
which I think no one should, as I am one myself, then ask him Why? or,
if he has ever been bitten by any of the eighteen teeth of a sloth?

The great savant Buffon in spite of all his genius, fell into most
grievous error in his estimation of a sloth. He says, “The inertia of
this animal is not so much due to laziness as to wretchedness; it is
the consequence of its faulty structure. Inactivity, stupidity, and
even habitual suffering result from its strange and ill-constructed
conformation. Having no weapons for attack or defense, no mode of
refuge even by burrowing, its only safety is in flight.... Everything
about it shows its wretchedness and proclaims it to be one of those
defective monsters, those imperfect sketches, which Nature has
sometimes formed, and which, having scarcely the faculty of existence,
could only continue for a short time and have since been removed from
the catalogue of living beings. They are the last possible term amongst
creatures of flesh and blood, and any further defect would have made
their existence impossible.”

If we imagine the dignified French savant himself, naked, and dangling
from a lofty jungle branch in the full heat of the tropic sun, without
water and with the prospect of nothing but coarse leaves for breakfast,
dinner and all future meals, an impartial onlooker who was ignorant of
man’s normal haunts and life could very truthfully apply to the unhappy
scientist, Buffon’s own comments. All of his terms of opprobrium would
come home to roost with him.

A bridge out of place would be an absolutely inexplicable thing, as
would a sloth in Paris, or a Buffon in the trees. As a matter of fact
it was only when I became a temporary cripple myself that I began to
appreciate the astonishing lives which sloths lead. With one of my
feet injured and out of commission I found an abundance of time in six
weeks to study the individuals which we caught in the jungle near by.
Not until we invent a superlative of which the word “deliberate” is
the positive can we define a sloth with sufficient adequateness and
briefness. I dimly remember certain volumes by an authoress whose style
pictured the hero walking from the door to the front gate, placing
first the right, then the left foot before him as he went. With such
detail and speed of action might one write the biography of a sloth.

Ever since man has ventured into this wilderness, sloths have aroused
astonishment and comment. Four hundred years ago Gonzala de Oviedo
sat him down and penned a most delectable account of these creatures.
He says, in part: “There is another strange beast the Spaniards call
the Light Dogge, which is one of the slowest beasts and so heavie and
dull in mooving that it can scarsely goe fiftie pases in a whole day.
Their neckes are high and streight, and all equall like the pestle of a
mortar, without making any proportion of similitude of a head, or any
difference except in the noddle, and in the tops of their neckes. They
have little mouthes, and moove their neckes from one side to another,
as though they were astonished: their chiefe desire and delight is
to cleave and sticke fast unto Trees, whereunto cleaving fast, they
mount up little by little, staying themselves by their long claws.
Their voice is much differing from other beasts, for they sing only in
the night, and that continually from time to time, singing ever six
notes one higher than another. Sometimes the Christian men find these
beasts, and bring them home to their houses, where also they creepe
all about with their natural slownesse. I could never perceive other
but that they love onely of Aire: because they ever turne their heads
and mouthes toward that part where the wind bloweth most, whereby may
be considered that they take most pleasure in the Aire. They bite not,
nor yet can bite, having very little mouthes: they are not venemous or
noyous any way, but altogether brutish, and utterly unprofitable and
without commoditie yet known to men.”

It is difficult to find adequate comparisons for a topsy-turvy creature
like a sloth, but if I had already had synthetic experience with a
Golem, I would take for a formula the general appearance of an English
sheep dog, giving it a face with barely distinguishable features and no
expression, an inexhaustible appetite for a single kind of coarse leaf,
a gamut of emotions well below the animal kingdom, and an enthusiasm
for life excelled by a healthy sunflower. Suspend this from a jungle
limb by a dozen strong hooks, and--you would still have to see a live
sloth to appreciate its appearance.

At rest, curled up into an arboreal ball, a sloth is indistinguishable
from a cluster of leaves; in action, the second hand of a watch often
covers more distance. At first sight of the shapeless ball of hay,
moving with hopeless inadequacy, astonishment shifts to pity, then to
impatience and finally, as we sense a life of years spent thus, we
feel almost disgust. At which moment the sloth reaches blindly in our
direction, thinking us a barren, leafless, but perhaps climbable tree,
and our emotions change again, this time to sheer delight as a tiny
infant sloth raises its indescribably funny face from its mother’s
breast and sends forth the single tone, the high, whistling squeak,
which in sloth intercourse is song, shout, converse, whisper, argument
and chant. Separating him from his mother is like plucking a bur from
one’s hair, but when freed, he contentedly hooks his small self to our
clothing and creeps slowly about.

Instead of reviewing all the observations and experiments which I
perpetrated upon sloths, I will touch at once the heart of their
mysterious psychology, giving in a few words a conception of their
strange, uncanny minds. A bird will give up its life in defending its
young; an alligator will not often desert its nest in the face of
danger; a male stickleback fish will intrepidly face any intruder that
threatens its eggs. In fact, at the time when the young of all animals
are at the age of helplessness, the senses of the parents are doubly
keen, their activities and weapons are at greatest efficiency for the
guarding of the young and the consequent certainty of the continuance
of their race.

The resistance made by a mother sloth to the abstraction of its
offspring is chiefly the mechanical tangling of the young animal’s
tiny claws in the long maternal fur. I have taken away a young sloth
and hooked it to a branch five feet away. Being hungry it began at
once to utter its high, penetrating penny whistle. To no other sound,
high or low, with even a half tone’s difference does the sloth pay any
heed, but its dim hearing is attuned to just this vibration. Slowly the
mother starts off in what she thinks is the direction of the sound. It
is the moment of moments in the life of the young animal. Yet I have
seen her again and again on different occasions pass within two feet
of the little chap, and never look to right or left, but keep straight
on, stolidly and unvaryingly to the high jungle, while her baby, a few
inches out of her path, called in vain. No kidnapped child hidden in
mountain fastness or urban underworld was ever more completely lost
to its parent than this infant, in full view and separated by only a
sloth’s length of space.

A gun fired close to the ear of a sloth will usually arouse not the
slightest tremor; no scent of flower or acid or carrion causes any
reaction; a sleeping sloth may be shaken violently without awakening,
the waving of a scarlet rag, or a climbing serpent a few feet away
brings no gleam of curiosity or fear to the dull eyes; an astonishingly
long immersion in water produces discomfort but not death. When we
think what a constant struggle life is to most creatures, even when
they are equipped with the keenest of senses and powerful means of
offense, it seems incredible that a sloth can hold its own in this
overcrowded tropical jungle.

From birth to death it climbs slowly about the great trees, leisurely
feeding, languidly loving, and almost mechanically caring for its
young. On the ground a host of enemies await it, but among the higher
branches it fears chiefly occasional great boas, climbing jaguars and,
worst of all, the mighty talons of harpy eagles. Its means of offense
is a joke--a slow, ineffective reaching forward with open jaws, a
lethargic stroke of arm and claws which anything but another sloth can
avoid. Yet the race of sloths persists and thrives, and in past years I
have had as many as eighteen under observation at one time.

A sloth makes no nest or shelter; it even disdains the protection
of dense foliage. But for all its apparent helplessness it has
a _cheval-de-frise_ of protection which many animals far above
it in intelligence might well envy. Its outer line of defense is
invisibility--and there is none better, for until you have seen your
intended prey you can neither attack nor devour him. No hedgehog
or armadillo ever rolled a more perfect ball of itself than does a
sloth, sitting in a lofty, swaying crotch with head and feet and
legs all gathered close together inside. This posture, to an
onlooker, destroys all thought of a living animal, but presents a very
satisfactory white ants’ nest or bunch of dead leaves. If we look at
the hair of a sloth we will see small, grey patches along the length of
the hairs--at first sight bits of bark and débris of wood. But these
minute, scattered particles are of the utmost aid to this invisibility.
They are a peculiar species of alga or lichen-like growth which is
found only in this peculiar haunt, and when the rains begin and all the
jungle turns a deep, glowing emerald, these tiny plants also react to
the welcome moisture and become verdant--thus throwing over the sloth a
protecting, misty veil of green.

Even we dull-sensed humans require neither sight nor hearing to detect
the presence of an animal like the skunk; in the absolute quiet and
blackness of midnight we can tell when a porcupine has crossed our
path, or when there are mice in the bureau drawers. But a dozen sloths
may be hanging to the trees near at hand and never the slightest whiff
of odor comes from them. A baby sloth has not even a baby smell, and
all this is part of the cloak of invisibility. The voice, raised
so very seldom, is so ventriloquil, and possesses such a strange,
unanimal-like quality that it can never be a guide to the location much
less to the identity of the author. Here we have three senses, sight,
hearing, smell, all operating at a distance, two of them by vibrations,
and all leagued together to shelter the sloth from attack.

But in spite of this dramatic guard of invisibility the keen eyes of
an eagle, the lapping tongue of a giant boa, and the amazing delicacy
of a jaguar’s sense of smell break through at times. The jaguar scents
sign under the tree of the sloth, climbs eagerly as far as he dares
and finds ready to his paw the ball of animal unconsciousness; a harpy
eagle half a mile above the jungle sees a bunch of leaves reach out
a sleepy arm and scratch itself--something clumps of leaves should
not do. Down spirals the great bird, slowly, majestically, knowing
there is no need of haste, and alights close by the mammalian sphere.
Still the sloth does not move, apparently waiting for what fate may
bring--waiting with that patience and resignation which comes only
to those of our fellow creatures who cannot say, “I am I!” It seems
as if Nature had deserted her jungle changeling, stripped now of its
protecting cloak.

The sloth however has never been given credit for its powers of passive
resistance, and now, with its enemy within striking distance, its
death or even injury is far from a certainty. The crotch which the
sloth chooses for its favorite outdoor sport, sleep, is unusually
high up or far out among the lesser branches, where the eight claws
of the eagle or the eighteen of a jaguar find but precarious hold. In
order to strike at the quiescent animal the bird has to relinquish
half of its foothold, the cat nearly one quarter. If the victim were
a feathery bush turkey or a soft-bodied squirrel, one stroke would be
sufficient, but this strange creature is something far different. In
the first place it is only to be plucked from its perch by the exertion
of enormous strength. No man can seize a sloth by the long hair of the
back and pull it off. So strong are its muscles, so vise-like the grip
of its dozen talons that either the crotch must be cut or broken off or
the long claws unfastened one by one. Neither of these alternatives is
possible to the attacking cat or eagle. They must depend upon crushing
or penetrating power of stroke or grasp.

Here is where the sloth’s second line of defense becomes operative.
First, as I have mentioned, the swaying branch and dizzy height is in
his favor, as well as his immovable grip. To begin with the innermost
defenses, while his jungle fellows, the ring-tailed and red howling
monkeys, have thirteen ribs, the sloth may have as many as twenty; in
the latter animal they are, in addition, unusually broad and flat,
slats rather than rods. Next comes the skin which is so thick and tough
that many an Indian’s arrow falls back without even scratching the
hide. The skin of the unborn sloth is as tough and strong as that of
a full-grown monkey. Finally we have the fur--two distinct coats, the
under one fine, short and matted, the outer long, harsh and coarse. Is
it any wonder that, teetering on a swaying branch, many a jaguar has
had to give up after frantic attempts to strike his claws through the
felted hair, the tough skin and the bony lattice-work which protect the
vitals of this Edentate bur!

Having rescued our sloth from his most immediate peril let us watch
him solve some of the very few problems which life presents to
him. Although the cecropia tree, on the leaves of which he feeds,
is scattered far and wide through the jungle, yet sloths are found
almost exclusively along river banks, and, most amazingly, they
not infrequently take to the water. I have caught a dozen sloths
swimming rivers a mile or more in width. Judging from the speed of
short distances, a sloth can swim a mile in three hours and twenty
minutes. Their thick skin and fur must be a protection against
crocodiles, electric eels and perai fish as well as jaguars. Why they
should ever wish to swim across these wide expanses of water is as
inexplicable as the migration of butterflies. One side of the river
has as many comfortable crotches, as many millions of cecropia leaves
and as many eligible lady sloths as the other! In this unreasonable
desire for anything which is out of reach sloths come very close to a
characteristic of human beings.

Even in the jungle sloths are not always the static creatures which
their vegetable-like life would lead us to believe, as I was able to
prove many years ago. A young male was brought in by Indians and after
keeping it a few days I shaved off two patches of hair from the center
of the back, and labelling it with a metal tag I turned it loose.
Forty-eight days later it was captured near a small settlement of
bovianders several miles farther up and across the river. During this
time it must have traversed four miles of jungle and one of river.

The principal difference between the male and female three-toed
sloths is the presence on the back of the male of a large, oval spot
of orange-colored fur. To any creature of more active mentality such
a minor distinction must often be embarrassing. In an approaching
sloth, walking upside-down as usual, this mark is quite invisible,
and hence every meeting of two sloths must contain much of delightful
uncertainty, of ignorance whether the encounter presages courtship or
merely gossip. But color or markings have no meaning in the dull eyes
of these animals. Until they have sniffed and almost touched noses they
show no recognition or reaction whatever.

I once invented a sloth island--a large circle of ground surrounded by
a deep ditch, where sloths climbed about some saplings and ate, but
principally slept, and lived for months at a time. This was within
sight of my laboratory table, so I could watch what was taking place by
merely raising my head. Some of the occurrences were almost too strange
for creatures of this earth. I watched two courtships, each resulting
in nothing more serious than my own amusement. A female was asleep
in a low crotch, curled up into a perfect ball deep within which was
ensconced a month-old baby. Two yards overhead was a male who had slept
for nine hours without interruption. Moved by what, to a sloth, must
have been a burst of uncontrollable emotion, he slowly unwound himself
and clambered downward. When close to the sleeping beauty he reached
out a claw and tentatively touched a shoulder. Even more deliberately
she excavated her head and long neck and peered in every direction but
the right one. At last she perceived her suitor and looked away as if
the sight was too much for her. Again he touched her post-like neck,
and now there arose all the flaming fury of a mother at the flirtatious
advances of this stranger. With incredible slowness and effort she
freed an arm, deliberately drew it back and then began a slow forward
stroke with arm and claws. Meanwhile her gentleman friend had changed
his position so the blow swept, or, more correctly passed, through
empty air, the lack of impact almost throwing her out of the crotch.
The disdained one left with slowness and dignity--or had he already
forgotten why he had descended?--and returned to his perch and slumber,
where I am sure, not even such active things as dreams came to disturb
his peace.

The second courtship advanced to the stage where the Gallant actually
got his claws tangled in the lady’s back hair before she awoke. When
she grasped the situation she left at once and clambered to the highest
branch tip followed by the male. Then she turned and climbed down and
across her annoyer, leaving him stranded on the lofty branch looking
eagerly about and reaching out hopefully toward a big, green iguana
asleep on the next limb in mistake for his fair companion. For an hour
he wandered languidly after her, then gave it up and went to sleep.
Throughout these and other emotional crises no sound is ever uttered,
no feature altered from its stolid repose. The head moves mechanically
and the dull eyes blink slowly, as if striving to pierce the opaque
veil which ever hangs between the brain of a sloth and the sights,
sounds and odors of this tropical world. If the orange back spot was
ever of any use in courtship, in arousing any emotion æsthetic or
otherwise, it must have been in ages long past when the ancestors of
sloths, contemporaries of their gigantic relatives the Mylodons, had
better eyesight for escaping from sabre-toothed tigers, than there is
need today.

The climax of a sloth’s emotion has nothing to do with the opposite sex
or with the young, but is exhibited when two females are confined in a
cage together. The result is wholly unexpected. After sniffing at one
another for a moment, they engage in a slowed-up moving-picture battle.
Before any harm is done one or the other gives utterance to the usual
piercing whistle and surrenders. She lies flat on the cage floor and
offers no defense while the second female proceeds to claw her, now and
then attempting, usually vainly, to bite. It is so unpleasant that I
have always separated them at this stage, but there is no doubt that
in every case the unnatural affray would go on until the victim was
killed. In fact I have heard of several instances where this actually
took place.

A far pleasanter sight is the young sloth, one of the most adorable
balls of fuzzy fur imaginable. While the sense of play is all but
lacking his trustfulness and helplessness are most infantile. Every
person who takes him up is an accepted substitute for his mother and
he will clamber slowly about one’s clothing for hours in supreme
contentment. One thing I can never explain is that on the ground the
baby is even more helpless than his parents. While they can hitch
themselves along, body dragging, limbs outspread, until they reach the
nearest tree, a young sloth is wholly without power to move. Placed on
a flat bit of ground it rolls and tumbles about, occasionally greatly
encouraged by seizing hold of its own foot or leg under the impression
that at last it has encountered a branch.

Sloths sleep about twice as much as other mammals and a baby sloth
often gets tired of being confined in the heart of its mother’s
sleeping sphere, and creeping out under her arm will go on an exploring
expedition around and around her. When over two weeks old it has
strength to rise on its hind legs and sway back and forth like nothing
else in the world. Its eyes are only a little keener than those of the
parent and it peers up at the foliage overhead with the most pitiful
interest. It is slowly weaned from a milk diet to the leaves of the
cecropia which the mother at first chews up for her offspring.

I once watched a young sloth about a month old and saw it leave its
mother for the first time. As the old one moved slowly back and forth,
pulling down cecropia leaves and feeding on them, the youngster took
firm grip on a leaf stem, mumbling at it with no success whatever.
When finally it stretched around and found no soft fur within reach it
set up a wail which drew the attention of the mother at once. Still
clinging to her perch, she reached out a forearm to an unbelievable
distance and gently hooked the great claws about the huddled infant,
which at once climbed down the long bridge and tumbled headlong into
the hollow awaiting it.

When a very young sloth is gently disentangled from its mother and
hooked on to a branch something of the greatest interest happens.
Instead of walking forward, one foot after the other, and upside-down
as all adult sloths do, it reaches up and tries to get first one
arm then the other _over_ the support, and to pull itself into an
upright position. This would seem to be a reversion to a time--perhaps
millions of years ago--when the ancestors of sloths had not yet
begun to hang inverted from the branches. After an interval of clumsy
reaching and wriggling about, the baby by accident grasps its own body
or limb, and, in this case, convinced that it is at last anchored
safely again to its mother, it confidently lets go with all its other
claws and tumbles ignominiously to the ground.

The moment a baby sloth dies and slips from its grip on the mother’s
fur, it ceases to exist for her. If it could call out she would reach
down an arm and hook it toward her, but simply dropping silently means
no more than if a disentangled bur had fallen from her coat. I have
watched such a sloth carefully and have never seen any search of her
own body or of the surrounding branches, or a moment’s distraction from
sleep or food. An imitation of the cry of the dead baby will attract
her attention, but if not repeated she forgets it at once.

It is interesting to know of the lives of such beings as this--chronic
pacifists, normal morons, the superlative of negative natures, yet
holding their own amidst the struggle for existence. Nothing else
desires to feed on such coarse fodder, no other creature disputes
with it the domain of the under side of branches, hence there is no
competition. From our human point of view sloths are degenerate;
from another angle they are among the most exquisitely adapted of
living beings. If we humans, together with our brains, fitted as well
into the possibilities of our own lives we should be infinitely finer
and happier,--and, besides, I should then be able to interpret more
intelligently the life and the philosophy of sloths!

MANGROVE MYSTERY

One day I found a hammock-form of roots, a maze of gentle curves
which gave and braced, and, taking paper, looked to see if a mangrove
had anything of interest to offer. At the end of three hours I slid
painfully down into the rising tide, my unpenciled sheet fluttered off,
and I went away with my mind in a whirl.

I rejoiced in Barnum’s Circus long before I learned to write, but, if
the first time thereafter, my mother had given me pencil and notebook
with instructions to describe everything that took place in all
three rings and on the stage, as well as the freaks, side shows and
menagerie, my ideas would have been of equal clarity and inclusiveness
as at my first mangrove séance. Above, around, beneath were interlacing
trapezes, flying rings and rope ladders, liana nets and gaily painted
poles, waving banners of emerald strung along the rafters, and high
over all the canvas of the sky. And everywhere the performers--acrobats
and leapers--worked mighty feats of balance and of strength; whiffs
arose of strange and unknown creatures; thrilling, tuning-up squeaks
and umpahs came from hidden orchestras which surely soon must burst
forth in full fanfare of breath-shortening music. Now and then a being
would creep slowly past, (doubtless on his weary way to a long parade
about some invisible arena), of such sight and form, that if raised to
man’s height would be a side show in himself.

But even at the first confusing survey, the mangrove stood out vivid
and clear-cut. It had the aspect of a god, an Atlas, with feet firm
planted upon earth, regardless whether currents of water or winds of
air swirled about its knees, and with wide arms out--upward spread
to the sky, upon which thousands of weaker beings found sanctuary.
Some alighted for temporary rest of weary wings, others for longer
periods, day boarders who came for meals or season residents who built
their houses and reared their families upon the vibrant roots. And
finally were those who knew no other world or scene, but, born or
hatched upon the mangroves, clung to them until loosed by death. By
their little body dropping to the water, they paid their final debt
to Gravitation, returning to his implacable coffers this small meed
of elevation-energy, which by grip of tendrils or of fingers they had
possessed throughout their lives.

[Illustration: “In the sunshine and warmth of the mangrove tangle”]

These were all kindly, or at most indifferent folk, who if they gave
nothing of value, did no harm. In a circus, the smiling faces of two
acrobats who catch one another in midair may mask bitter hatred, a
desire to swing short, or grip loosely; the story writers are fond of
showing us the tragic sorrow obverse of the clown’s grinning visage.
In the sunshine and warmth of the mangrove tangle, behind the swaying
leaves and bee-beckoning blossoms’ fragrance is terrible strife and
slow death. The splendid plant gives shelter and support upon its
sturdy uplifted arms, not only to the fairy homes of humming-birds,
but to parasites whose gratitude is never to cease strangling with
inflexible coils, or, more insidiously, gently to insert living threads
of death into the very heart of their supporter. Out of all this,
how futile it seems to try to give any real idea of the marvel of
mangrove life. At most we can hope only to arouse a worthy discontent,
a disquieting desire also to go and see. For here are living tales,
complete but as yet unworded, worthy to fill volumes of Carroll or
Dunsany or Barrie or Blackwood; here are scenes needing only paper
tracing to equal the best of Rackham or Sime, to touch the emotional
gamut of Böcklin and Heath Robinson.

About ten thousand years before I filled this fountain pen, some
ancestor of yours and mine--our “touch of nature”--discovered that
by building a house of piles out in a lake, he could thwart the wild
animals which ever threatened him, and lessen the danger of a surprise
attack from equally-to-be-dreaded envious or hasty-tempered neighbors.
Few carnivores care to swim after their prey, and war canoes had hardly
been invented. Such sanctuaries gave to families and to small tribes
time to think, to invent new weapons, to seize new opportunities and to
take better care of their babies.

Today, while pushing a canoe through the roots of the mangrove jungle,
I thought enthusiastically of my pile-dwelling ancestors as I noted
many exciting similes, and then paddled hastily back to the laboratory
to see what botanists had thought about it. I found much of interest,
but my mind was sobered, my imagination quieted. There was nothing of
Swiss lake dwellings, but a very definite title of _Rhizophora Mangle_,
and a casual remark of branches being supported by simple, vertical
roots; it was put down that the petals were lacerate-woolly on the
margin, exceeded by the calyx limb; but their delicate odor was passed
by without comment; the living shifts of greens on the foliage, with
the veins carrying shafts of parrot color over the background of pale
chrysolite--this was ignored; to the botanist the leaves were leathery,
quite entire, obovate-lanceolate and blunt--a statement unquestionably
to the point. Finally I learned that the astringent bark is employed
for tanning, and I returned to my living mangroves, alias R. Mangle,
wondering if too constant pondering upon astringent, unadulterated
facts is not often efficacious in a sort of mental tanning. Our
mangrove might yield a new harvest to us if we could choose a different
contact of thought, clothing the fruit with the vital interest hidden
in “one-seeded by abortion,” and yet avoiding sentimental pleonasms.

However we decide to think of this plant, it is sure to be with
admiration, for it stands out as a pioneer. Among earthly vegetation
the mangrove is an aristocrat, a true dicotyledon, but it has dared
to seek again the watery habitat of the lowlier growths, indeed of
the very green algæ from which land plants originally developed. Like
the penguin which has relinquished the ærial wing for an aquatic
fin, or the seal which has encased its five fingers and five toes in
flipper mittens, so the mangrove, while retaining all its badges of
aristocracy, has returned to the haunts of the ancestors of all plants,
from whence it can look calmly shoreward at the terrible struggle for
life a few feet away, where every inch of soil is battled for, where
the vigorous monopolize air and sunlight.

Such a radical change cannot be achieved without far-reaching
adaptations and readjustments; the banker does not become a farmer
merely by moving to the country, and every part of a mangrove shows
delicate modes of meeting the strange new conditions as cunningly as
the shift of muscles of a jiu-jitsu wrestler encountering an unknown
opponent.

In the month of February, Kartabo mangroves are covered with
flowers--and yet to a passing glance reveal no trace of inflorescence.
Small and yellowish white, in irregular clusters of six to a dozen,
they make no kind of visual showing, but their nectaries call to small
trigonid bees in no uncertain way, and through the hours of sunlight
the branches of the mangrove are busy marts of trade. Each cluster of
blossoms becomes a corner grocery where the customers come for their
buckets of nectars and packages of pollen and rush away without paying,
or so they may think. But there are leaks in the pollen bags, and when
they enter another blossom, the little stream of sifting yellow dust
drifts across the entrance, a few grains or even a single one, falls
upon the waiting pistil, and the bee has repaid for his bread and
honey many fold and with compound interest. Its destiny fulfilled,
the flower falls apart, the petal, lacerate-woolly margins and all,
drifting off on the first tide. The ovary swells, two seeds form, and
now comes the first adjustment, and we realize that in the botanist’s
dry remark “one-seeded by abortion” may be concealed tragic doom and
a wealth of subtle meaning. No spear can be thrown straight which has
twin heads and shafts, and so one seed shrivels and dies, and the
other thrives and grows. What decides the fate of life or death we do
not know. Some delicate balance, some subtle test of worth or lack
takes place in every one of the thousands upon thousands of fertilized
mangrove blossoms, and there is no appeal. The reason, as we shall see,
is too vital, the target too difficult and treacherous for a thought to
be given to unborn plants.

The problem of the next generation of mangroves is a serious one.
The seeds are formed over an everchanging surface; soft, sticky mud
giving place to strong currents, flowing first in one, then in the
opposite direction; rough waves plough up the mud and splash against
the stilt-like roots. No sticky secretion, no mere weight, no hooks
or ærial wings will suffice for these seeds. From their natal branch
high above the tidal area, some sure method of anchorage must be found
to enable them to avoid being smothered in the mud, stranded on the
shore, rolled into deep water or washed out to sea.

The method is the arrow or loaded dart, and the force is the energy of
gravitation stored in particle after particle by the mother plant, as
she drew up salts and water and elements, raising them sapfully from
mud and tide, and condensing them into a solid, slender, pointed weapon
capable of coping with all the difficulties of the new environment.
But no seed alone can thus function, and in solving this problem the
mangrove reveals itself as one of the most remarkable plants in the
world. The lower forms of vegetation form their seeds and thrust them
forth naked upon the world; the more advanced plants ensheath their
offspring in swaddling clothes of protection against heat and cold,
moisture and aridity. These are comparable to egg-laying creatures,
with yolk and shell to shield the embryo from dangers. But the mangrove
is truly viviparous, and the embryo seed remains attached for months,
nourished by the sap of the parent branch. Out of the pear-shaped head
a root-like structure grows downward, often to a length of twenty
inches and a width of one. Like an airplane bomb, or the deadly
throwing assagai of the Zulus, the mangrove seedling is thickest
three-fourths of the way down, and then tapers rapidly. With a weight
of as much as three ounces and driving force generated by a height of
twenty feet, the umbilical cord of sap may safely dry, the connecting
sheath shrivel, and one day there is a dull little spatter of mud, or
a splash of water, and the unconscious work of the bees, the months of
slow invigorating by the parent plant are fulfilled. The seed sticks
upright in the mud, propelled through even two feet of water to its
goal, and immediately rootlets sprout and consolidate the anchorage.

I once blazed two dozen seedlings which seemed ready to drop, and
three of these were loosed at low water, so that they fell unhindered
directly into the mud. The others I missed and I can only surmise
whether this is the rule; whether some subtle influence of moon or tide
is not sufficient to cause the final separation. Such a stimulus would
be of great value to the young plant and is no more improbable than the
marvellous effect of the moon’s rays upon the palolo worms of the sea
bottom.

Let us for awhile forget the mangrove circus medley,--crab clowns,
strong men of the ants, hairy wild tarantulas, prestidigitator opossums
producing ten infant opossums from a single fold of skin, white
elephant membracid larvæ, living statue lianas, frog barkers and
lightning change lizards. Let us think of birds, or of a single bird.

I have seen more than a hundred kinds of birds among the mangroves
of Kartabo, but a mere enumeration of these would be of little
value and of no interest. And instead of selecting the rarest, most
bizarre of tropical forms, let us choose the commonest, the most
blatant, apparently the most ordinary bird, with average habits and
usual traits; which is another way of saying that we have observed
it casually, watched it with unintelligent inattention, and wholly
failed to interpret its activities in the terms of their desperate
significance.

A kiskadee flew to a root before me and called loudly. For a moment it
was only a kiskadee, and hardly registered color or sound, so common a
feature of the day was it. It was threatened with the oblivion of the
abundant, the neglect of the familiar. In New York City on a day of
slush and humid chill, with rush and worry and congested life, to hear
the loud, certain call _kis-ka-dee!_ from a cage in the Zoological Park
was to thrill in every fibre, and to remember peace, and calm thoughts
and vast quiet spaces. As the steamer moved up to the Georgetown
telling, _kis-ka-dee!_ from a corrugated iron roof signalized the
approach of another season of wonderful jungle existence. But from
that first moment on, the kiskadees were ungratefully allowed to sink
into the subconscious, while jaded, conscious senses strained after new
forms and novel sounds.

Today, however, looking up from my canoe among the mangroves, I saw the
bird as first I saw it many years ago--it became more than one among
hundreds, it assumed a miraculous rejuvenation.

Its very presence among the mangroves was significant. To the eyes of
all immigrants through the ages the mangrove and the kiskadee must have
come first--the tourist on the last ocean steamer, dark-haired men of
quaint Spanish galleons, Carib Indians in their dugouts paddling from
islands of the sea, and the man whose stone ax I found the other day,
squatting on a couple of vine-tied logs, drifting from God knows where.

Here on the very apex, the outermost root, marking the junction of the
Cuyuni and Mazaruni Rivers--here a kiskadee perched and here it had
built its nest. It was exciting thus to be able to fix a locality with
almost planetary, or at least continental accuracy. I have felt the
same thing when circling in a plane over the very tip of Long Island,
or standing on the spray-drenched, southernmost boulder of Ceylon,
or squatting on a Buddhist cairn on the verge of Tibet. Now I knew
that even a small map of South America would show this very spot of
mangroves and the exact perch of my kiskadee,--and the bird grew in
importance.

To Northern appraisement, our kingbird is nearest to this tropical
tyrant, except that the latter is even more wonted to man’s presence.
The kiskadee has nothing of delicacy or dainty grace. It is beautiful
in rufous wings and brilliant yellow under plumage, it is regal with
a crown of black, white and orange. But in life and caste it is
decidedly middle class. It is the harbinger of the dawn, but so is an
alarm-clock, and in regularity and blatancy of announcement there is
much in common between the two.

The husky call crashes upon the ear soon after the bird is sighted,
and from early times has caught the attention and been translated into
human speech. I know not what the stone-ax man dubbed it, he may only
have grunted and hurled his weapon at it, hoping for a morsel of food.
The Arrowaks and the few remaining Caribs know it as _Heet-gee-gee_,
and the Spaniards, prompted perhaps by the Jesuit Fathers, interpreted
it _Christus fui_; to Dutch ears it became characteristically tangled
up with _g’s_ and _i’s_, _Griet-je-bie_, the French more cleverly
phrased it with the onomatopoetic _Qu-est-ce-qu’il-dit?_ or _Qui? Oui,
Louis!_ while the negroes laugh it into _Kiss, Kiss, me deh’_.

I leaned back in the canoe and watched my kiskadee through a lattice
of curved roots. Within five minutes it gave me a hint of the living
chains of life with which the mangroves abound. The bird left its
perch and with a wild outpouring of screams and shrill cries flew with
unwonted directness, straight out and up over the river. Its mark was
a caracara hawk--a menial, degenerate, vegetable-feeding _Accipiter_,
who, when eggs or nestlings offer, loves to be tempted and loves to
fall! Swiftly after the kiskadee swept the next link in the chain, two
humming-birds whirring past, catching up at once and buzzing about the
tyrant’s head, well knowing that this sturdy eight inches of feathers,
alias flycatcher, so quick to cry “wolf” at every passing hawk, was far
from being wholly guiltless in the matter of certain nestlings.

But this is only an occasional failing and we pass to admiration
of other, more worthy attributes. The kiskadee, like most strong
characters has a number of doubles and imitators; one has drawn a grey
veil over the yellow breast, another has a wider bill, two are almost
replicas in miniature, but they are all conventional in haunt and
food. They all live in the compound of the bungalow and search the
air diligently for winged insects as their names say they should. But
kiskadee has overthrown the traditions of his family. A kindred spirit
to the mangrove, his quick eye has caught the advantages of aquatic
isolation and so we often find him nesting among the outer growths.
And having accepted the sanctuary of this strange amphibious tree, he
has altered his habits in other ways. A grey-throated kingbird or a
lesser kiskadee will often choose a perch over the water from which it
gracefully swoops for flying ants and termites. But watch the kiskadee!

As a returning crusader flaunts the infidel’s scimiter, and keeps
silence upon certain ways and means and happenings, so kiskadee
returned to perch, wiping from its bill the sordid taint of tweaked
hawk’s feather, and ready to explain the lost feather from its own
crown as worthy mark of battle. Its next movement was significant of
much of earthly progress and evolution--indeed an accumulation of
similar achievements would be quite enough to explain my sitting in a
canoe, watching the kiskadee with high power glasses, and endeavoring
to philosophize upon what I saw, instead of still pushing my body into
pseudopodia with my erstwhile amœbic confrères in the mud below. This
thought came when the bird fell from its root, plopped into the water,
and with effort, and a bit bedraggled as to plumage, rose with a small
fish in its beak.

The eternal restlessness of two of our pet monkeys, “Sadie” and
“Holy Ghost,” suggested to one of us the excellent definition of a
monkey:--“An animal which never wants to be where it is,” and this
applied to habits and traits emphasizes the importance of the kiskadee
diving after a fish instead of merely swooping after a passing insect:
the wide beak, the fringe of guiding bristles, soft plumage, the
examples of its relatives and the instinctive dictates of hundreds of
past generations, all point flycatcherward, yet it chooses otherwise
and taps a more nourishing source of food supply closed to its
superficial imitators, nearer to its new home, and less dependent on
sun and season.

In this, as in all similar cases, the vital interest lies not in the
fact of the actual change of habit, but how it came to arise. It were
easy in the comfort of one’s study with eyes fixed on pencil and paper
to devise the method of origin, clothing it with facile words. There
come to memory the shrill chatter, the swift short flights, the trim,
stream line forms of midget mangrove kingfishers, tiny Isaak Waltons
whose plunge, strike and return embody the perfection of piscatory
art. How easy for the intelligent eye of the kiskadee to observe the
mode of life of these little neighbors of the roots, to essay, to
practice and to succeed! Or if this strains our credulity, let us take
another sheet of paper and again logically explain the origin of the
habit; a pursued insect falls into the water, the kiskadee swoops at it
at the same moment when a minnow arises; the fish is unintentionally
seized instead of the flying ant, the foundation of cause and effect is
laid; and so, “dearly beloved,” that is the way the kiskadee learned to
fish!

For my part, I have not the faintest idea of how it began, in fact the
little I have been able to ascertain, tends more to complicate than to
clarify the problem, but there is one very significant thing about this
flycatcher fishing. The Kiskadee Tyrant (_Pitangus sulphuratus_) in
some of its several forms ranges from Texas to the Argentine, and from
Guiana to Peru.

Many years ago in western Mexico I observed the Northern form of
Pitangus plunging for minnows in an arroyo pool, later, in the Orinoco
delta and in Trinidad the subspecies _trinitatis_ fished for me in
both places; during five separate visits to Guiana I have seen many
individual kiskadees catching fish in widely separated localities, and
I have heard of a similar habit in birds of Brazil and Argentina.

Now while some unusually adaptable or quick-sighted bird may learn a
new habit, or a new variation of an old habit, it is quite another
thing to imagine a similar spreading of it wholesale among the
individuals of the species ranging over mountains, plains and islands
throughout a continent and a half. Such an achievement is as absurdly
improbable as the theory of a kingfisher tutor. We do not know how it
has come about, but when it is made clear I believe that many other
equally mysterious phenomena will be understood; why so many groups
of hoofed animals quite distantly related, all began in past time to
develop horns more or less simultaneously; why in hundreds of tropical
lakes which never know spring, untold hosts of ducks and geese are, as
one bird, stirred by something beyond themselves--as inexplicable and
invariable as the magnetic needle; why a flock of birds in flight has
no individual will, but is swerved and turned, carried aloft or settled
to rest by some inclusive spirit of flock or species. All this is not
recognized by any taxonomist, it is not explained by psychologists,
it is hardly ever thought of by naturalists, but some day it will
demand of our philosophy an explanation. When that time comes, I will
understand the fishing of my mangrove kiskadee as now I understand only
how much I want to know.

A strange city or shore or jungle, a new friend, or house or garden
should always first be seen at night; should be glanced at, not
scrutinized, listened to, not examined, wondered at, not studied.
The glamour rightly born of dusk will then forever mitigate defects
apparent in the glare of day, ash-cans, thorns, thick wrists, oilcloth
tiles or blight. But no studied plan led my feet to the mangroves on
a May midnight of the wettest moon at full. Raindrops from distant
Venezuelan storms, and others which had spattered upon the mysterious
heights of Roraima had filled the rivers up to their brims. And now the
pull of the moon had slackened, and gently let the liquid mass sink
down. There was not a ripple, only an occasional heave and settling,
more effective, more potent of cosmic energy than any crashing waves or
surging bore. And I did not wonder that ancient man failed to connect
the tides and moon, for here high overhead hung the great satellite,
while before me the gravity pull of yesternight’s moon was just
relaxing.

The light was somewhat grayed with clouds, but quite bright enough
for type, if I had not forgotten that there was such a thing; the
mangrove world was oxidized, the leaves lost all their semblance
to foliage,--the branches merely dripped dark, oblong sheets of
tissue. The slowly sinking mirror stretched the completed curves of
roots,--slits widening to ellipses, ellipses to circles, until suddenly
the earthly halves were shattered upon the dull glisten of exposing mud.

I was perched upon the buttress of a small mora which had ventured far
out beyond its jungle brethren, or had been long since isolated by
encroaching waters. Behind me was a black palm swamp and the narrow
trail between. Optically both were invisible, aurally they were clearly
outlined. From the swamp came the cheery little voices of the black
and scarlet leaf walkers, the cubee frogs of the Indians, snapping out
their brief but vital message, and from end to end the white-collared
nighthawks patrolled the trail, with short, silent flights,
thistle-down alightings, and never-ending queries of _Who-are-you?_ as
distinct as though worded by human lips. I remembered my Brazilian frog
who pursued my researches with his eternal _Why?_ I looked at the moon
and the water and the mangroves, I thought of my imperfect self and I
knew that never in this world would I form a satisfactory answer to
either bird or batrachian.

Beyond the outermost roots came the low thrumming of a catfish
singing in the shallows, forced perhaps by the lowering tide from some
moonlit feeding ground hidden from my sight. It ceased abruptly and
like an aerial antiphony came a deep rumbling throb from a root at
my right,--the call of the greatest of all tree frogs, a well-named
_Hyla maxima_. Here night after night I had heard him and had tried to
approach. But always he detected my lightest step and became silent.
His is the resonant bass violin in the orchestra of a jungle night. At
this moment from two miles away, a chorus of these great frogs rang
clear from a distant swamp. For about three-fourths of the time the
calls were perfectly synchronized, coming in great successive waves;
_wahrrook! wahrrook! wahrrook!_ Wahruk, by the way, is their Akawai
Indian name. Then some batrachian with a poor sense of rhythm got out
of tempo, and this threw all the rest into confusion.

Now that I had remained quiet for many minutes, the fears of the giant
tree frog were allayed and he called, almost within reach. I examined
every branch near me and at last saw the outline of his great goggle
eyes, standing high above his inconspicuous head. I even distinguished
a huge webbed hand, looking like a bit of splayed out moss, resting
flabbily against a bit of bark. In five minutes he rumbled forty-two
times, grouping his emotional reiterations in series of eight, with
long rests between. Steadily I watched him, until without warning, in
the midst of a deep-throated _wahrrook!_ he leaped into mid air. Only
it was not my supposed frog with the outstretched hand which sprang,
but a shapeless bit of dangling lichen a foot away, my image reverting
into moss and bark; a lifetime of carefully trained eyesight availed
nothing, even in this brilliant tropical moonlight, when pitted against
the dissolving power of a giant tree-frog. He splashed into the water,
reaching another mangrove root in two kicks, and vanished again. This
was not maxima’s usual habit of a creeping walk from leaf to leaf, now
and then leaping to a higher part of the foliage,--and I waited, and
wondered.

In front of me were several twigfuls of leaves, and just below two
curved roots, one complete from trunk to water, the second lacking a
few inches of crossing the arc of the other. The air was motionless,
the water like glass, when I distinctly saw three of the leaves move
to and fro. Then two more farther on, followed by quiet, then all
waved simultaneously, as with memory of the breeze of the past rising
tide, or anticipations of the breaths which would usher in the coming
dawn. No other leaf in sight even trembled,--only these rocked and
swung. Another vegetable miracle followed,--the shortened root began
to grow before my eyes! I had recently measured and marvelled at a
bamboo shoot which pushed steadily upward almost ten inches a day, but
here was a mere root which had added six inches to its length in half
as many minutes! Finally my dull eyes cleared, and as the detective
stories say, there was solved the mystery of the frog’s leap, the
shaking leaves and the sprouting root; a snake flowed slowly along
through the leafy twigs, over the arched root to its tip, and then,
with its suspended body, spanned the gap between it and the next root.
Long before I had even seen the moving leaves, the frog had sensed the
danger and fled.

As I watched the root apparently grow thicker, then diminish, and
finally again become a shortened segment, my memory pared down the
moon, cleared the sky of clouds, held fast to the mangroves, but raised
the flat lines of bordering jungle into rounded hills. The palms and
dark water and cool tropic air were the same, but instead of the
roar of distant howlers there came to the ear the joyous whoops of
gibbons,--the wa-was of the deep Bornean jungle.

All this leaped vividly to mind because it framed the last time I
saw a snake among mangroves. That time the snake was smaller, but its
effect was of infinitely greater moment. I was hunting Argus pheasants,
but had unwillingly allowed my interest to be temporarily distracted
by two great apes, orang-utans, which I saw now and then, and which
were remarkably tame. One of these, a small animal about half grown,
invariably retreated toward the river-bank, and then vanished. No
matter how carefully I trailed the strange little being, every trace
of him disappeared when I reached the mangrove fringe. One moonlight
night I sat upon a mangrove root, compass in hand, trying to locate a
distant calling Argus pheasant, as the correct lining-up of the bird
would be sure to bisect its dancing ground. After I had sat quietly for
a long time, something drew my eyes upward and there, high overhead,
peering down at me, was the orang, chin on hand, leaning on the edge of
his nest of branches. There was no fear in his glance,--he looked like
a meditative, aged man, who would have been more in place leaning on a
cane in a chimney corner, than on a frail platform of broken boughs in
a mangrove tree. I gradually focussed my electric flash on his face and
he blinked at the strange light. He mumbled with his lips as if talking
to himself, saying strange tree-top things about huge fireflies which
burned too brightly. Once he swept a huge hand across his face, then
sucked a great, crooked forefinger and without moving his head, rolled
his eyes upward at a passing bat.

I shut off my light and we gazed at one another in the moonlight, with
interest, but without malice or suspicion, until suddenly his twitching
lips drew together, and I saw his whole body rise and stiffen. I
followed his glance as best I could, somewhere beyond me, and before
long I saw a small snake climbing out of the water up one of the roots.
I knew it for a harmless species and after watching it draw out its
whole length of three feet, I looked upward again. Not a sound, neither
snap of twigs nor rustle of leaves had come to me, but the monkey’s
nest was empty. I could see the branches more or less clearly on all
sides for thirty feet, yet there was no hint of the great ape. The
harmless little snake had sent him off in violent but silent haste into
the jungle, whereas my presence had given him no apparent disquietude.
He was absent the following night, but the second night was back and
actually snoring before I came close enough to disturb him. I never saw
him again.

VII

THE LIFE OF DEATH

We humans stand upright, but we look straight ahead. So for a long time
I was blind to the mighty expanse of branch and foliage of my giant
tree. I had passed it often and now and then reached out and touched
it, for its mighty girth fascinated me. My Indian hunter gave me its
name, Etaballi, and my botany added the less harmonious _Vochisia_.
But it was my ear which first led my eye upward to a deep resonant
humming which filled the dim air of the jungle. The sun was clouded as
I looked, but the air was aglow with a solid dome of color, a gigantic
mound of clear gold which eclipsed all the foliage and made the tree
glorious. Humming-birds and bees, butterflies and nectar-loving wasps
were there, and their wings of feathers, scales or mica tissue churned
the air each with an individual note, the sum of which was a composite
tone of wonderful quality.

Lizards and woodhewers scampered easily up the trunk, birds and insects
flew where they willed, but I was bound to earth and by stretching
could reach at the utmost only eight feet from the ground. I could
kill any bird in the top of the tree, I could call myself one of the
Lords of Creation, but that helped not at all in my wish to study this
majestic jungle growth.

Day after day I watched new masses of flowers come into bloom. Finally,
so hopeless seemed the outlook and so marvellous appeared the teeming
life of the tree-top, that I directed two amiable murderers, who were
trail-cutting for me, to fell the jungle Etaballi. It was late when
they began and the wood proved as hard and tough as metal, so when the
warder came for them they had made but slight impression on the giant
bole.

Then using a brain far better for mechanical achievement than my own,
we evolved a plan for surmounting these ninety feet to the first limb.
The plan did what I always like plans to do--it combined the primitive
and the sophisticated. With a bow and special arrow of an Akawai
Indian, a slender cord would be shot over the branch, then a rope
pulled over, and with boatswain’s seat and pulleys the rest would be
easy.

The following day was one of great import both to the tree and myself.
Much has been written of portents and warnings, and if I should narrate
all the inexplicable things which have happened to me near the street
called Prophecy, no one would believe the more ordinary events which
occur as I traverse the avenue of Science. But in this case there was
nothing. I left my friend in the late afternoon, standing in majestic
quiet, leaves hanging motionless, although, a few hundred feet upward,
white cloudlets were scudding before a mid-heaven trade breeze. I
had seen this friendly tree lashed in tropic storms, I had watched
it by day and night; parts of five years of our lives had been spent
together, and I had seen but not observed its towering form as long ago
as sixteen years when I passed up-river for the first time.

I had left Etaballi in the dusk, with its glory of gold pouring forth a
stream of honeysuckle perfume and I looked forward to my new experiment
in the morning, having to do with scaling its height. In the night
arose one of the storms of the early rains. I heard the roar far down
the Mazaruni and looked out of my tent to see first Pegasus and then
the Pleiades erased when there sounded the patter of the first few
drops, followed by the steady, long, audible lines of downpour. Once
and only once there came a deep distant _kr-ump!_ such as used to roll
over the wide sands and drown the surf on the coast of Belgium when the
Germans were vainly strafing to the north. This single sound, as of a
subdued exclamation of some great God looking down upon the jungle, was
the only hint of anything unusual, and no one could call a far-distant
thunder mumble a portent.

Nothing is more pitifully out of place than a fallen tree. It is like
a foundered, deserted ship with decks awash, covered with a maze of
broken masts, remnants of sails and tangled rigging. Thus I found my
Etaballi, brought low, but worthy even in the manner of its fall. Human
murderers had nicked it, but the final surrender was at the demand of
one of the natural elements, whose brothers had brought the tree into
being and nourished it into maturity,--a stroke of lightning,--sister
of the sun, the rain and the winds.

Down it had come, straight to the north and cut for itself a mighty
glade. All other trees in its path, all stumps and saplings, had gone
down with it, and where for centuries had been dimness was now clear
sunlight and a great expanse of open sky. The surrounding trees leaned
far outward as if looking down with some strange arboreal sympathy for
their fallen comrade.

I walked up and down the mighty hole, I swung myself up among the high
branches, and even from those crippled, dying limbs I looked down upon
earth from as great a height as the summit of an ordinary tree. I
began to realize that in the death of my great friend I might achieve
intimacy with many unknown things.

At present all was silent except for the rustle of shrivelled leaves
and an occasional deep groan as some overstrained mass of fibres gave
way. If birds had been perched or nesting among its branches last
night, they had fled; insects had been shaken off, or were now making
their way to other trees, as rats swarm along a ratline from a sinking
vessel.

I left at once and did not return for two weeks. After that I spent
an hour or two of many days with the fallen tree, and if I could have
had my way every hour of daylight would have found me there. I wrote
and collected until my fingers and body ached, and gathered a mass of
astonishing facts which, when digested, will fill many papers with a
multitude of very true, but to the layman, very tiresome, technical
observations.

But always there kept breaking through the mist of bare happenings, of
actual blatant phenomena, glimpses of the dramatic and the romantic
side of this little cosmos. For the tree-made glade became an
individual thing, a veritable worldlet, and just as we go into a room
and to our delight find new pictures on the walls and new books on the
table, so here in my gladeroom no two days were alike.

While sitting quietly in armchair, straight back or lounge--for I had
all to order among the branches--I was forever having my attention
distracted from the business at hand of bark and wood to visitors
who came to peer or hammer, to play or to carry on their courtship
almost within arm’s reach. My angular figure and neutral garments were
apparently an excellent camouflage among the maze of branches, and
creatures came close which would have fled at first glance if I had
been standing in mid-trail.

Every class of backboned animal except fish came to my fallen tree, and
I have no doubt that to the leafy pools far down on the jungle floor,
the land-travelling minnows had already made their way. Tree-frogs
leaped past on damp, cloudy days and lizards of a half dozen species
crept about, lapping up flies and other small fodder. A green tree
snake came one day, but soon turned and went back to the protection of
the surrounding foliage. An event was when a mighty boa constrictor,
seventeen feet at the very least, weaved slowly in and out of the
tangle. When he stopped he became but one more lichen-covered liana.
In full sunlight he rested his great head flat upon a limb, and for
many minutes no branch was more lifeless. Then I walked slowly toward
him. When a few feet away he raised his head, looked at me, reached
inquiringly forward with his pliant tongue, and slowly flowed away. We
felt and showed mutual respect and each preferred to look, and then
dignifiedly to turn aside, I the richer for the meeting, for I could
add admiration and a thrill of real enthusiasm at the sight.

Monkeys came, a band of impudent Cebus, who dared descend to the branch
tips, to shake them, and with many simian oaths to challenge me to
come on. I took one step in their direction, and they fled chattering.
Birds were almost always in sight--great yellow-headed vultures who
swept down out of mid-heaven to see whether my prostrate body meant
death. Doves boomed, toucans yelped, and after the first week a berry
tree ripened its fruit, and no hour passed without flocks of parrots
screeching full-lunged and sending down a rain of pits. Humming-birds
fought overhead and fell, locked together bill and claw, at my feet;
flycatchers found my glade a happy hunting ground.

One morning when I made up my mind to let no outside sight or
sound through to my conscious concentration on the doings of the
little people of bark and wood, I was suddenly startled into utter
forgetfulness of my work. Here in the heart of the South American
jungle there were reproduced for me the steep hills and valleys of
northern Yunnan and Burma--the smells, the colors, the cold eddies
of wind from the Tibetan snows--all were recrystallized in my mind
by the notes of silver pheasants. From the underbrush behind my seat
came the unmistakable low, liquid murmurs, breaking unexpectedly into
the thrilling cackling. I dropped everything, and fifty feet away
found a pair of distracted motmots who could not make their full-grown
offspring behave, and were voicing their shattered nerves in this
amazingly pheasantine outburst.

Herein lies the threefold charm of the labor of a scientist,--its
unexpectedness, its mystery, and the eternal march of its phenomena,
approaching, occurring, and passing into ever-vivid memory.

After the first week of observation my methods of close study had
so sharpened my senses that the tree seemed to me to have passed
into a resurrection of renewed vitality. Out of its death had come
superabundant life. It recalled an observation by a stout fellow
naturalist of mine, Samson by name, made many centuries ago. Some time
after he had casually rent a lion in twain, he returned to look at the
beast, and “behold there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcass
of the lion.”

No part of it from underground roots to shrivelled topmost foliage
was free from a flutter and bustle of vibrant beings. Thousands upon
thousands of lives would cease and their races become extinct were it
not for the occasional death of such a jungle giant as this.

An hour of undiluted, blazing sun drove me back to the splintered stump
for shelter. I walked around and around it and then mounted it and fell
to studying the cross-section smoothed by the skilful ax-blows of my
friends the dusky criminals. I counted carefully, marking every century
with a smudge of ink from my fountain pen, and when I had reached the
very heart, I stood up and looked at the mighty Etaballi with renewed
awe. I felt as if I had been unduly familiar with a stranger who was
suddenly revealed as some very famous, very great historical character.
For when this huge plant first broke from its seed and took root in
this very spot where I stood, Genghis Khan became emperor of the
Mongols. When its first leaves struggled for light and air the Crusades
were at their height; on the opposite side of the world troubadours
and minnesingers were making music, and Columbus and his voyages were
still three centuries in the future.

For many minutes I remained quiet, held in wonder at the long centuries
of human achievement. Then I returned to the watching of the life
of today. I saw the excited creatures coming over the ground, along
tangled branches or upon swift wings, and I saw that they were
marvellously equipped, forearmed.

As I pondered on these mysteries and watched a sliver of a beetle
crawling on the bark, human history blurred, faded and passed from
mind. When Genghis Khan reigned, the beetle’s ancestors were doing
exactly what he is doing; double the years and Attila was making
precedent for his successors--and identical beetle slivers crawled over
dead bark. Ten times the years of this tree take us back beyond human
history, add twenty or one hundred times its length of life, when our
forebears were fighting to lift themselves above the other beasts, and
in all probability not the slightest change could have been detected in
the color, size, shape or habits of the flat predecessors of the tiny
beetle under my lens.

When the bark begins to loosen a whole world comes by day and by
night to creep beneath, and begin all the mysterious rites and
achievements which fate allots to creatures of the under bark. All
are positively thigmotactic which, as I once explained, is having the
irresistible desire to touch or be touched by something, above, below,
and--a thigmotac’s greatest joy--on all sides at once. Twice I have
experienced this and found it very terrible; the first time when I
crept out of Cheops by the ancient, rubbish-obscured robbers’ entrance,
when sharp bits of alabaster so held me for a time that I could not
move, and my imagination pictured the whole weight of the mighty
pyramid pressing upon me. Another time was near the end of an obstacle
race on a Toyo Kisen Keisha steamer, when each competitor, after
fifteen minutes of constant, exhausting stunts on three decks, had to
creep through a long, canvas ventilator laid flat on the deck. Half-way
through, with the second man at my heels, I felt the canvas tube become
narrower where an old tear had been sewn up, and my shoulders, even
when pressed together, held the tube taut. Lungs full of coal dust,
my blood beating in my ears like turbines,--no danger from savages or
adventure with wild animals which I could recall, had ever given me a
more ghastly minute.

I returned from my first day at the tree with a dozen beetles, and
from a glance at them pinned in my collection, I can with certainty
interpret their respective walks or creeps or crawls of life. A
number are thin, but one is so amazingly flat that I am preserving it
carefully among a few choice wonders of the insect world.

It is a small beetle, black and shiny as a new jet bead. It is oblong,
and only by the most careful scrutiny can the faint details of the
head, wings and body be detected. They seem no more than surface
scratches and put to shame the most delicate watch or Japanese carving.
I turn the beetle sideways and he becomes a mere black line, less in
diameter than the slender pin which supports him. The under surface
shows a more complex maze of lines, marking where jaws, antennæ, legs
and feet are stowed away. He is a third of an inch long and a fiftieth
thick. But above and below he wears his skeleton outside--a solid
sheath of dense, hard chitin, and if we conservatively allot half of
his thickness to this external armor, we have a space one hundredth
of an inch into which is packed in perfect working order muscles for
spinning his wings, walking, twiddling his antennæ and grinding his
jaws; brain, nerves, eyes and other sense organs, mouth, stomach and
intestine, and, if a lady beetle, ovaries whose scores of eggs are
brought to maturity, with an intricate apparatus for depositing them.
On another day I caught a wafer of an earwig whose bust measurement
compared with its inch length, would, translated into human height,
make a person just two inches in thickness. All the compactness of
these shavings of vitality, these slivers of life, is in anticipation
of the death of such a tree as this and the subsequent loosening of the
bark.

Other beetles are antitheses of the first one, each a tiny cylinder
with every surface rounded and every organ curved. The outer armor
is a rich, glowing mahogany with a scattering of golden hairs and an
absurd tail-piece, round, blunt and jagged. I did not realize the
perfection of this arrangement, until, during the second week, I came
upon a whole flock of these little chaps in their tunnels. After dark
a flash-light showed only a tiny shaft driven into the heart of the
wood, surrounded by cores of white, chewed-up wood pulp, but the moment
the light struck down the hole, the faintest of shuffling could be
heard by placing one’s ear close, and like magic the hole vanished. The
inmate had somehow detected the unwelcome light and had hastily backed
up and plugged the entrance with himself. Now, looking at the pinned
insect, the funny, round, jagged end-piece, so silly and meaningless
in itself, resolved into a perfection of adaptation. No one could jump
his claim! Beetles like these are stolid folk, wholly lacking a sense
of humor, and they go through life, deliberately, directly, with never
a side-wise glance or a light thought. In all this they have much in
common with turtles.

Quick as the beetles were to take advantage of the new manna, others
were before them, and I believe the very first comers were small,
flat, wingless roaches, which scurried away as I lifted bits of
bark. Roaches form the conservative wing of the insect world, and
have many characteristics of certain persecuted human races. They
are found everywhere, contented with a safe, middle course of life,
seldom aspiring to size or bright colors, never attacking or even
defending themselves, or putting on side in their life-histories.
Once a cockroach always a cockroach is their motto. They have no
responsibility of grub or pupal stage, and from the Palæozoic Age,
unknown millions of years ago, to the present moment when one scuttled
from the flood of light which I threw into his refuge, roaches have
changed but little.

After the roaches or with them, for they resent no company provided
they are allowed to creep and thigmotac in safety, came the wedges and
gimlets of beetles, and in the next two weeks successions of stages
of these hard-backs. First all but invisible eggs, then pale grubs
squirming about in the fermenting wood, and finally a dynasty when the
bark catacombs were filled with groups of stiff little mummies.

I excavated the débris in a deep hollow in the tree which once had
been a hundred feet above the ground, and experienced something of the
thrill of those who delve into ancient cities. At the top was a layer
of twigs and leaves shaken up by the concussion of the fall. An inch or
two below I found many berry pits and fruit seeds and when I scooped
out several handfuls there came to light a dried and shriveled carcass,
unmistakable in beak and foot--a nestling toucan which had never
lived to fly and yelp and pluck bright berries in the sunlight of the
tree-tops. Down I went again, into the very bottom of this nest midden,
and there came upon rotten chips and soft, downy feathers. Among them
were two, broken, stiff tail feathers which could have come only from
one bird, the giant Guiana woodpecker, almost half a yard in length,
with bill of ivory, and plumage of black, scarlet and white. No one
could tell whether these birds nested in this stub within the decade,
or when Galileo faced the Inquisition,--for the age of the supporting
limbs made such latitude possible.

Still another discovery was left in my arboreal palimpest. I was
crumbling up the wood near the top of the hollow stub, where, long
ago, it had been reduced by heat, water, fungi and insects to a rich,
dark, pulpy mass. Suddenly, over a tiny chip, a weird little face
peered at me, and a minute millipede, scurrying past, pushed over the
wooden screen and exposed the quaintest being in the world. It was a
doll or mummy--even the most technical scientist would admit the first,
for he would call it a pupa, which was what little Roman children
called their dolls. Being an average pupa it was motionless, and,
propped up by accident against the dark, red background, it presented
a multiple personality,--one thought of angel, curate, banker, clown,
simultaneously. Around its head was an absurdly perfect replica of a
halo, then came two mournfully sloped eyes, dark brown, sad, stolid;
just midway down their diameter two translucent shields curved across,
giving the little being the appearance of peering over horn-rimmed
glasses; mouth parts were encased in crystalline coverings, a mouth
which drooped at the corners--one felt that nought in past experience
or future hope could ever twist that expression into a smile. Palpi
were draped in each side like the side whiskers of a financier of the
’eighties. The two front legs, bent, with tips touching and elbows out,
were laughably, like the comic paper idea of a country curate with
finger tips spread and touching, gazing sadly over his glasses at some
regretted irregularity of life. Then came the opal-sheathed wings,
sweeping around in a beautiful curve across the whole of the underbody,
as in old prints of guardian angels. Finally the tapering body-segments
and their tip, fashioned in projecting styles. A hasty movement of mine
sent down a shower of bits of wood, and buried the pupa. Carefully
I uncovered him in his deep dark cavern and as I removed the last
concealing chip, my little mummy gave me an unexpected surprise. From
the hinder part of his body gleamed two dull lights, shining with
a strong, steady glow, and illuminating the magenta walls of his
sarcophagus. No wonder the appearance of these little chaps recalled
most remarkable trilobite-like pupæ which I had found years ago in
mid-Borneo, which proved to be firefly larvæ. I forgot all the comedy
of halo, horn-glasses and finger tips, and with a little awe and much
enthusiasm I watched the greenish-yellow shine. In the egg there is
the first faint kindling--a dim, evanescent, rush-light glow; and here
in the pupa, although it would have to wait perhaps many weeks before
attaining adult beetlehood, its little lamps were trimmed and steadily
alight, burning low it is true, and without the lighthouse rhythm of
flash and blackness, flash and blackness. Already it was preparing
for the all-important responsibility when upon the illumination would
depend the chances of a mate and the future of its race.

The light of fireflies is one of the few things in this world which
merit the term _perfect_. A gas flame is only three percent efficient,
developing ninety-seven percent of useless, invisible heat or chemical
rays; the blazing glare of the electric arc is only ten percent of what
it ought to be, and most astonishing of all is the fact that sunshine
gives off only thirty-five percent of visible light rays. Unlike
Stevenson’s “Lantern Bearers” the glow, deep-cloaked within the body
of a firefly is wholly lacking in heat; it is one hundred percent pure
flame.

I returned to the loosening bark and found that close upon the heels of
the beetles came thrips, although these stout little fellows preferred
the high, arched, dead branches to the main prostrate trunk. Few people
have ever seen a thrips, but those who can find delightful the sound
of the world itself have part compensation. When the time comes and
one has seen and enjoyed a live thrips or a thousand thrips, then
life will have acquired a new molecule of pleasure. If I say the word
comes thrippingly to the tongue, it is only because I have just
been consorting with a host of thrips, and their joy of life, their
apparent love of play is infectious. Thrips are among the lesser folk
of earth and if one attains the length of a third of an inch he is a
Goliath of a thrips. But this, apparently like everything in nature,
is comparative, for a thrips barely a fifth of an inch in length may
harbor two hundred parasitic worms, who doubtless consider their host
as gigantic. These tiny creatures are peculiar in many ways, as for
example in their name which is both singular and plural. Also for
unknown, but comparatively long periods of time, male thrips are wholly
superfluous both for the continuance of the race, or companionship, or
whatever other functions gentlemen thrips may be fitted to perform. In
loyalty to my sex I pass this by, thoughtfully but without comment.

In the sizzling midday sun I first became aware that the era of
thrips had arrived at my fallen tree. It seemed as if the samisen
cicada players and myself were the only things awake in the world.
The bark under my eyes suddenly assumed a salmon hue and my lens
showed uncountable hosts of minute, scarlet thrips, all doing a
frantic, zoroastrian dance. They were slender bits of life, with
nondescript head and a tapering body looking like a string of scarlet
buttons. They ran swiftly to and fro on their six legs, holding the
body high aloft or thrashing it from side to side. Sometimes a half
dozen thrashed together, in some diminutive wild rhythm, or two
circled around each other, or antennæd some thripian scandal. Under
the shoulder of one bit of bark dust three infant thrips practiced
thrashing (a good tongue-twisting phrase!) until I tired of watching.
All these were larvæ, or rather immature thrips, scarlet and wingless.
Now every young insect with which I have ever been acquainted had
thought and action only for food, but here was a whole generation of
thrips--all under age--dancing and whirling about and waving their wild
tails for hours during the hottest part of several days. I thought well
of thrips for this unique casualness.

Every now and then an adult thrips appeared, somewhat larger, glossy
black with scarlet seams and four marvellous wings. As wings they
seemed hopelessly inadequate, but as ornaments they had much merit. If
a crow were to shed all his wing feathers and was provided instead with
four, small ostrich plumes, we would not expect him to fly. A mature
thrips sports four delicate feathers with narrow shafts and wide, soft
fringes down each side.

I was once astonished to see a bony horse hitched to a decrepit car,
slowly traversing a cross street in New York City, and learned that
it was a mere gesture, a childish fulfilling of certain legal phrases
in order to hold the franchise of the horse-car line. I recalled this
when I saw an adult thrips coming through the air, slowly, uncertainly,
with dangling body and pitiful feather wings barely sustaining the
owner. This too was a gesture, a needless effort, for he landed heavily
on the same branch, quite exhausted, a few feet away from the point
of departure. On foot he could have made the distance quickly and
with little exertion. Again I admired the thrips, for as in his youth
he had played and danced as well as eaten, so now in adult phase he
made the beau geste--the pitiful clinging to the franchise of his
volant ancestors. His wings might be dwarfed by disuse, frayed by
degeneration, but he could still cast with shrivelled muscles a shadow
of past achievements.

The coming of the thrips was sudden, their ways were inexplicable,
their going wholly mysterious. One day there were uncounted millions.
Shortly afterward, needing a new more notes on their activities
I went out and found every one gone,--not a single one remained.
In their haunts were growths of evil-looking fungi, semi-liquid
drops of scarlet trembling on yellow stalks, and around and among
these sinister growths crept vast numbers of extremely small mites.
These--plant and animal--were in turn evanescent and lasted but two
days, but the going of the thrips will never be explained,--whether by
migration, poison from the omnipotent fungus, or, as with so many other
peoples of earth, through enervating lives of ease.

By sense of smell I could tell that radical chemical changes were going
forward in the fallen tree. At first the glade was filled with the tang
of aromatic wood, the clean, fresh odor of new split plant tissues;
then the sap became heated and fermentation set in. The first stages
were unpleasant, musty and acrid, but finally a malty whiff developed,
which during my hours of research, awoke exhilarating pre-prohibition
memories. If my coarse sense could detect these successive changes,
what staggering olfactory blows must have been dealt to the delicate
flies which came with the first hint of ruptured plant cells. Unlike
the beetles they undertook their business in life with an apparent
joyousness, and like the thrips they all had an inordinate love of the
dance. It is a strange thing that at carrion and decaying wood we find
so much graceful and intricate action, such varied courtship, so much
effort only indirectly concerned with the odorous maelstrom which has
summoned them all together. The visitors to beautiful and sweet-scented
flowers and fruit, on the contrary, come and sip and leave, without
delay or distraction.

I soon realized that I could spend all my time for at least a year on
the study of the flies alone which came to the fallen tree. For ten
mornings there came hundreds of small marble-wings, which wave their
two, parti-colored banners alternately about. I looked closer and saw
that they were clustered in groups of six to twelve, or more usually
seven to thirteen. All the fortunate ones who had secured a mate were
busy every moment protecting her from roaming males. The female fly
had very short legs on which she walked briskly about, searching for
suitable crevices to deposit her eggs. Her mate, on his elongated legs,
stalked just above her, apparently anticipating every move. The pair
would progress by quick, short spurts until a wing-waving stranger
hove in sight. No introduction or preliminary challenge was necessary.
The newcomer rushed up and tried to butt the husband out of the way.
The rightful fly would haunch his thorax and brace his legs, for all
the world like a football player meeting interference. Running swiftly
around, the assailant would make another attempt on the opposite side.
Meanwhile the female, apparently oblivious of all this strife on
the second floor, went calmly on her way, making the engagement very
confused and ineffective by thus constantly shifting the field of
battle.

We should emphasize this admirable, domestic preoccupation to the
full, for otherwise it pains me to record a lamentable lack of
Lucystonism. The lady flies seemed indeed to care little what might be
the outcome of the battles. When, now and then, her faithful guardian
was overthrown and pushed into outer loneliness, the new protector was
accepted without demur. In fact her bark-searching position allowed her
glimpses of little more than the ankles of her Lord and Master, and it
must indeed be difficult to be deeply moved emotionally by choice of
ankles alone.

The battling of the mates was as it should be and has been since the
beginning of time--brave gentlemen waging war over the weaker sex, but
what shall we say of another group of seven where the seventh was an
ignored wall flower! The poor little virgin did not accept her neglect
in humble resignation, but proved herself a militant feminist, and made
one attempt after another to drag her more fortunate sisters from the
protection of their towering mates. She was always rebuffed and the
last I saw of her, she was washing her face and hands, fly-fashion,
after an ignominious tumble into a thimbleful of dirty water, which
is fly-size for lake. How I longed to tell her of a scene being
enacted only a few inches away, where I observed the meeting of two
lonely bachelors. They began a most terrific head-pulling contest,
until finally they separated unharmed and quite exhausted, and went
peacefully off, perhaps realizing that after all in their case there
was nothing in particular to fight about.

From a fly’s eye height I looked down the prostrate trunk with twenty
or thirty groups of tussling marble-wings in sight, their earnest but
futile efforts to injure one another very comic to my eyes, but to them
as serious as only fate can be serious.

Other flies had very different ensigns and dances. In one the wings
were divided lengthwise, the front half being black, the rear
transparent. These wandered singly over the bark and as they went, they
swung first to one side, then to the other, at each swing opening out
the wing on that side. The movement was exactly that of a skater taking
long, oblique strokes, and swinging his arms far out to the side (a
simile which could have no meaning for any native of this country).
When two flies meet they do the outer edge around one another, closing
in to battle if of the same sex, or to courtship if of the opposite.
Others are perky peacock flies, with head and tail lifted in a position
of eternal alertness, who slither along without perceptible individual
leg motion, going sideways or backwards with equal ease. Their battle
technique is like that of the bulldog, leaping from a distance, but the
ferocity of their intent far exceeds their power of injury, and they
bounce harmlessly off each other. They remind me of

“Empusa’s crew, so naked-new, they may not face the fire,
But weep that they bin too small to sin to the height of their desire.”

The creatures who come to gnaw and chew the dead wood are only one
component of the complex maelstrom of life, siphoned hither by the
smell of sap and decaying bark. One day an army of white fungus tents
sprang up on a rotting branch, and a foot away even my poor human sense
could detect a mildewy odor from them. Hundreds of insects scattered
far and wide through the jungle, to whom the infinitely more powerful
sap smell had meant nothing, were now vitalized into instant action,
and there came into existence a whirlpool within the maelstrom. Great
wine-colored beetles and smaller ones of various pigments, gathered in
scores, dancing flies which were never seen on bark or carrion were
summoned, and strange short-winged beings with scarlet tips to their
slender bodies which they waved in mid-air like mock torches. As I knew
from past experience the delicate, lace umbrellas would last only three
days, and I watched with interest the race which these vital beings ran
against time. No tunnels or mines for them, no prolonged courtship, but
a quick mating and depositing of eggs which became grubs or maggots
almost on the instant. Two days later, grubs were eating and molting
with frenzied haste, and on the third day, when their nutritious
shelters blackened and melted away, the larvæ dropped with them into
the mat of leaf mold beneath.

The dilettante flies of the fungus puzzled me. Theirs were aerial
dances, and for hour after hour they swung and feinted, swooped or
hung like motionless motes. This mystery was solved when I took a
number of the beetle pupæ to the laboratory and confined them in a
glass observation dish. In a few days, instead of beetles, out came
dancing flies. No wonder they had no need of haste; as parasites they
could batten at leisure on others’ labors. I looked askance at the
rich regard of life and the new generation granted to what my Puritan
fore-fathers would have decried as sinful, ungodly gaiety.

Returning again to my bark I found a hundred similar cases. Spiders and
wasps and many other enemies were gathering. Day by day the chains of
life were forged longer and longer. Within my first week at the tree I
could write the following from direct observation:

This is the bird
That caught the lizard
That ate the wasp
That stung the spider
That sucked the fly
That killed the grub
The son of the beetle
That gnawed the tree
That fell in the storm at Kartabo.

Or to be more technically explicit:

This is the Attila
That caught the Cnemidophorus
That ate the Pompilid
That stung the Ctenid
That sucked the Tachinid
That killed the immature Coleopteron
The son of the Elater
That gnawed the Vochisia
That fell in the meteorological disturbance of Kartabo.

And so the wonderful adventure went on. It had happened a thousand
thousand times, and for uncounted miles in all directions were untold
numbers of these trees whose lives would sooner or later terminate.
My Etaballi, whose roots reached deep into the ground, and more than
seven centuries into time, was dissolving. Bark and branch, sap and
heartwood, by the alchemy of life were being rekneaded into a host of
lesser beings--crawling, flying, dull and brilliant, hard and soft,
clever and stupid, and as these poured forth from crevice or tunnel,
cocoon or pupa, and their gauzy wings dried, their armor crystallized
into malachite or emerald, there confronted them enemies in every guise
and form. And presently the substance of the Etaballi, translated into
the bodies of the borers, was resurrected into spider, lizard and bird.

[Illustration: “The giant Etaballi fell last night”]

Now and then I turn back to my journal for May the twelfth, and read
the sentence: “The giant Etaballi fell last night.” Science, Religion,
Philosophy--how clear all these would be if we could solve this one
mystery. I had hoped for some faint clew to the meaning of it all. I
left my tree for the last time certain only of the profound inadequacy
of my human mind.

OLD-TIME PEOPLE

PART I--FACT

A volcano in eruption and a jungle monkey--nothing can ever quite
prepare our minds for the first sight of these. Neither the crude
wood-cut of Vesuvius in our old school geography, nor the latest
colored moving picture of Kilauea, adumbrates the awe of the silent,
ascending line of smoke, or the nocturnal glow of fires, old as earth
itself is old. Your canoe slips through the reflection of everhanging
jungle, and you suddenly spy a little face peering out from the
fronds,--a face wistful, serious, grave as with the weight of planetary
responsibilities; and so human that you feel that somewhere in its
past it too could tell of an Eden tragedy. If not an apple, it must at
least have nibbled a berry of some little vine of self-consciousness.
How unlike the immobile features of the deer and rodents and jungle
cats is this sober, anxious little ego! And how vividly our orchid
climbing days return when we see a family of bandarlog swarming up a
liana. These miniatures of ourselves seem to climb as easily against
gravitation as we loll down hill with it.

This Guiana jungle is a strange and wonderful place when we think of
it from the view-point of its monkey tenants. Their floors are swaying
vines and bending branches, their roofs green waving fans and banners.
Their nearer neighbors are humming-birds and leaf-winged butterflies,
gaudy toucans and screeching parrots. Far up through skylights they
catch glimpses of vultures, soaring a mile above earth, and yet with
eyes so keen that an accidental headlong fall to earth of any little
monkey would bring a score of hungry ghouls. Through the skylight, too,
hurtles swift death,--harpy eagles, whose grip is the end.

The jungle sends up enormous trees, one hundred, two hundred feet,
among the branches of some of which fifteen hundred generations of
monkeys have gambolled. If these stood like oaks in a meadow, isolated
and alone, the four-handed ones would perish or have to take to the
ground. But lignum vitæ rather than arbor vitæ should be the simian’s
password, for the vines which bind together the whole tropical forest
are the way of life of the monkey. By means of the untold fathoms of
ratlines and suspension bridges, tight ropes and ladders, these jungle
people can range for thousands of miles without ever coming to earth,
living in the realm of orchids and birds’ nests, of sloths and tree
lizards.

Their very name has come to be a byword, although, like their physical
bodies in past ages, it is bound to us etymologically by monna and
madonna. We laugh at their comic little faces and ways and, if we are
incurably fanatic or quite egocentric, or fearful of what comes after
death, we indignantly deny all past kinship of a common ancestor. On
the other hand, if we love the truth and have a sense of humor, we
recognize that these little jungle folk have missed being human by some
very little accident, being, but for the grace of some side-tracking,
ourselves. And while we swagger upright and think of our brains with
complacency, are we sure that all the advantage is on our side?

As with us, the whole of the lives of these monkeys is one long
struggle against gravitation. They are born and weaned, they play and
fight, they eat and sleep, in midair far from the ground, and only when
death comes, do the tiny fingers relax and headlong they slip through
fronds and leaves to the earth itself. This same eternal pull of earth
holds us completely in thrall at birth, then we roll over, struggle to
hands and knees and creep reptile-like for a space. At last we rise
upon unsteady soles and from three to seventy we walk or run, swinging
our arms to balance us, frequently tumbling to earth again, exhausted
after a few hours and sinking upon chair or bed to gather strength
against another day of upright struggle.

The joys of climbing, of balance, of swaying limbs, of headlong leaps
from self-earned lofty vistas, pass with boyhood for most of us. They
are renewed for me sometimes when I mount the ratlines of a ship
plunging through heavy seas, or in the first rush of a nose dive from
high in air.

We cheat the power of earth with elevators, though to do so we must
call upon the lightning or waters for aid. Instead of holding to
clean-barked boughs, swaying aloft in the sunlight, we creep beneath
the ground and dangle unsteadily from dirty straps. In place of
plucking our fruit fresh from its native stem and eating it amid the
green glow of its own foliage, we barter for its shrivelled pulp sealed
in cans of tin. We gape at and applaud those of our kind who dare, upon
tight-rope or trapeze, feats which any self-respecting monkey would
smack her child for thus bungling.

The Capuchin, the bourgeois organ-grinder’s friend, in past years now
and then climbed our gutter-pipe and at the reminding jerk on his
cord, pitifully doffed his little cap and took our pennies. Here in
his home we tame him and bind him to us with affection, so that with
full liberty he chooses his sleeping box on our laps. He is silent,
and gentle and serious like the coolies who work on the coastal
rice-plantations.

This is, of course, merely generalization, comparable to the immortal
description, “The French are a gay and polite people, fond of dancing
and light wines.” Anyone who has been a friend to creatures,--dogs,
birds, monkeys or any other of our quaint companions in this curious
world,--knows that individuals vary in disposition and temperament only
less than what we are pleased to call the highest order, Man.

_Some_ Capuchins are silent; we have known some whose garrulity tried
our patience and our hearing. There was once a man who took a cage
to the African jungle and so far reversed the usual procedure as to
enter it himself, while the gorillas congregated outside,--or so he
hoped,--to gaze on the strange sight. His purpose was to study the
language of gorillas. One suspects that the vocabulary thus acquired
would be chiefly of a scurrilous nature, but who is so lacking in a
sense of justice as to grudge the apes a chance to get even at last?

We have acquired some knowledge of monkey talk, especially from our
Capuchin pets. It does not seem an extensive tongue but the same
sound can, as with us, be given many different meanings by inflection,
pantomime, or even facial expression. When one of our small Cebus
friends is confronted by some terrifying sight, such as a monstrous
iguana, he springs away precipitately, wide-open mouth expelling on a
sharp breath a guttural hissing grunt. Engaged with us in a game of tag
around the laboratory, he sometimes finds himself cornered; then he
emits the same sound, but no one could now take it for an expression of
fear. It is much prolonged, without the abrupt tone of real terror, and
his white teeth gleam in his open mouth in an unmistakable grin as he
capitulates and flings himself confidently into our outstretched hands.

[Illustration: “One wistful little chap”]

One wistful little chap who was once a member of the laboratory family
would sustain his part in serious discussion for minutes at a time.
To open the conversation, one had only to approach him closely, look
him in the eye, and smack the lips gently and repeatedly. To this he
never failed to respond in kind, but much more rapidly than human lips
could move, wrinkling his brows mightily the while with the effort of
concentration, and occasionally varying his remarks by an emphatic
shake of the head and a curious throaty chuckle with a falling cadence,
which sounded for all the world as though he demanded briefly,
“Whatcher got?”

Monkeys have bad dreams, nightmares that perhaps are shared by us.
Often in the evening I have been distracted from some microscopic
business in hand by a clamor from the compound, and going out have seen
a pitiful monkey face, with frightened drowsy eyes peering anxiously
for insubstantial bugbears, and heard small whimpers of allayed
distress as nervous little hands clung to my solid and reassuring
fingers.

Most Capuchins have in their repertoires some almost bird-like tones of
clear twitters and chirrups, and, when they are particularly anxious
to be noticed, a sweet call, Coo-coo-coo, whose blandishment it is
difficult to resist. This same phrase, loud and prolonged is the call
of the clan when widely separated in the jungle. It carries over half a
mile.

The Beesa monkey, like the native Indian, is a silent mystery. Neither
likes close confinement, and no emotion is shown by their placid,
inscrutable faces. The young do not understand the strange new beings
who have come into their lives, and soon pine away; as long as they
live they are extremely affectionate, but mentally dull and timid.

Beesas are strange-looking beasts. The fur is black, very long and
coarse, the tail appearing as large around as the whole body. The
face is purplish-brown, surrounded in the adult, with a great ruff of
yellowish-white. The young Beesa is more frowsy and less judicial in
appearance. They roam through mid-jungle heights, a single great male
leading his harem of five or six females, while as many half-grown
youngsters trail behind. As they climb from tree to tree, sliding
down vines or scaling steep aerial ladders, they utter a low, abrupt,
penetrating grunt or cough sounding like a faint, dull blow of wood on
wood, which ordinarily would never be noticed among the rustling of
leaves and the occasional thump of a falling fruit or dead branch. When
alarmed they slip away rapidly, and so short are their legs and so long
their fur that they seem to flow instead of walk along the branches.

The squirrel monkeys or sackawinkis are, next to the marmosets, the
smallest of the Guiana monkeys. Their noses appear to have been dipped
into an ink bottle, and their brains into spirits of ammonia. They are
living springs, never running down, but withal sober and silent in
their contacts with life and ourselves.

There seems to be in some respects a relation between size and
intelligence, not only as in elephants and shrews, but in monkeys. The
marmosets,--tiny, furry, nervous little beings, are very stupid, food
and safety occupying their almost every moment.

The monkey of monkeys of this jungle is the big red Howler. He lives
in families, and when the great male raises his head and in the light
of early dawn sends forth his mighty voice, its reverberations are
distinctly audible three miles away. His tail is long and full-muscled,
and the bare skin beneath its tip has lines and cushions which tell of
things forever lost to us. The color of the long, silky hair is that
of the gold nuggets in the streams which trickle through the jungle
far below, and the emotions of our tame young Howler are those of a
very young child,--he is curious, timid, resentful, excitable, greedy,
affectionate, serious; as fond of lifting his voice in anger or joy as
a negro at a revival and as volatile as a twenty-four-hour thermometer
chart in a desert. Jungle monkeys, and an active volcano,--see them
before you die, or you will have missed two splendid thrills in life.

PART II--THEORY

A little monkey climbed down a swaying vine, hand over hand, until
his face was close to a quiet pool of sweet water. The day before at
evening, he had done the same thing. His mother and his ancestors for
generations had done likewise. And always they chattered at the monkey
they saw in the water, and finally in anger snatched at him, and their
little fingers troubled the water and the monkey vanished. Then they
drank eagerly, turned quickly, and clambered swiftly up to rest.

Today the little monkey began to chatter, then stopped. He moved, and
the monkey in the water moved. He brushed away some hairs from his face
and the water monkey. Then something happened. He stopped chattering
and peered again and again at the face in the water. He put his little
paw over his eyes and slowly took it away. Then he forgot his thirst,
raised his head and gazed fixedly before him, wrinkling his forehead
and remaining very quiet. And the more distant his gaze, the less he
seemed to observe, and the deeper became the wrinkles.

The night came quickly and the tragedies of the darkness began. The
little monkey had long ago forgotten his momentary abstraction and was
curled in a slumbering ball high among the dense foliage of a jungle
tree.... If there is such a thing as prophecy; if the first beginnings
of great and momentous things make themselves felt abroad, then the
cool night wind carried with it more than the scent of orchids and the
calls of the night folk. It must have vibrated with the sense of the
end of a great regime. The dominance of animals was tottering, the
beginning of the end of earthly evolution. Something introspective
had come to pass--a glimpse of the ego--a momentary flash of self
consciousness. The little face in the water was not really another
monkey. And the end of this realization was to be man.

But one such revelation was of no avail, and whether the little monkey
was finally caught by his arch enemies--the serpents or leopards--or
sometime slipped and fell into his pool we shall never know. But his
memory can never die, for he was the first Seer; his eyes were the
first to look Beyond and Within.

Then the new thing happened to great ape-like creatures. Day after day
they would stop in their swift, hand over hand swinging through the
tree-tops and gaze into space for a moment. These primitive _penseurs_
were at a disadvantage, for when their less psychic brethren caught
them off guard they promptly crept up and slew them. But relentless and
remorseless as the waters of the open sea, these waves of abstraction
rolled on. And like bits of drifting wreckage, came tossed and tumbled
thoughts, dumb and inarticulate, groping and quite inadequate for any
use.

The first periods of self-realization were like trances or
obsessions, wholly subconscious and involuntary. For that which we have
not conceived, we cannot intentionally formulate. With feet and hands
clasped about branches, the great ape beings swayed back and forth in
the ecstasy of day dreams. Then from the inward view, the inner sight
with unseeing eyes of what they could not name, they came gradually to
look again upon the outer world. And now was wrought the great change,
for linked ideas flashed upon their confused brain, twin stars of
thought which in their grand-apesons might evolve into knowledge of
cause and effect, and the greatest of all things thoughtful-correlation.

Against single thinkers, the thoughtless ones could easily prevail.
And all the more easily because in the beginning it was as it shall be
in the end--the law of compensation allots brawn to one, and mind to
another, as dominant attributes. This abstraction was a thing apart,
and unlike all other changes which had come in the past. When one
stumbled upon a new way of opening cocoanuts, or experienced witless
facility in walking upright for a few steps, one naturally kept the
knowledge to oneself. Why should any new-found ability be shared! But
these disturbing, inexplicable trances often led to a greater interest
in one’s neighbor or one’s mate.

Ah, one’s mate! One had not thought of this before, except as a
pleasing something to be kept near one. Blindly one had captured it
somehow and one felt that one would tear that fellow ape apart with
teeth and sheer muscle if he came nearer one’s mate; and if ... but
here some buzzing fly was sure to distract, or a troublesome itching
of one’s back which required one’s whole attention, and then, ... well
there was always something else, or food or sleep.

Not only to the great bull apes came these lightning glimpses of self,
but to the females. But there was a difference. The correlation was
direct. The momentary loss due to introspection was all but negatived
by the instantaneous return to the objective: a return which was
like the ascent of the diver with his pearl: a swift recovery of
consciousness leavened with the unfathomable mystery of intuition. And
through all the throes of thought conception, when bull apes travailed
with wrinkled brows and aching heads for the sustained glimmer which
ever faded and died out, their mates went about, ambling on crooked
knuckles, and their little pig eyes shot swiftly their message to one
another--they understood.

They understood and waited quietly. And for this waiting they shall
have naught but praise, superlative praise. For it is not difficult to
wait in ignorance. Thus the crystal waits for its perfect growth: the
seed for the century-delayed warmth and water. But with understanding
to have patience: to feel, however dumbly and blindly, the future of
equality, of splendid unanimity of interest and respect, and to play
one’s hopeless, inarticulate part and wait--this is very wonderful.

And this was the part of the female apes, and the ape women. And the
difference between these was too fine for any written words. But as
nearly as may be it was the difference between waiting, and waiting
with understanding. And there were ape women when as yet there were no
ape men for them to mate with. They followed the law and accepted any
bull ape who broke through their subconscious restraint--that restraint
and appraisement which worked for evolution a hundred thousand years
ago--and will tomorrow. So the bulls continued to come wooing like
great brutal things of lust and brawn. And the ape women, with a last
sidewise glance at their sisters, went with them.

And the bull apes, they too obeyed the law, and performed the three
functions of their life--they sought their food, escaped their enemies,
and enjoyed their mates. But they also did a fourth thing equally
important in the long run, which was hardly classifiable, because it
was instinctive and its selfishness obscured by heredity. They killed
every weakling, or crippled bull or disabled female. One great brawny
female had to use tooth and muscle to save her baby. Thus for once the
law failed. And the failure of the law was due to intuition. And this
was the second great result of the vision of the Seer.

The bulls had made but little use of their new-found self-realizations.
But now the ape woman fought for her babe’s life and won. Weak and
small he certainly was, but he possessed wonderful quickness, and
every pursuit and attempt on his life was unsuccessful. And he grew up
and became a failure as an ape. For he tired of catching flies, and
scratching and sunning and sleeping did not seem to fill up all the
hours of daylight. He played with stones and gathered them in heaps,
and then fled. For at this point all the bull apes in sight, having
forgotten yesterday’s identical experience, rushed up, expecting that
such labor must mean new-found food. Then he found hollow trees and
beat upon them for hours with palm or stick. But he sought no mate,
which was perhaps fortunate, for he would doubtless have returned
maimed, or else been slain outright by the outraged female.

Then one day came to pass the third wonderful thing. A great woman,
who had left her fang marks on every bull who had tried to woo her,
came shuffling along and joined the weakling. He fled only a short
distance and then returned fearlessly. For deceit and treachery were
still to be evolved, and when the mighty ape woman showed favor to
him he knew that it was truth. He accepted her, and continued to fear
the world and to potter about with his stones, and bright-colored
blossoms, and his banging of hollow trees. Then he commenced making
club-like affairs, and sat outside the burrows of small animals and
smashed them when they appeared. And one day he smashed the head of a
female ape, who, following the fourth law had attempted to slay him,
the unbearable weakling. Her mate was roused to such a pitch, that his
self-consciousness dominated and he hunted his victim down. And this
was the end of the weakling, who yet had carried out his destiny.

When the great ape woman bore a child, it fulfilled the promise of the
little monkey’s first ecstasy. The prophecy of the night wind had come
to pass. Here was balance of brawn and mind. Against his twin thoughts,
his correlation, his weapons, his resources, opponents melted away. And
this first ape man found ape women ready: waiting and understanding.

THE BIRD OF THE WINE-COLORED EGG

In this life of ours it is the striking and startling things which
attract our attention and the inexplicable which focus and hold it. A
tinamou fulfills all these requirements, but thrills only one person
in a hundred thousand, because that is about the proportion of human
beings which ever sees or hears or eats him. Nevertheless, tinamous
range over forests and pampas of such extent that the whole United
States could be laid down twice upon them without overlapping.

Quail, partridges and pheasants are birds of the north and temperate
regions, and we are all familiar with the part they play in the
life of mankind--æsthetic, recreational, and commercial. The stress
of competition or some innate constitutional barrier hinders the
dominance of these terrestrial birds in the jungles of the tropics. In
the area of research at my British Guiana laboratory, only a single
small partridge has found and retained a foothold, and this is a very
uncommon bird. In its low call-note, its arched-over nest and its
dead leaf plumage, it seems thoroughly affected by the great, lonely
dimness of its unusual haunts, and an observant traveller could remain
for months ignorant of its very existence.

Another group of fowl-like birds has solved life in these great jungles
by taking to the trees, even nesting high up among the branches. These
guans and curassows have retained the whiteness of egg-shell but have
reduced the number of eggs in a single laying to two.

In the abhorrence of the well-known vacuum accredited to Nature,
the absence of terrestrial gallinaceous birds is compensated by the
presence of tinamous, bob-tailed, sturdy running chaps, who defy all
the dangers of the tropics and carry on their lives in the face of
innumerable foes. To those few fortunates like myself, who have had
opportunity to admire, watch, study, listen to, shoot and eat these
birds, the substitution is eminently satisfactory.

Five o’clock in the afternoon of a newcomer’s first day in the jungle
apprises him of the proximity of tinamous--although if unaided by
Indian or ornithological lore, it may be months before he knows to
what he is listening. From its sweetness, his guess will never be
far from some song bird, perhaps of beautiful plumage, and from its
ventriloquial character he will have no idea whether it comes from
high overhead or from right or left on the ground.

Little by little, year after year, I have gleaned a habit here, a
peculiarity there, until at last it is possible to piece them together
into a mosaic of sorts, a shadowy palimpsest of life history which
gives us more or less of an idea of the voice and fears, the food
and courtship, and the strange domestic relationship of the sexes.
The most familiar of the three species occurring in the quarter of a
square mile of jungle at Kartabo is the variegated tinamou. My Akawai
Indian hunters know him as orri-orri or maam, rolling the r’s like any
Spaniard, and when referring to him technically I call him _Crypturus
variegatus variegatus_ (Gmelin). This, for a wonder, is appropriate
when translated, and the variegated hiddentail is an excellent and
distinctive name.

My first problem was to discover whether the birds which I heard
calling every evening were the same individuals or whether these
tinamous wandered casually through the jungle except when actually
nesting.

By means of slight peculiarities in the call-notes, I was able in two
instances to locate with certainty the home range of the variegated
tinamou. One bird, a female as it ultimately proved, was always to
be found in one of two small snarls of lianas and underbrush. Any
time during the night the bird could be flushed from this spot. In
the morning about 5:30 she began calling, timidly at first, then with
more assurance. As it grew light she left her retreat and moved slowly
west across one of our trails and then turned south to several trees
with fallen fruit. Here the calling ceased for about half an hour and
then recommenced as she retraced her steps, turned west again and
went on until I lost her in the maze of thick jungle. Her last call
was given about seven o’clock. During the period of a full month she
followed this identical routine every one of the eighteen mornings on
which I trailed her, with a single change to a new feeding ground when
the supply from the first gave out. On five evenings I found her back
in the brush pile, when she began a new period of calling, usually
beginning about 5:15 and continuing intermittently until nearly seven
o’clock.

Before the beginning of the regular silvery, staccato trill, a single
high, sweet, long-drawn-out note is uttered, of about two seconds’
duration, followed by an interval of three or four seconds, when
the call proper is given. Rarely, when the bird becomes suddenly
suspicious, the first note is given alone, but almost invariably it is
the precursor of the call. When the birds rise they are always silent,
unlike pheasants, no matter how terrified they may be. On moonlit
nights I have heard their usual call at intervals throughout the night,
on cloudy days it is sometimes uttered at noon, while during no month
of the year is the variegated tinamou wholly silent. The call is, of
course, always given from the ground, and probably nine-tenths of the
utterances occur between 5:00 and 7:00 P.M. and 5:30 and 6:30 A.M.

The first note is usually on F natural, and is very sweet and
penetrating, with considerable carrying power, being audible for long
distances through the jungle. Several times I have heard these birds
across the Cuyuni River, almost a mile away. It is a characteristic
vocal utterance of solitary birds which inhabit deep woods, taking the
place of motion, elaborate plumage, pattern and color of birds which
have more of a chance to communicate by sight.

I have, as regards the enemies of the tinamou, three times found
the feathers or other remains of this species in the jungle, once
accompanied by the tracks of a margay cat or ocelot, and again by the
pugs of some smaller carnivore; another record is of feathers of a
tinamou in juvenile plumage in the stomach of a spectacled owl.

Variegated tinamous are naturally timid birds with a regular system of
escape. When flushed in deep jungle they rise with a sudden rush of
wings and scale off for twenty or thirty yards. They then come to earth
and freeze for ten or fifteen minutes. If, as rarely happens, their
landing place is accurately located, either by actually seeing the bird
descend or the leaves moving, it is an easy matter to approach quite
close and watch the bird for some time. It never moves while under
surveillance but stands like a bit of mottled jungle débris with its
eye full upon the disturber of its peace. Nine times out of ten, the
individual flushed evades all scrutiny or search. Even more than in
the great tinamou, the plumage of this species merges with the jungle
floor. There is no doubt that the birds unconsciously trust to their
protective coloring, both at first in permitting a close approach and
in freezing after the escape dash. When one is crashing through dense
undergrowth, the birds escape by creeping silently to one side, as I
have now and then observed when crouching and watching the progress of
one of my party near-by.

Once I saw a bird collide with a tree-trunk and fall stunned, although
it ultimately recovered. But I believe that such accidents, due to
imperfect steering ability, occur more frequently with the large
tinamou than with either of the small ones.

These solitary birds seem to have no especial association with any
other creatures of the jungle; more than once I have seen them stop
feeding and look up in alarm at the warning rattle of an ant-bird which
had discovered me, but this recognition of the quality of alarm in
other birds’ notes is common to most of the jungle fraternity.

Small berries or fruits form almost the whole vegetable diet, many
cherry-like with round pits, wild plums with oblong stones, hard
acorn-like seeds and occasionally fleshy fruits without pits or seeds.
All the food is procured on the ground, and the birds in company with
agoutis have favorite berry trees, under which, at the season of
falling fruit, they may be found evening after evening.

They are as solitary in their roosting as in other ways; they roost on
the ground, or, as in two cases at least, on fallen logs a few inches
up. Usually the choice of place is deep within a tangle of lianas and
vines, from which the bird could not possibly take immediate flight.
I have kept close watch on a bird, which eventually proved to be a
female, through a brief period of intensive vocal courtship, and
neither then nor afterwards did the tinamou fail each night to roost by
herself in her solitary tangle.

There are only three months during which I have no record of breeding
and these would undoubtedly be filled up if I had more thorough
knowledge of the field under observation. The calling of the females
during every month would indicate that there is no absolute cessation
of breeding, as there is in the case of the large _Tinamus_. The
males of these tinamous take full charge of the single egg and the
subsequent rearing of the chick, and I have found a male, attended by a
three-quarters grown chick, incubating a newly laid egg.

I should not like to make any assertion as to a single male taking
charge of more than three eggs in succession, but from two-month-period
reawakenings of vocal calling in the vicinity of a single nesting
area, and the number of young secured or reported from that place, I
am quite sure that three eggs, one after another, were incubated. It
is interesting to note that the same female, judging from the break
in a preliminary note of its call, in the time under consideration,
underwent at least three other periods of song development in an area
somewhat to the northward, and although I could never locate a nest
or a brooding male there, it is probable that she was courting if not
actually laying eggs for another male bird.

In addition to this instance, at the end of March I have secured a
male variegated tinamou with one-third of the juvenile plumage still on
the body, incubating an egg with a week-old embryo, and twice I have
seen half-grown young birds in company with a single adult, presumably
the male parent. My earlier experience with these birds indicated the
remarkable proportion of sexes of eight males to one female. I now have
a much larger series for comparison, and of forty birds secured within
the area under observation, thirty-two are males and eight females,
a very exact proportion of four to one. This is probably the correct
percentage.

Almost all of the usual calling is done by the females, while the
more excited vocal courtship is wholly feminine. Only once have I
ever heard two birds directly answering each other, and on this
same occasion I had my first glimpse of tinamou courtship. The male
(presumably) was perched on a fallen log near my hiding place, while
an approaching bird (later proven a female) came slowly, by short
quick runs, from a bit of open jungle farther west. In the intervals
between runs she gave utterance to a veritable ecstasy of calling--the
usual dignified, deliberate scale being run and jumbled together in
an excited, high-pitched flood of tone. The male answered from time
to time with the usual call, quite unexcitedly. With perhaps several
months of brooding cares behind him, and more to come, we can hardly
blame him for a restrained, philosophical exhibition of emotion. As
the female approached, her runs became shorter and more irregular, her
body plumage flattened, the head and neck were raised almost straight,
and with rapid, mincing steps, her body vibrating with the effort of
the continuous notes, she zigzagged toward the calm recipient of her
attention. An abominable ant-bird discovered me at this moment, and
rattled and screamed his loudest. Both tinamous seemed to perceive me
at once, the male slipped off his log, and the female rose in a sharp,
twisting spiral and I shot her as she turned, to make certain of the
presumed fact that it was indeed the females which did the courting.

[Illustration: The Tinamou

From a painting by Helen Damrosch Tee Van]

A few weeks later I was hidden between two fallen logs waiting for
a quadrille bird to return to its nest, when a tinamou walked into
view,--jigged, I might have said, for the bird was stiff-legged, and
taking little mincing steps which shook her whole body and scuffed up
the fallen leaves. It was exactly the tremulous heel-walk of an East
Indian dancer when, with motionless body, he moves, or almost floats
across the floor with short, rigid, almost imperceptible jerks. The
tinamou revolved slowly, and when her tail came around into view I
could hardly believe it was the usual dull-hued species. The tail,
or rather, the ten, loose-vaned feathers which represent this almost
obsolete organ, were upright, thereby pushing up all the elongated
feathers of the lower back and rump. Closely applied behind were the
under tail-coverts and even the feathers of the flanks, which now,
flattened and with much of their surface exposed, proved to be really
brilliant in color. With a shaft of sunlight striking them they fairly
glowed; the tips of the tail feathers were buffy brown, then came a row
of rich chestnut, then two rows of pale creamy buff with semi-circular
narrow bands, then a beautiful patch of variegated feathers,
white-tipped, with broad black and russet-red bars, and finally the
softer, black-banded flank feathers. The wings drooped, the tips nearly
touching the ground, the beak pointed upward, and the rich cinamon
breast feathers were puffed out.

Three and a half turns did the courting bird make before she pirouetted
behind the second log. What followed I did not see. I knew that the
least movement on my part would send the bird headlong. My quadrille
bird subsequently returned, I learned what I wished about her, and
then, stiff from a prolonged squat, I arose painfully. Like a shot,
the two tinamous were up and bludgeoned off. Not a sound had they
uttered, and after the faint scuffling of leaves which continued for a
few moments after the birds disappeared, I had no knowledge that any
tinamous remained in the vicinity.

The proportion of the sexes makes it almost certain that these birds
are polyandrous, although judging by the slender spatial and temporal
bond between them, promiscuous would probably be the more appropriate
term. The lack of spurs and the insistence of vocality indicates that
courtship and rivalry are carried on in ladylike fashion.

Of six nests found within the quarter mile of jungle under observation,
three were in dry, moderately flat jungle, two in somewhat swampy
places, and one on a trail half-way up the slope of a low hill. They
are apparently chosen without any thought of escape, for in three
instances when the bird got up, it either struck against intervening
lianas, or had some difficulty in getting away clear. There is little
doubt but that the site is chosen by the male; the hen tinamou sticks
too closely to her calling place, her feeding and roosting areas to do
more than court the male and lay her single egg. Once I was sure of a
second site being near a former one. I took an egg in a damp low bit
of jungle and a week later flushed the bird from a new, well-formed,
but as yet eggless hollow eight feet distant from the first. He did
not, however, return after this second alarm.

No attempt is made to form a nest. Attracted by some unknown choice, a
spot is selected, and is made into a home literally by squatting. If
leaves and twigs and other jungle litter are beneath the breast of the
bird, they are pressed down and form the sole lining; if not, the mold
alone receives the pressure and is gradually rounded into a shallow
form.

A single egg is laid at one time and incubated. There is little
variation in the color, the surface showing an exquisitely delicate
tint which is but poorly expressed in our English term of light
purple-vinaceous. There are sometimes zones of lighter tint about the
larger or smaller end, due to some physiological cause in the lower
portion of the oviduct. I consider the color of _Crypturus_ eggs as
distinctly protective, much more so than those of _Tinamus_, whose
turquoise sheen is readily seen against the jungle débris. As such it
is at least one ameliorative factor in the risk of the small number,
and the danger of the continuously breeding male bird. The birds always
sit close however, and only when almost stepped on do they boom up and
away. Many an egg would go undetected if, instead, the sitting tinamou
would creep stealthily off at the first hint of danger. The gloss of
the egg is not quite as high as in _Tinamus_, but it is still far ahead
of any other bird’s egg with which I am familiar,--one of the most
beautiful shells in the world.

Out of the observation area I have known three eggs of the variegated
tinamou to disappear suddenly long before incubation was completed, but
only in one case do I know the cause, when a herd of peccaries trod
heavily over the nest and all the neighborhood, a few fragments of
yolk-stained shell showing how a single crunch had provided some wild
pig with a delicious mouthful.

Incubation lasts about twenty-one days, and I have two notes, one of my
own and the other by an assistant, of nests being deserted twelve hours
and twenty-four hours after hatching. The parent therefore has at least
the precocity of his offspring to lighten his labors. We have secured
two young birds of about two and five weeks respectively, feeding by
themselves at a distance from the parent, so the precocity extends
to the independent juvenile life, thus allowing the male to take up,
unhampered, a new round of domestic duties.

The position of the chick in the egg is very obviously an adaptation
to facilitate shell-breaking. The neck and head are folded close to
the breast and abdomen, while the right leg is raised far forward and
sideways until the beak rests directly on the under side of the flexed
tarsus. Pressure is thus brought to bear on the shell not only by
movements of the head but the slightest effort at extension of the foot
and leg automatically forces the beak in general and the egg-tooth in
particular against the inner wall of the egg-shell.

On June 9, 1922, a single egg of the variegated tinamou was taken from
a nest on the ground in the jungle. It was light purple-vinaceous with
the usual highly polished sheen, and as well as I could determine
through the dense pigmentation, the embryo was five or six days old.
The egg was placed in the incubator in a temperature of 100 to 103
degrees and dampened and turned regularly.

Sixteen days later the egg was pipped at ten o’clock in the morning.
Within two hours the chick was out, partially dried and creeping about
all over the incubator shelf. The down dried well, but not on the
back and head until I put in a circular band of flannel, into which
the chick crept and by rubbing around as it would under its parent’s
plumage, the dorsal down dried fluffily. There is no doubt that the
young bird would never dry well without the constant friction of the
old bird’s feathers during the first twelve hours after hatching. This
condition of the down is apparently a rather serious thing, for when
the down dries flat and matted together, it causes such irritation that
the little chick wastes much time and strength in trying to preen the
bad places. Even a slight thing like this might very well be a matter
of life or death, at a time when every moment of learning to correlate
eye and beak is of the utmost importance.

I observed that the banging of the incubator door caused instant fear
reaction--the chick squatting at once, but no other observations were
made until the following day at ten in the morning when it was taken
into the compound in a vivarium.

Placed on the ground the tinamou chick twice showed fear reactions,
then pecked of its own accord. I worked with it off and on all day, and
at last it took four small pieces of worms. On the whole it was far
less apt in learning to calculate distances than _Tinamus major_ of
equal age. This was so marked that I believe it to be another example
of very delicate balance between necessity and practice. In _Tinamus_
there is a single adult to look after a brood of six to ten, while the
solitary _Crypturus_ chick has the whole attention of its parent, so
there is far less need for extreme precocity in this case than in the
former. With only a single chick to look after, greater care will be
taken, and more time devoted to feeding and guiding the offspring. In
_Tinamus_ the young are compelled to forage more on their own, having
the disadvantage of only a fraction of parental solicitude.

Another characteristic peculiar to this species in comparison with the
larger tinamou is its relative silence. The other chicks, or even one
by itself, were always cheeping and calling, whereas this one uttered
only very low calls and at infrequent intervals. Even these are given
only when the bird is quiet and undisturbed, and seem to be more in
the nature of content calls then otherwise. It is readily seen that it
is important for a covey of chicks to keep in touch with each other by
frequent calls, whereas a single chick following its parent could with
safety do so in comparative silence.

The _Crypturus_ chick learned the use of its legs and by two o’clock
could make its quick, short spurts without falling over at the end. It
never walked slowly more than a step or two, but usually after several
futile pecks at the bit of worm which I proffered, if it heard a sudden
noise, it darted swiftly one or two feet away and squatted flat. I
tested it with various sounds and found I could cry out loudly or clap
my hands together near it without effect, but the least deep or hollow
sound such as striking the glass side of the empty vivarium, caused it
to jump and flatten. Its pecking, as in _Tinamus_, was always forward
and downward at the ground, and its constant fault was to strike
beyond the object aimed at. The chick was uncomfortable on a white
handkerchief and scuttled to bare ground as quickly as possible. It
pecked at worms and spiders much more readily on the ground, even when
they were of the same color as their surroundings, than when they were
laid conspicuously on light bamboo leaves or when held in the forceps.

I tried calls and whistles with no apparent effect, until I imitated
the note of _Crypturus_ itself. Like a flash the chick turned in my
direction, ran six feet toward me, and crouched beside my foot. I tried
it again and again, then summoned the members of my staff to watch. The
shrillest whistle brought no response, but the very first note on F
natural above middle C, attracted and held the little bird’s attention,
and the following notes brought it headlong. After such a reaction it
was much more alert and willing to attempt another bit of food, and not
only this, but its sense of direction was almost perfect. When I held
my face close to the ground and called, the chick ran, not only toward
me, but stopped at my mouth, although I had finished calling before it
reached me.

This instinctive and perfect reaction to the call of the species,
together with its disregard of the call of _Tinamus_ and other
terrestrial jungle birds, was wholly unexpected. I have known chicks of
other groups to crouch instinctively at the cry of a hawk, or the alarm
note of their own or other birds, but to recognize among many other
imitations, the exact summons call, was very interesting and threw a
new light on the instinct reactions of this very generalized type of
bird.

It did not enjoy being in the hot sun, but ran with quick darts toward
the shade. Like the other tinamou chicks it never showed the slightest
fear of our enormously tall figures stalking about. In fact, if anyone
passed while I was attempting to induce it to eat, it invariably rushed
off and followed, and had to be brought back and started over again in
food interest. Unlike the large _Tinamus_ chicks no shuffling of hands
or feet in scratching motions and sounds had any effect.

Like so many of the small creatures I have watched in the laboratory
compound, the chick persisted invariably in working toward the east or
northeast. Again and again I turned it about and always it changed
direction and started back. I place no special significance at present
upon this, but present it as an interesting fact as applying to
mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and even to armored catfish. When,
however, I gave the parent’s call the chick never failed to turn and
run toward me regardless of direction.

While it learned to peck and swallow bits of food and quartz with fair
accuracy, I could not give it the constant attention and encouragement
which it needed, and it died on the third day.

For many years the tinamou was a glorious anticipation--a hope
engendered by the accounts of travelers in the tropical wilderness. It
is now not only a memory but a stimulation, for when the city presses
too closely, when four walls suffocate as well as enclose, when people
oppress as well as associate, then I go to the bird house at the
Zoological Park and at five o’clock there seldom fails me a sweet,
clear staccato of silvery tones. Body and soul, I am back in the Guiana
jungle, with the cool night settling down, a distant howler clearing
his throat, and a bass chorus of giant tree frogs rumbling across the
river. Then the tinamou calls again and the world is reorientated.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

The chapter numeral in the chapter headings for Chapters VIII and IX were
missing in the original edition. The omission has been retained.

Page 105: corrected misspelled “inexplicaable”, and corrected misplaced
period after “center of the back” to a comma.

Page 151: corrected misspelled “aboreal”.

Page 183: corrected misspelled “emminently”.

Illustrations have been moved to enhance readability. The original page
numbers in the list of illustrations remain unchanged.

All other inconsistencies, particularly in hyphenation and diacritics,
have been left unchanged.

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