How animals talk

Did you ever see two friendly dogs meet when one tried to tell the other of something he had discovered, when they touched noses, stood for a moment in strange, silent parley, then wagged their tails with mutual understanding and hurried off together on a canine junket?

That was the little comedy which first drew my attention to the matter of animal communication, many years ago, and set my feet in the unblazed trail we are now to follow. And a very woodsy trail you shall find it, dim and solitary, with plenty of “blind” spots where one may easily go astray, and without any promise of what waits at the other end of it. [4]

One summer afternoon I was reading by the open window, while my old setter, Don, lay at on his side in the shade of a syringa-bush. He had scooped out a hollow to suit him, and was enjoying the touch of the cool earth when a fat little terrier, a neighbor’s pet, came running with evident excitement to wake the old dog up. Don half raised his head, recognized his friend Nip and thumped the ground lazily with his tail.

“It’s all right, little dog. You’re always excited over something of no consequence; but don’t bother me this hot day,” he said, in dog-talk, and dropped his head to sleep again.

But Nip was not to be put aside, having something big on his mind. He nudged Don sharply, and the old dog sprang to his feet as if galvanized. For an interval of perhaps five seconds they stood motionless, tense, their noses almost touching; then Don’s plume began to wave.

“Oh, I see!” he said; and Nip’s stubby tail whipped violently, as if to add, “Thank Heaven you do, at last!” The next moment they were away on the jump and disappeared round a corner of the house.

Here was comedy afoot, so I slipped out through the back door to follow it. The dogs took no notice of me, and probably had no notion that they were observed; for I took pains to keep out of sight [5]till the play was over. Through the hay-field they led me, across the pasture lot, and over a wall at the foot of a half-cultivated hillside. Peering through a chink of the wall, I saw Nip dancing and barking at a rock-pile, and between two of the rocks was a woodchuck cornered.

For weeks Nip had been laying siege to that same woodchuck, which had a den on the hillside in a patch of red clover, most convenient to some garden truck. A dozen times, to my knowledge, the little dog had rushed the rascal; but as Nip was fat and the chuck cunning, the chase always ended the same way, one comedian diving into the earth with a defiant whistle, leaving the other to scratch or bark impotently outside.

Any reasonable dog would soon have tired of such an uneven game; but a terrier is not a reasonable dog. At first Nip tried his best to drag Don into the affair; but the old setter had long since passed the heyday of youth, when any kind of an adventure could interest him. In the presence of grouse or woodcock he would still become splendidly animate, and then the years would slip from him as a garment; but to stupid groundhogs and all such “small deer” he was loftily indifferent. He was an aristocrat, of true-blue blood, and I had trained him to let all creatures save his proper game severely alone. So, after following [6]Nip once and finding nothing more exciting than a hole in the ground, with the familiar smell of woodchuck about it, he had left the terrier to his own amusement.

When speed failed, or wind, it was vastly amusing to watch Nip try to adopt cat-strategy, hiding, creeping, scheming to cut off the enemy’s retreat. Almost every day he would have another go at the impossible; but he was too fat, too slow, too clumsy, and also too impatient after his doggy kind. By a great effort he could hold still when his game poked a cautious head out of the burrow for a look all around; but no sooner did the chuck begin to move away from his doorway than the little dog began to fidget in his hiding-place, and his tail (the one part of a dog that cannot lie) would wildly betray his emotions. Invariably he made his rush too soon, and the woodchuck whistled into his den with time to spare.

On this summer afternoon, however, Nip had better luck or used better tactics. Whether he went round the hill and came over the top from an unexpected quarter, or lay in wait in his accustomed place with more than his accustomed patience, I have no means of knowing. By some new device or turn of luck he certainly came between the game and its stronghold; whereupon the chuck scuttled down the hill and took refuge among [7]the rocks. There Nip’s courage failed him. He was a little dog with a big bark; and the sight of the grizzled veteran with back against a stone and both flanks protected probably made him realize that it is one thing to chase a chuck which runs away, but quite another thing to enter his cave while he stands facing you, his beady eyes snapping and his big teeth bare. So after a spell of brave barking Nip had rushed off to fetch a larger dog.

All that was natural enough, and very doglike; at least it so appeared to me, after seeing other little dogs play a similar part; but the amazing feature of this particular comedy was that Nip had no difficulty in getting help from a champion who had refused to be interested up to that critical moment. Through the wall I saw him lead Don straight to the rocks. The old dog thrust in his head, yelped once as he was bitten, dragged out the chuck, gave him a shake and a quieting crunch; then, without the slightest evident concern, he left Nip to worry and finish and brag over the enemy.

It is part of the fascination of watching any animal comedy that it always leaves you with a question; and the unanswerable question here was, How did Nip let the other dog know what he wanted? [8]

If you are intimate enough with dogs to have discovered that they depend on their noses for all accurate information, that they have, as it were, a smellscape instead of a landscape forever before them, you will say at once, “Don must have smelled woodchuck”; but that is a merely convenient answer which does not explain or even consider the facts. Don already knew the general smell of woodchuck very well, and was, moreover, acquainted with the odor of the particular woodchuck to which his little dog-chum had been laying siege. He knew it at first hand from the creature itself, having once put his nose into the burrow; he got a secondary whiff of it every time Nip returned from his fruitless digging; and he was utterly indifferent to such foolish hunting. Many times before the day of reckoning arrived Nip had rushed into the yard in the same excitement, with the same reek of earth and woodchuck about him; and, so far as one may judge a dog by his action, Don took no interest in the little dog’s story. Yet he was off on the instant of hearing that the familiar smell of woodchuck now meant something more than a hole in the ground.

That some kind of message passed between the two dogs is, I think, beyond a reasonable doubt; and it is precisely this silent and mysterious kind of communication (the kind that occurs when your [9]dog comes to you when you are reading, looks intently into your face, and tells you without words that he wants a drink or that it is time for him to be put to bed) that I propose now to make clear. Before we enter that trail of silence, however, there is a much simpler language, such as is implied in the whistle of a quail or the howl of a wolf, which we must try as best we can to interpret. For unless our ears are keen enough to distinguish between the food and hunting calls of an animal, or between bob-white’s love note and the yodel that brings his scattered flock together, it will be idle for us to ask what message or impulse a mother wolf sends after a running cub when she lifts her head to look at him steadily, and he checks his rush to return to her side as if she had made the murky woods echo to her assembly clamor.

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