CONCEALING COLORATION 31 



available adaptations of an animal's bod)" will be found ranged against 

 his life-and-death danger. 



Out in the open, the zebra's watchful eye and ear, backed by his 

 agility, ensure his safety. But if he pass too near any cover as ample as 

 the lion must have for his operations, his stripes begin to be a safe- 

 guard, because cover enough to conceal the lion means reeds or tranches 

 silhouetted across the lion's view of the zebra. The zebra is inevitably 

 against the crouching feline's sky, and his own sky-and-reed counter- 

 feit begins to have the advantage of confusion with the real vegetation 

 through which the lion is condemned to look. A chain is no stronger 

 than its weakest link. What is, obviously, the weakest link in the 

 zebra's life chain? It is when he must risk the lions ambush and drink. 

 All available powers of getting through this tightest place in his life 

 are sure to be found in operation. This need to drink is as much the 

 crux of the zebra's life as the need to be able to swim would be the crux 

 of a foot-passenger's journey from New York to California, if there 

 were neither boats nor bridges. There will arrive in California no foot- 

 passengers that can not swim, because there is the Mississippi. And 

 there will survive no race of zebras that were not the watchfulest, the 

 agilest and the hardest to see when they had to go through this greatest 

 danger of their lives. It is their Mississippi. When a zebra comes to 

 a drinking-place, the faintest sound that could mean an ambushed lion 

 must not pass undetected by him, and he starts away from the faintest 

 rustle. The crouching lion sees him come into the reeds — sees him all 

 the time — and if the zebra comes within range, springs upon him, but 

 even in his first spring has inevitable difficulty in distinguishing the 

 zebra's outlines because of the absolute similarity of the zebra's imita- 

 tion of reeds and sky to the real ones. The zebra's uneasiness keeps 

 both the real and the counterfeit in motion together. Very often, doubt- 

 less, as the best naturalists seem to agree, the zebra's automatic start 

 comes in time to save him, and the lion's instantaneous now-or-never 

 second spring, such as probably all felines make, must be guided by a . 

 lightning-swift perception which "of the violently agitated sky- and 

 reed-stripes are the zebra and which are not! Any one who saw my 

 deer at Washington will understand this (and better still will any one 

 who will come to Monadnock and see the wonders of my artificial zebra 

 and oryx). Plainly, then, since the zebra must at this necessary 

 moment be terribly near the lion, his race could not have continued 

 except by having every counter-balancing advantage; and it is demon- 

 strably here that the full magic of his coloration comes into play. These 

 sky-counterfeits are as plainly addressed to the lion's sight, and most of 

 all at the night drinking-place, as the thickness of a grizzly's frontal 

 bone is addressed to the teeth of his enemies. 



Colonel Eoosevelt has done himself a wrong by not studying our 



