io The Field Naturalist's Quarterly Feb. 



the spring of a panther, watching above the runways. We 

 imagine that to be a fearful death, and painters have depicted 

 it in the colours of agony. As a matter of fact there is no 

 pain whatever. Livingstone, who lay under the paw of a 

 lion, with his shoulder crushed and his arm gashed with 

 seams whose scars he carried to his grave, felt no pain and 

 did not even know that he was hurt. He was the first to 

 call attention to the fact that the rush and spring of a savage 

 animal brings a kind of merciful numbness that kills pain 

 perfectly, and seems also to take away all feeling and voli- 

 tion ; so that one is glad simply to lie still — his only hope, 

 by the way, if he is to escape. If this is true of men, it is 

 ten times more so of the animals, which have none of our 

 nervousness or imagination. 



There are many other things which point to the same com- 

 fortable conclusion. Soldiers in the rush of a charge or the 

 run of a retreat are often mortally hurt without knowing it 

 till they faint and fall an hour later. Every one has seen a 

 mouse under the cat's paw, and the toad in the jaws of a 

 snake, and knows that, so far as the stricken creatures are 

 concerned, there is no suggestion there of death or suffering. 

 And I have seen larger creatures — rabbits and grouse and 

 deer — lying passive under the talon or claw that crushed 

 them, and could only wonder at Nature's mercifulness. 

 Death was not hard but kind, and covered over with a 

 vague unreality that hid all meaning from the animals' eyes 

 and made them wonder what was happening. 



Sometimes the animals die of cold. I have occasionally 

 found, on bitter mornings, owls and crows, and little birds, 

 hanging each by one claw to a branch dead and frozen. 

 That is also a merciful and painless ending. I have been 

 lost in the woods in winter. I have felt the delicious languor 

 of the cold, the soft enfolding arms of the snow that beckoned 

 restfully as twilight fell, when the hush was on the woods 

 and human muscles could act no longer. And that is a gentle 

 way to die when the time comes. 



Sometimes the animals die of hunger, when an ice-storm 

 covers all their feeding-grounds. That also, as any one 

 knows who has gone days without food, is far more merciful 

 than any sickness. Long before pain comes, a dozy lassitude 



