23 8 The WWe Goat 



midable nature ; no strangers can go near him ; he 

 would disembowel them in a jiffy ; even his keeper 

 has to be wary. At the top of his pile of rocks sat 

 the captive, hunched, as I have said, and truculent 

 and lowering, in spite of his stillness. His eye 

 had that gaze which so wonderfully remains with 

 wild animals who are prisoned from the great free 

 natural spaces that belong to them, whose birth- 

 right is a liberty of no sparrow-and-robin size, but 

 a colossal liberty, the range of the primal world, 

 where fences and statutes are not. Our delight- 

 fully conventional intelligence is familiar with 

 this look in the eyes of the lion and the eagle 

 because the poets have called our attention to it, 

 have said pretty things about it ; but if you have 

 the unusual gift of making your own observations, 

 you will find it in many other animals, including 

 certain types of man. As for this goat, no goat 

 sitting on a rock at Harlem could stare like him ; 

 he might have been sitting on the top of the 

 Cascade Mountains, surveying huge gulfs, and 

 (possibly) meditating how improving it would be 

 to disembowel a ram. 



As I watched him, an odd thought revisited 

 me: how Asiatic he looked, for some obscure 

 reason ! I remembered thinking this same thing 



