THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS 



The domestic animal's instincts are by no means as 

 sure in their action as are those of their wild brothers. 

 But I do not believe that a wild animal finds its 

 way home in the same way that a man does by a 

 process of calculation and judgment, and memory of 

 familiar points. I have seen the murres in Bering 

 Sea fly for many miles straight home to their rook- 

 eries through a dense fog; and the fur seals in the 

 vast pathless wilderness of the Pacific find their way 

 back each spring to their breeding-rocks in Bering 

 Sea. I cannot see how their sense of sight or smell 

 could aid them in such cases. President Roosevelt 

 told me of a horse he had during his ranch days that 

 returned to its old home, seventy miles away, by 

 taking a direct line across the prairie, swimming 

 rivers in its course. How did the horse know the 

 way? Wild animals probably have a sense of direc- 

 tion that is enfeebled or lost in domestic animals 

 a sense that civilized man has lost also, but that is 

 keen in barbarians. 



The statement that young ducks have no instinc- 

 tive impulse to enter the water is misleading. Why, 

 then, do they enter it voluntarily? Young ducks 

 have no instinctive recognition of water through the 

 eye, but they have through the feet; the moment 

 they feel the water with their feet, the impulse to 

 enter is awakened, and away they go. Is this true 

 of chickens? Neither ducks nor chickens know water 

 through the sense of sight, but by the sense of touch. 

 164 



