How Animals Talk 



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 con- 

 venient 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 wood- 

 chuck 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 re- 

 turned 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 



[8] 



