How Animals Talk 



to wild game, which stops to watch you curiously 

 after it has seen you and heard your step or voice 

 and sampled your quality in the air. These two 

 facts, implying some kind of mental or emotional 

 contact between the natural man and the natural 

 brute, are probably not accidental or unrelated, 

 and we are here trying to find the natural law or 

 principle of which they are the occasional and 

 imperfect expression. 



This whole matter of silent communication may 

 appear less strange if we remember that most wild 

 creatures are all their lives accustomed to matters 

 which sense-blinded mortals find mysterious or in- 

 credible. Why a caterpillar, which lives but a few 

 hours when all the leaves are green, should make a 

 cocoon of a single leaf and with a thread of silk 

 bind that leaf to its stem before he wraps himself 

 up in it, as if he knew that every leaf must fall; 

 or why a spider, adrift for the first time on a chip, 

 should immediately send out filaments on the air 

 currents and, when one of his filaments cleaves to 

 something solid across the water, pull himself and 

 his raft ashore by it ; or why a young bear, which 

 has never seen a winter, should at the proper time 

 prepare a den for his long winter sleep, a thousand 

 such matters, which are as A B C to natural 

 creatures, are to us as incomprehensible as hiero- 

 glyphics to an Eskimo. That a sensitive animal 



[156] 



