How Animals Talk 



feather stirs or a foot shifts or an eyelid blinks 

 even when your glance roves blindly over him; 

 you may give him up and go away, leaving him 

 motionless; but the instant you see him he seems 

 to know it, and in that instant he is off. This is 

 not a single or an accidental but a typical ex- 

 perience; any woodsman who has hunted ruffed 

 grouse with a rifle will smile as he tells you, 

 "That's true; but I can't explain it." 



A third bit of woods lore, of which we shall 

 presently make good use, is that natural birds and 

 animals have, a lively interest in every new or 

 strange thing they meet. Far from being occu- 

 pied in a constant struggle for existence, as the 

 books misinform us, their lives are full of leisure; 

 they have plentiful hours for rest or play or rov- 

 ing, and in these idle times they get most of their 

 fun out of life by indulging their curiosity. I 

 fancy that in this respect, also, most people are 

 still natural creatures, seeing that men or women 

 in a crowd are as easily set to stretching their 

 necks as any flock of ducks or band of caribou. 



So strong is the animal's inquisitive instinct 

 (for it surely is an instinct, the basis of all educa- 

 tion, and without it we should be fools, learning 

 nothing) that he will readily give over his play 

 or even his feeding to investigate any new thing 

 which catches his attention. I speak now not of 



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