LEAF AND TENDRIL 



doing, just as nations and corporations will exhibit 

 a meanness and hoggishness that would shame the 

 individuals composing them. 



It is a question whether or not the lower animals 

 ever experience the feelipg we know as revenge — 

 that they cherish a hatred or a secret enmity toward 

 one of their own kind or toward a person, in the 

 absence of that person or fellow. Their power of 

 association, which is undoubted, would call up the 

 old anger on the sight of an object that had in- 

 jured them, but they probably do not in the mean- 

 time carry any feeling of iU-will as we do, because 

 they do not form mental concepts. And yet I have 

 known things to happen that point that way. It is 

 well known that the blue jay destroys the eggs of 

 other birds. One day I found a nest of a blue jay 

 with its five eggs freshly punctured — each egg with 

 a small hole in it as if made by the beak of a small 

 bird, as it doubtless had been. Was this revenge on 

 the part of some victim of the jay's ? One can only 

 conjecture. Roosevelt tells this curiously human an- 

 ecdote of a bear. A female grizzly was found by a 

 hunter lying across a game trail in the woods. The 

 hunter shot the bear as she was about to charge 

 him, and on examining the spot where she had been 

 lying, he found that it was the freshly made grave 

 of her cub. He conjectured that a male grizzly or 

 a cougar had killed the cub in the absence of the 

 mother, and that on her return she had buried it, 

 142 



