I have written these three things, of partridge and deer and fox—while twenty others come bubbling up to remembrance that one need not write—simply to suggest the great fact, so evident among all wild creatures,—from the tiniest warbler, lifting his sweet song to the sunrise amid a hundred enemies, to the great eagle, resting safe in air a thousand feet above the highest mountain peak; and from the little wood mouse, pushing his snow tunnels bravely under the very feet of hungry fox and wild-cat, to the great moose, breasting down a birch tree to feed on its top when maple and wicopy twigs are buried deep under the northern snows,—that life is a glad thing to Nature's children, so glad that cold cannot chill, nor danger overwhelm, not even hunger deaden its gladness. I have seen deer, gaunt as pictures from an Indian famine district, so poor that all their ribs showed like barrel hoops across their collapsed sides; yet the yearlings played together as they wandered in their search for food through the bare, hungry woods. And I have stood on the edge of the desolate northern barrens when the icy blasts roared over them and all comfort seemed buried so deep that only the advice of Job's wife seemed pertinent: to "curse God and die." And lo! in the midst of blasphemy, the flutter of tiny wings, light and laughter of little bright eyes, chatter of chickadees calling each other cheerily as they hunted the ice-bound twigs over and over for the morsel that Nature had hidden there, somewhere, in the far autumn days; and then one clear, sweet love note, as if an angel had blown a little flute, tinkling over the bleak desolation to tell me that spring was coming, and that even here, meanwhile, life was well worth the living.

The fact is, Nature takes care of her creatures so well—gives them food without care, soft colors to hide, and nimble legs to run away with—that, so far as I have ever observed, they seldom have a thought in their heads for anything but the plain comfort and gladness of living.

It is only when one looks at the animal from above, studies him psychologically for a moment, and remembers what wonderful provision Nature has made to keep him from all the evils of anxious forethought, that one can understand this gladness.

In the first place, he has no such pains as we are accustomed to find in ourselves and sympathize with in our neighbors. Three fourths, at least, of all our pain is mental; is born of an overwrought nervous organization, or imagination. If our pains were only those that actually exist in our legs or backs, we could worry along very well to a good old age, as the bears and squirrels do. For the animal has no great mentality, certainly not enough to triple his pains thereby, and no imagination whatever to bother him. Your Christian-Science friend would find him a slippery subject, smooth and difficult as the dome of the Statehouse to get a grip upon. When he is sick he knows it, and goes to sleep sensibly; when he is well he needs no faith to assure him of the fact. He has his pains, to be sure, but they are only those in his legs and back; and even here the nervous organization is much coarser than ours, and the pain less severe. He has also a most excellent and wholesome disposition to make as little, not as much, of his pains as possible.

I have noticed a score of times in handling wounded animals that, when once I have won their confidence so that they have no fear of my hurting them willfully, they let me bind up their wounds and twist the broken bones into place, and even cut away the flesh; and they show almost no evidence of suffering. That their pain is very slight compared with ours is absolutely certain.

I have sometimes found animals in the woods, bruised, wounded, bleeding, from some of the savage battles that they wage among themselves in the mating season. The first thought, naturally, is how keenly they must suffer as the ugly wounds grow cold. Now comes Nature, the wise physician. In ten minutes she has them well in hand. They sink into a dozy, dreamy slumber, as free from pain or care as an opium smoker. And there they stay, for hours or days, under the soft anæsthetic until ready to range the woods for food again, or till death comes gently and puts them to sleep.

I have watched animals stricken sore by a bullet, feeding or resting quietly; have noted little trout with half their jaws torn away rising freely to the same fly that injured them; have watched a muskrat cutting his own leg off with his teeth to free himself from the trap that held him (all unwillingly, Gentle Reader; for I hate such things, as you do), but I have never yet seen an animal that seemed to suffer a hundredth part of the pain that an ordinary man would suffer under the same circumstances.

Children suffer far less than their elders with the same disease, and savage races less than civilized ones; all of which points far down to the animal that, with none of our mentality or imagination or tense-strung nervous organization, escapes largely our aches and pains. This is only one more of Nature's wise ways, in withholding pain mostly from those least able to endure it.

Of purely mental sufferings the animal has but one, the grief which comes from loss of the young or the mate. In this we have read only of the exceptional cases,—the rarely exceptional,—tinctured also with the inevitable human imagination, and so have come to accept grossly exaggerated conceptions of animal grief.

A mother bird's nest is destroyed. The storm beats it down; or the black snake lays his coils around it; or the small boy robs it thoughtlessly; or the professional egg-collector, whose name and whose business be anathema, puts it into his box of abominations. The mother bird haunts the spot a few hours,—rarely longer than that,—then glides away into deeper solitudes. In a few days she has another nest, and is brooding eggs more wisely hidden. This is the great rule, not the exception, of the gladsome bird life. Happy for them and for us that it is so; else, instead of the glorious morning chorus, the woods would be filled always with lamentations.

When the young birds or animals are taken away, or killed by hungry prowlers, the mother's grief endures a little longer. But even here Nature is kind. The mother love for helpless little ones, which makes the summer wilderness such a wonderful place to open one's eyes in, is but a temporary instinct. At best it endures but a few weeks, after which the little ones go away to take care of themselves, and the mother lets them go gladly, thinking that now she can lay on fat for herself against the cold winter.

If the time be yet seasonable when accident befalls, the mother wastes but few hours in useless mourning. She makes a new nest, or hollows out a better den, or drops her young in deeper seclusion, and forgets the loss, speedily and absolutely, in rearing and teaching the new brood,—hurrying the process and taking less care, because the time is short. It is a noteworthy fact—you can see it for yourself any late summer in the woods—that these late-coming offspring are less cared for than the earlier. The mother must have a certain period of leisure for herself to get ready for winter, and she takes it, usually, whether the young are fully prepared for life or not. It is from these second broods largely that birds and beasts of prey keep themselves alive during times of hunger and scarcity. They are less carefully taught, and so are caught more easily. This again is not the exception, but the great rule of animal life.

And this is another of Mother Nature's wise ways. She must care for the deer and partridge; but she must also remember the owl and the panther that cry out to her in their hunger. And how could she accomplish that miracle of contradiction without exciting our hate and utter abhorrence, if she gave to her wild creatures the human griefs and pains with which they are so often endowed by our sensitive imagination?

Of these small griefs and pains, such as they are, the mothers alone are the inheritors. The male birds and animals, almost without exception so far as I have observed, have no griefs, but rather welcome the loss of the young. This is partly because it leaves them free to shift and feed for themselves—your male animal is essentially a selfish and happy creature—and partly because it opens to them anew the joys of winning their mates over again.

The second great reason for the gladness of animal life is that the animal has no fears. The widespread animal fear, which is indeed the salvation of all the little wild things, is so utterly different from our "faithless fears and worldly anxieties" that another name—watchfulness, perhaps, or timidity, or distrust—should be given to it in strict truth.

This animal fear, be it remembered, is not so much an instinctive thing as a plain matter of teaching. Indeed, inquisitiveness is a much stronger trait of all animals than fear. The world is so full of things the animal does not understand that he is always agog to find out a little more.

I was sitting on a stump one day in the woods, plucking some partridges for my dinner. A slight motion in the underbrush roused me from my absorption; and there was a big bull moose, half hid in the dwarf spruces, watching me and the fluttering feathers, with wonder and intense curiosity written all over his ugly black face. And I have caught bear and deer and crows and squirrels and little wood warblers at the same inquisitive game, again and again. If you sit down in the woods anywhere, and do any queer or simple thing you will, the time will not be long before you find shy bright eyes, all round with wonder, watching you with delicious little waverings between the timidity which urges them away and the curiosity which always brings them back again, if you but know how to keep still and disguise your interest.

If you find a young bird or animal, in nest or den, young enough so that the mother's example has not yet produced its effect, you will probably note only two instincts. The first and greatest instinct, that of obedience, is not for you to command; though you may get some strong hints of it, if you approach silently and utter some low, cautious sound in imitation of the mother creature. The two which you may surely find are: the instinct to eat, and the instinct to lie still and let nature's coloring do its good work of hiding. (There is another reason for quietness: a bird—and, to a less extent, an animal—gives forth no scent when he is still and his pores are closed. He lies quiet to escape the nose as well as the eyes of his enemy. That, however, is another matter.) But you will find no fear there. The little thing will feed from your hand as readily as from its mother, if you catch him soon enough.

Afterwards come the lessons of watchfulness and timidity, which we have called fear,—to sort the sounds and sights and smells of the woods, and to act accordingly; now to lie still, and now to bristle your pinfeathers, so as to look big and scare an intruder; now to hiss, or growl, or scratch, or cry out for your mother; and now, at last, to dive for cover or take to your legs in a straightaway run,—all of which are learned, not by instinct, but by teaching and example.

And these are not fears at all, in our sense of the word, but rules of conduct; as a car horse stops when the bell jingles; as a man turns to the right, because he has learned to do so, or bends forward in running, or jumps forward when he hears an unknown noise close behind him.

To make a rough and of course inadequate generalization, all our human fears arise from three great sources: the thought of pain or bodily harm, the thought of future calamity, and the thought of death. Now Nature in mercy had kept all these things from the wild creatures, who have no way of making provision against them, nor any capacity for faith, by which alone such fears are overcome.

First, in the matter of bodily harm or pain: The animal has lived a natural life and, as a rule, knows no pain whatever. He likewise has never been harmed by any creature—except perhaps an occasional nip by his mother, to teach him obedience. So he runs or flies through the big woods without any thought of the pains that he has never felt and does not know.

Neither does any thought of future calamity bother his little head, for he knows no calamity and no future. I am not speaking now of what we know, or think we know, concerning the animal's future; but only of what he knows, and what he knows he knows. With the exception of the few wild creatures that lay up stores for winter—and they are the happiest—he lives wholly in the present. He feels well; his eyes are keen and his muscles ready; he has enough, or expects enough at the next turn of the trail. And that is his wisdom of experience.

As for death, that is forever out of the animal's thinking. Not one in a thousand creatures ever sees death—except, of course, the insects or other wild things that they eat, and these are not death but good food, as we regard a beefsteak. If they do see it, they pass it by suspiciously, like a tent, or a canoe, or any other thing which they do not understand, and which they have not been taught by their mothers how to meet. Scores of times I have watched birds and animals by their own dead mates or little ones. Until the thing grows cold they treat it as if it were sleeping. Then they grow suspicious, look at the body strangely, sniff it at a distance, never touching it with their noses. They glide away at last, wondering why it is so cold, why it does not move or come when it is called. Then, circling through the underbrush, you will hear them calling and searching elsewhere for the little one that they have just left.

So far as I know, the ants, some tribes of which bury their dead, and the bees, which kill their drones at the proper season, are the only possible exception to this general rule of animal life. And these little creatures are too unknown, too mysterious, too contradictory a mixture of dense stupidity and profound wisdom to allow a positive theory as to how clearly they think, how blindly they are instinctive, or how far they are conscious of the meaning of what they do daily all their lives.

Bodily harm, future calamity, death,—these three things can never enter consciously into the animal's head; and there is nothing in his experience to clothe the last great enemy, or friend, with any meaning. Therefore are they glad, being mercifully delivered from the bondage of our fears.

I am still sitting on the old log by the salmon pool, with the great river purring by and the white foam patches floating down from the riffles. A second little turtle has joined the first on his teeter board; they are swinging up and down, up and down, in the kindly current together. The river is full of insect life below them; they will eat when they get ready. Meanwhile they swing and enjoy their little life. Far over the mountain soars the great eagle, resting on the winds. The earth has food and drink below; he will come down when he is hungry. Meanwhile he looks down over the brim of things and is satisfied. The birds have not yet hushed their morning song in the woods behind me; too happy to eat, they must sing a little longer. Where the pool dimples and rolls lazily the salmon are leaping in their strength; frogs pipe and blink on the lily pads riding at anchor; and over their heads in the flood of sunshine buzz the myriads of little things that cannot be still for gladness. Nature above and below tingles with the joy of mere living—a joy that bubbles over, like a spring, so that all who will, even of the race of men who have lost or forgotten their birthright, may come back and drink of its abundance and be satisfied.