How Animals Talk and Other Pleasant Studies of Birds and Beast Book Reviews

How Animals Talk and Other Pleasant Studies of Birds and Beast by William Joseph Long Book Summary

Did you ever see two friendly dogs meet when one tried to tell the other of something he had discovered, when they touched noses, stood for a moment in strange, silent parley, then wagged their tails with mutual understanding and hurried off together on a canine junket?
That was the little comedy which first drew my attention to the matter of animal communication, many years ago, and set my feet in the unblazed trail we are now to follow. And a very woodsy trail you shall find it, dim and solitary, with plenty of “blind” spots where one may easily go astray, and without any promise of what waits at the other end of it.
One summer afternoon I was reading by the open window, while my old setter, Don, lay at on his side in the shade of a syringa-bush. He had scooped out a hollow to suit him, and was enjoying the touch of the cool earth when a fat little terrier, a neighbor’s pet, came running with evident excitement to wake the old dog up. Don half raised his head, recognized his friend Nip and thumped the ground lazily with his tail.
“It’s all right, little dog. You’re always excited over something of no consequence; but don’t bother me this hot day,” he said, in dog-talk, and dropped his head to sleep again.
But Nip was not to be put aside, having something big on his mind. He nudged Don sharply, and the old dog sprang to his feet as if galvanized. For an interval of perhaps five seconds they stood motionless, tense, their noses almost touching; then Don’s plume began to wave.
“Oh, I see!” he said; and Nip’s stubby tail whipped violently, as if to add, “Thank Heaven you do, at last!” The next moment they were away on the jump and disappeared round a corner of the house.
Here was comedy afoot, so I slipped out through the back door to follow it. The dogs took no notice of me, and probably had no notion that they were observed; for I took pains to keep out of sight till the play was over. Through the hay-field they led me, across the pasture lot, and over a wall at the foot of a half-cultivated hillside. Peering through a chink of the wall, I saw Nip dancing and barking at a rock-pile, and between two of the rocks was a woodchuck cornered.
For weeks Nip had been laying siege to that same woodchuck, which had a den on the hillside in a patch of red clover, most convenient to some garden truck. A dozen times, to my knowledge, the little dog had rushed the rascal; but as Nip was fat and the chuck cunning, the chase always ended the same way, one comedian diving into the earth with a defiant whistle, leaving the other to scratch or bark impotently outside.
Any reasonable dog would soon have tired of such an uneven game; but a terrier is not a reasonable dog. At first Nip tried his best to drag Don into the affair; but the old setter had long since passed the heyday of youth, when any kind of an adventure could interest him. In the presence of grouse or woodcock he would still become splendidly animate, and then the years would slip from him as a garment; but to stupid groundhogs and all such “small deer” he was loftily indifferent. He was an aristocrat, of true-blue blood, and I had trained him to let all creatures save his proper game severely alone. So, after following Nip once and finding nothing more exciting than a hole in the ground, with the familiar smell of woodchuck about it, he had left the terrier to his own amusement.

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