of the innumerable tragedies of the wilderness—the grim procession of life and death, the irreconcilable conflict of the animals as bounden as we are to appetite and passion and self-preservation—probably every hunter of considerable experience has seen the eloquent tokens; and every reader has heard at least of the sensational cases. the wonder is, perhaps, that these latter are so few; that only one death out of a million is so far outside the vast inclusive rule as to be of interest to us dull-eyed observers. for the law of conflict is inexorable. outside of man and his protected servitors, only a tiny fraction of a per cent. of the animals die “a natural death”—that is, without violence. of teeming sea and teeming forest, a vast majority of the denizens perish “with their boots on”—overwhelmingly a prey to that insatiate “hollow feeling” which nature has put for warder[276] of the feral population, lest it overwhelm the earth. the “defensive” animals fall, as a rule, to the appetite of their predatory neighbors; the predatory beasts, in turn, have a reasonable expectation of death at the “hands” of their rivals in the tribe, their foes outside, or the only unnatural killer, man. every acre of field and forest has had its myriad tragedies of the humble wild-folk—though we are too unobservant to note the fact. a few bleaching bones, a wisp of fur or feathers, a dim scurry in the dust—this and no more is the chronicle of the snuffing out of a life as gladly lived, as hardly parted with as our own. many authors have become famous by their skillful dissection of the beastliness of man; but we too seldom remember (unless while reading the jungle stories or wahb) the humanity of the beasts, which is quite as true a part of natural history. this is mostly because in our civilized cushioning we know nothing real about the beasts. they are very little more to us than so many forms of speech, raw material for perfunctory literature or for “hunting,” whose only serious penetration is put up in brass cylinders by the u.m.c. co. it is nothing short of astounding how little the average “hunter” knows of the game he[277] kills, except so much of its habit as shall enable him to kill it. indeed, the very name “game” is perhaps significant of this blindness. it is a game, and a great game, if shrewdly played; but pity the man who can see in it nothing but the killing! he is as far from being what i would soberly call a hunter as the fellow whose only notion of whist is to play trumps at every lead is far from being a whist player. one who knows as well as anyone, and as well loves, the wild thrill of the chase, who has hunted and been hunted, and found the keenest “sport” when the “game” turned the tables and he had to fight hand-to-hand for his own life, is not apt to be foolishly sentimental. but he is very apt to pity those who have never learned the higher side of hunting. to watch a beaver colony at work; or a vixen with her pups; or a bear family at play; or the wild stallion herding his flirtatious manada and falling like a thunderbolt upon some mustang lothario; or partridge or wild turkey at mating time—experto credite, it is quite as much “fun” and rather more woodcraft than trapping or killing or “creasing.” which is saying a great deal. and to such as mix the game with brains, these things become more and more the refinement and expertness[278] of it. as a matter of fact, a fox is a much smarter hunter than any man who hunts only to kill. his eyes and ears are far better, his nose is a genius of which no human has so much as an inkling, his foot-fall is infinitely softer, his strategy far more competent. for that matter, more foxes escape the allied force and wit of a score of men and a half-score of hounds than partridges or quail escape the unaided campaign of one fox. as to that, in the average foxhunt, at least (and leaving out of the count the trapper and real wilderness hunter), one hound is worth in effectiveness half a hundred people. without a single dog to lead them, the whole chase could as soon stay at home.
more picturesque, perhaps, than the every-day sacrifice of a life to an appetite is the animal duel to the death; and particularly when both parties fall. feral combats—mostly deriving from sexual jealousy, for it is comparatively rare that predatory beasts shall fight outside their kind—are innumerable, though in a small minority of cases fatal to either combatant; perhaps fifty times as rarely to both. even in the extreme event, there is generally little visible record left, and that of a sort that shamefully few of our hunters can identify.[279] the best known—because the most unmistakable—is the entanglement of buck deer by their horns in such inextricable fashion that the duellists starve to death. this is not so extremely rare. i have found such grappled skulls thrice—in maine, in the sierra madre of mexico, and in colorado so noble a duo of elk heads locked in this chinese puzzle of death that the inaccessibility of the range and the impossibility of bringing out these ponderous relics have given me a standing grievance these seventeen years. the swordfish pinned by his beak to starve beside the pierced hull; the rat in the fatal nip of a big clam; the buffalo and the cinnamon bear fallen together dead—all these i believe to be authentic; and of the mutual pyrrhic victory of two rattlesnakes i have seen the proof.
but beyond reasonable comparison, the most extraordinary “document” i have ever seen or heard of in this sort is the absolutely unique relic found in 1900 by edwin r. graham in the desert county of inyo, cal., near coalingo, and now in the museum of the leland stanford jr. university. there is no possible question of its authenticity. all the ingenuity of man could not make a tolerable counterfeit of it. nor do i believe there is any reasonable doubt that[280] it is the most remarkable record ever found of a fight to the death.
it is unflattering but typical of our civilized observation that thousands of people—including a great many “hunters”—identified these mummied protagonists as “a coyote and an eagle.” even the photograph shows what they are, as well as the vindictiveness of their death-struggle.
a prowling wildcat (evidently too hungry to be fanciful) finds a great horned owl blinking upon the brink of a cliff, and pounces upon it, catching a wing hold. the owl, somewhat armored, even against those terrible teeth and claws, by its quilting of feathers, flings itself upon its back; pounding fiercely with its free wing, tearing with its hooked beak, and clenching its talons into the flesh with that peculiar mechanical lock-grip of its kind—a grip which death does not loosen, as more than one hunter who picked an owl up unripe has learned to his sorrow. that even this large owl could not kill a full-grown wildcat in any ordinary combat, probably every hunter knows. but this owl chanced to get a clutch on the wildcat’s open fore paw, one of his claws clinched behind a tendon—and there it still is, traceable even in the photograph. perhaps he could not have withdrawn it himself,[281] had he been the survivor of the struggle. the cat’s jaws are still locked upon the broken bone of the owl’s left wing. neither is otherwise very badly mangled; and doubtless the cat would have torn to shreds “the body of this death” and gone about his business with no more handicap than that ineradicable talon in his paw.
wildcat and owl in death-struggle
but in their wild and blind mêlée they overstepped the verge of the cliff, and down they went together. the 40-foot fall does not seem to have broken their clinch at all. if it did, they renewed it. but, though no fractures were sustained, the stumble doubtless stunned the cat; and there, irretrievably grappled in immortal hate, they died together of thirst and loss of blood. there at the foot of the cliff they were found; desiccated by the furnace airs of the desert, light as mummies, but unbroken; their very eyeballs dried in their sockets; the plumage of the owl practically complete, and enough fur of the wildcat’s muzzle and paws left by the moths to identify it even to those who could not recognize its unequivocal anatomy.
