Part 4

As a child this faculty (if such it be) was as natural as anything else in life; for in childhood we take the world as we find it in personal experience, and nothing is especially wonderful where all is wonder. I then thought no more of feeling the presence of an animal than of hearing him walk when I could not see him; but as I grew older the experience seemed a little odd or “queer,” and I never spoke of it to any one till I discovered, first, that the faculty seems to be common among animals, and second, that some Indians (not all) have it and regard it as the most natural thing in the world. Here is how the latter discovery came about:

Simmo and I were calling moose from a lake one moonlit night, with a silent canoe under us, dark evergreen woods at our back, and a little ghost of a beaver-meadow, vague, misty, shadow-filled, immediately before our eyes yet seeming as remote as any drifting cloud. To our repeated call no answer was returned; then we allowed the canoe to drift ashore where it would, and sat listening to the vast silence. I was brought back from my absorption in the fragrance, the harmony, the infinite stillness of the night by feeling the canoe shake and hearing Simmo whisper, “Somet’ing near. Look out!”

Now in a silence like that, the tense, living silence of the wilderness at night, one’s ears are as full of tricks as a puckwudgie, who is one of the mischievous fairy-folk of the Indians. The whine of a mosquito sounds across the whole lake; or the mutter of a frog becomes like the roar of a bull of Bashan; or suddenly you begin to hear music as the faint vibration of some dry stub, purring in the unfelt air currents, turns to the booming of a mighty church organ. At such a time, unless one has trained his senses to ignore the obvious (the Indian secret of seeing and hearing things), one soon becomes confused, uncertain of the borderland between the real and the imaginary; so presently I turned to Simmo and whispered, “You hear him?”

The Indian shook his head. “No hear-um; just feel-um,” he said; and again we settled down to watch. For several minutes we questioned the woods, the lake, the meadow; but nothing stirred, not a sound broke the painful quiet, the while we both felt strongly that some living thing was near us. Then a shadow moved from the darker shadow of an upturned root, only a few yards away, and a great bull stood alert on the open shore.

I thought then, and I still think, that besides our ordinary five senses we have a finer faculty which I must call, for lack of a better term, the sense of presence; and I explain it on the assumption that every life recognizes and attracts every other life by some occult force, as dead matter (if there be such a thing) attracts all other matter by the mysterious force of gravitation.

Doubtless I have been many times watched in the woods when I did not know or feel it; and certainly I have often had my eyes upon an unconscious bird or beast when, though I fancied he grew uneasy under my scrutiny, he did not have enough sense of danger to run away—possibly because no real danger threatened him, the eyes that looked upon him being friendly or merely curious.

Once on a hardwood ridge I came upon a buck lying asleep in open timber, and stood with my back against a great sugar-maple, observing him for five or six minutes before he stirred. No, I was not trying to awaken him by a look, or to stage any other experiment. I was simply enjoying a rare sight, noting with immense interest that this wild creature, whom I had always seen so splendidly alert, could nod and blink like any ordinary mortal. So near was he that I could mark the drowsiness of his eyes, the position of his feet, the swelling of his sides as he breathed. I happened to be counting his respirations in friendly fashion, comparing them with my own, when suddenly his head turned to me; his eyes snapped wide open, and they were looking straight into mine. Apparently his feeling or subconscious perception had warned him where danger was; but still his eyes could not recognize it, standing there in plain sight. For to stand motionless without concealment is often the best way to deceive a wild animal, which habitually associates life with motion.

No more drowsiness for that buck! He was startled, plainly enough; but he rose to his feet very stealthily, not stirring a leaf, and stood at tense attention. When he turned his head to look over his shoulder behind him I raised my field-glass, for I wanted to read his thought, if possible, in his eyes. As he turned his gaze my way again his nose seemed to sweep my face. It rested there a moment full on the lens of my glass, moved on, and returned for a longer inspection. Then he glided past, still without recognizing me, testing the air at every springy step, harking this way, looking that way, and disappearing at last as if he trod on eggs.

From such experiences I judge that the feeling of unsensed danger, or the more subtle feel of a living thing, is as variable in the animals as are their instincts or their social habits. It may be dull in one creature and keen in another of the same species, or alternately awake and asleep in the same creature; but there is no longer any doubt in my mind that it is a widespread gift among birds and beasts. When it appears occasionally among men, therefore, it is to be regarded not as uncanny or queer, but, like the sure sense of direction which a few men possess, as a precious and perfectly natural inheritance from our primitive ancestors. That it skips a dozen generations to alight on an odd man here or there, like a storm-driven bird on a ship at sea, is precisely what we might expect of heredity, which follows a course that seems to us erratic or at times marvelous, as geometry appears to an Eskimo, because we do not yet understand its law or working principle.

Among savage tribes, who live a natural outdoor life in close contact with nature, the perception of danger or of persons beyond the ordinary sense range is much more common than among civilized folk. Almost every explorer and missionary who has spent much time with African natives, for example, has noticed that the Blacks have some mysterious means of knowing when a stranger is approaching one of their villages—mysterious, that is, because it does not depend on runners or messengers or any other of our habitual means of communication. A recent observer of these people has at last offered an explanation of the matter, with many other impressions of native philosophy, in a work to which he gives the suggestive title of Thinking Black. Of the scores of books on Africa which I have read, this is the only one to show more than a very superficial knowledge of the natives, and the reason is apparent. The author thinks, most reasonably, that you cannot possibly know the native or understand his customs until you know his thought, and that the only trail to his thought is through the language in which the thought is expressed. Therefore did he study the speech as a means of knowing the man; and herein he is in refreshing contrast to other African travelers and hunters I have read, who spend a few months or weeks in a white man’s camp, knowing the natives about as intimately as lovers know the moon, and then babble of native customs or beliefs or “superstitions,”—as if any rite or habit could be understood without first understanding the philosophy of life from which it sprang, as a flower from a hidden seed.

This rare observer, who knows how the native thinks because he perfectly understands the native language, tells us [2] that the Blacks clearly recognize the power of animals and of normal men to know many things beyond their sense range; that they give it a definite name, and explain it in a way which indicates an astonishing degree of abstract thought on the part of those whom we ignorantly call unthinking savages. According to these natives, every natural animal, man included, has the physical gifts of touch, sight, hearing, taste, smell, and chumfo. I must still use the native term because it cannot be translated, because it implies all that we mean by instinct, intuitive or absolute knowledge and (a thing which no other psychology has even hinted at) the process by which such knowledge is acquired.

This chumfo is not a sixth or extra sense, as we assume, but rather the unity or perfect co-ordination of the five senses at their highest point. I may illustrate the matter this way, still following Crawford, whose record contains many curious bits of observation, savage philosophy, woods lore and animal lore, many of them written by the camp-fire and all jumbled together pell-mell:

For ordinary perception at near distances the eye or the ear is sufficient, and while engaged in any near or obvious matter the five senses work independently, each busy with its own function. But when such observation is ended or at fault, and the man retreats, as it were, into his inner self, then in the quiet all the senses merge and harmonize into a single perfect instrument of perception. (Here, in native dress, is nothing more or less than the psychologist’s subconscious self, with its mysterious working.) At such moments the whole animal or the whole man, not his brain and senses alone, becomes sensitive to the most delicate impressions, to inaudible sounds or vibrations, to unseen colors, to unsmelled odors or intangible qualities,—to a multitude of subtle messages from the external world, which are ordinarily unnoticed because the senses are ordinarily separate, each occupied with its particular message. So when a sleeping animal is suddenly aware that he must be alert, he does not learn of approaching danger through his ears or nose, but through chumfo, through the perfect co-ordination of all his senses working together as one. In the same way a wandering black man always knows where his hut or camp is; he holds his course on the darkest night, finds his way through a vast jungle, goes back to any spot in it where he left something, and often astonishes African travelers by getting wind of their doings while they are yet far distant.

Such is the native philosophy; and the striking feature of it is, that it is not superstitious but keenly observant, not ignorant but rational and scientific, since it seems to anticipate our latest biological discoveries, or rather, as we shall see, a philosophy which rests upon biological science as a foundation.

Perhaps the first suggestion that the native may have reason in his theory comes from the extraordinary sensitiveness of certain blind people, who walk confidently about a cluttered room, or who sort the family linen after it returns from the laundry. These blind people say, and think, that they avoid objects by feeling the increasing air pressure as they approach, or that they sort the family linen by smell; but it appears more likely that a greater unity and refinement of all their senses results from their living in darkness.

That our human senses have unused possibilities, or that we may possibly possess extra senses of which we are not conscious, may appear if you study the phenomenon of hearing, especially if you study it when you hear a strange sound in the woods or in the house at night. It is assumed that we always locate a sound by the ear, and that we determine its volume or distance by our judgment from previous experiences; but that, I think, is a secondary and not a primary process. When we act most naturally we seem to locate a sound not by search or experiment, but instantly, instinctively, absolutely; and then by our ear or our judgment we strive to verify our first chumfo impression.

As a specific instance, you are lying half asleep at night when a faint, strange sound breaks in upon your consciousness. If you act naturally now, you will nine times out of ten locate the sound on the instant, without bringing your “good ear” to bear upon it; but if you neglect or lose your first impression, you may hunt for an hour and go back to bed without finding the source of the disturbance. Or you are traveling along a lonely lane at night, more alive than you commonly are, when a sudden cry breaks out of the darkness. It lasts but a fraction of a second and is gone; yet in that fleeting instant you have learned three things: you know the direction of the cry; you know, though you never heard it before, whether it is a loud cry from a distance or a faint cry from near at hand; and you are so sure of its exact location that you go to a certain spot, whether near or far, and say, “That cry sounded here.”

So much if you act naturally; but if you depend on your ears or judgment, as men are apt to do, then you are in for a long chase before you locate the cry of a bird or a beast or a lost child in the night.

It is easy to make mistakes here, for we are so cumbered by artificial habits that it is difficult to follow any purely natural process; but our trail becomes clearer when we study the matter of hearing among the brutes. Thus, your dog is lying asleep by the fire when a faint noise or footstep sounds outside. Sometimes, indeed, there is no audible sound at all when he springs to his feet; but no sooner is the door opened for him than he is around the house and away, heading as straight for the disturbance as if he knew, as he probably does, exactly where to find it. Yet your dog is, I repeat, a very dull creature in comparison with his wild kindred. Their ability to locate a sound is almost unbelievable, not because they have more delicate ears (for the human ear is much finer, being sensitive to a thousand inflections, tones, harmonies, which are meaningless to the brute), but because of what the Blacks call their better chumfo or what we thoughtlessly call their stronger instincts.

This has been strongly impressed upon me at times when I have tried to call a moose in the wilderness. If you seek these animals far back where they are never hunted—a difficult matter nowadays—the bulls answer readily enough, or sometimes too readily, as when one big brute chased me to my canoe and gave me a hatless run for it; but in a much-hunted region they are very shy and come warily to a call. The best way to see them in such a place is to call a few times at night, or until you get an answer, and then go quickly away before the bull comes near enough to begin circling suspiciously. At daybreak you are very apt to find him waiting; and the astonishing thing is that he is waiting at the very spot where you used your trumpet.

The place you select for calling may be a tiny bog in a vast forest, or a little, nameless beaver-meadow by a lake or river. It is like many other such places, near or far, and the bull may come from a distance, crossing lakes, rivers, bogs and dense forest on his way; but he never seems to make a mistake or to be at a loss in locating the call. On a still night I have heard a bull answer me from a mountain five or six miles away; yet in the morning there he was, waiting expectantly for his mate near the bit of open shore where I had called him; and to reach that spot he must either have crossed the lake by swimming, a distance of two miles, or else have circled it on a wide détour. That he should come such a distance through woods and waters, and pick the right spot from a hundred others on either side, seems to me not a matter of ears or experience but of chumfo, or absolute knowledge.

Another and more interesting verification of the chumfo philosophy is open to any man who will go quietly through the big woods by moonlight, putting himself back amid primal or animal conditions, and observing himself closely as he does so. The man who has not traveled the wilderness alone at night has a vivid and illuminating experience awaiting him. He is amazed, so soon as he overcomes the first unnatural feeling of fear, to find how alive he is, and how much better he can hear and smell than ever he dreamed. At such a time one’s whole body seems to become a delicately poised instrument for receiving sense impressions, and one’s skin especially begins to tingle and creep as it wakes from its long sleep. Nor is this “creeping” of the skin strange or queer, as we assume, but perfectly natural. The sensations which we now ignorantly associate with fear of the dark (a late and purely human development; the animal knows it not) are in reality the sensations of awakening life.

Possibly we may explain this supersensitiveness of the skin, when life awakens in it once more and it becomes for us another and finer instrument of perception, by the simple biological fact that every cell of the multitudes which make up the human body has a more or less complete organization within itself. Moreover, as late experiments have shown, a cell or a tissue of cells will live and prosper in a suitable environment when completely separated from the body of which it was once a part. These human cells inherit certain characteristics common to all animal cells since life began; and it is not improbable that they inherit also something of the primal cell’s sensibility, or capacity to receive impressions from the external world. This universal cell-function was largely given over when the animal (a collection of cells) began to develop special organs of touch, sight, and hearing; but there is no indication that the original power of sensibility has ever been wholly destroyed in any cell. It is, therefore, still within the range of biological possibility that a man should hear with his fingers or smell with his toes, since every cell of both finger and toe once did a work corresponding to the present functions of the five animal senses.

Before you dismiss this as an idle or impossible theory, try a simple experiment, which may open your eyes to the reality of living things. Go to a greenhouse and select a spot of bare earth under a growing rose-bush. Examine the surface carefully, then brush and examine it again, to be sure that not a root of any kind is present. Now place a handful of good plant-food on the selected spot, and go away to your own affairs. Return in a week or so, brush aside your “bait,” and there before your eyes is a mass of white feeding-roots where no root was before. In some way, deep under the soil, the hungry cells have heard or smelled or felt a rumor of food, and have headed for it as surely as a dog follows his nose to his dinner.

Do plants, then, know what they do when they turn to the light, and is there something like consciousness in a tree or a blade of grass? That is too much to assert, though one may think or believe so. No man can answer the question which occurs so constantly to one who lives among growing things; but you can hardly leave your simple experiment without formulating a theory that even the hidden rootlets of a rose-bush have something fundamentally akin to our highly developed sensibility. At present some biologists are beginning to assert, and confidently, though it is but an opinion, that there is no dead matter in the world; that the ultimate particles of which matter is composed are all intensely alive. And if alive, they must be sentient; that is, each must have an infinitesimal degree of feeling or sense perception.

To return from our speculation, and to illustrate the chumfo faculty from human and animal experience: I was once sitting idly on a Nantucket wharf, alternately watching some hermit-crabs scurrying about in their erratic fashion under the tide, and an old dog that lay soaking himself in the warm sunshine. Just behind us, the only inharmonious creatures in the peaceful scene, some laborers were unloading rocks from a barge by the aid of a derrick. For more than an hour, or ever since I came to the wharf, the dog lay in the same spot, and in all that time I did not see him move a muscle. He was apparently sound asleep. Suddenly he heaved up on his rheumatic legs, sniffed the air alertly, and turned his head this way, that way, as if wary of something.

The human labor had proceeded lazily, for the day was warm; there was no change in the environment, so far as I could discern; the only sounds in the air were the sleepy lap of wavelets and the creaking of pulleys; yet my instant thought was, “That dog is frightened; but at what?” After a few moments of watching he moved off a dozen yards and threw himself flat on his side to sleep again. His body was hardly relaxed when a guy-rope parted, and the iron-bound mast of the derrick crashed down on the wharf.

It was certainly “touch and go” for me; I felt the wind of the thing as it fell, and was almost knocked off the wharf; but I was not thinking then of my own close call. With my interest at high pitch I examined the mast, and found it lying squarely athwart the impression left by the dog in the dust of the road.

“Merely a coincidence,” you say; which indicates that we are apt to think alike and in set formulas. That is precisely what I said at the time—a mere coincidence, but a startling one, which made me think of luck (a most foolish notion) and wonder why luck should elect to light on a worthless old dog and take no heed of what seemed to me then a precious young man. But I have since changed my mind; and here is one of the many observations which made me change it.

Years afterward my Indian guide, Simmo, was camped with a white man beside a salmon river. It was a rough night, and a storm was roaring over the big woods. For shelter they had built a bark commoosie, and for comfort a fire of birch logs. At about nine o’clock they turned in, each wrapped in his blanket, and slept soundly but lightly, as woodsmen do, after a long day on the trail. Some time later—hours, probably, for the fire was low, the storm hushed, the world intensely still—the white man was awakened by a touch, and opened his eyes to find his companion in a tense, listening attitude.

“Bes’ get out of here quick, ’fore somet’ing come,” said the Indian, and threw off his blanket.