The Strange White Doves (2 page)

As the sun dipped low again, Alice said, “We'll just have to catch them and put them back in the cage. They'll never last out there another night.”

That evening Zan happened to be away somewhere with the school band, so we tried to catch the doves ourselves. They cooed a greeting at our approach and allowed Alice, who has a way with birds and animals, to come very close—but not quite close enough. I could not even get near them. With the coming of darkness we were forced to give up.

We slept badly that night. When the morning mists had cleared, we looked for the doves. Miraculously, they were still there.

When Zan returned from school, we hurried to the shack. He caught both doves in a matter of seconds, scooping up one with his left hand and the other with his right.

I was flabbergasted.

What sort of power did he have over them?

3

THE TWENTY-FIVE RACCOONS

T
HE GAME WARDEN
for our area, who lives farther down the valley, was finally able to find a good home for the doves with a distant friend who was something of a naturalist.

As for the small mysteries concerning them, I have often thought that the first dove was stolen and carried some distance in a car, from which it escaped. Possibly its mate was unable to locate it until it stopped moving and reached the stationary point of our home. But no matter. Our heads were reeling with bigger mysteries.

I thought of the many stories of wild geese I had been told by hunters and woodsmen. Geese, according to most of those tales, will always find a wounded mate, no matter how far away it may be taken from the place where it was caught. Certainly I know of a number of actual cases that would seem to confirm this observation. The question is, How does one bird manage to locate the other?

“Oh, it's just instinct,” I was always told. A truly remarkable thing, instinct.

Every creature capable of feeling and emotion, be it a worried gander or a worried human, has much the same instinctive reaction in the face of a tragedy that suddenly separates it from its mate. All else is forgotten while it searches. But there has to be more than instinct at work when the search takes it directly to the lost one.

As far as geese are concerned, I'm sure their remarkable eyesight and hearing would explain many of the stories I had heard. But not all.

Suddenly I remembered my experience with the seventeen squirrels.

Once, when I was living in a small stone house in an Illinois town, a very friendly gray squirrel began accepting handouts in the form of pecans. He was so quiveringly fond of those pecans, and so unselfish about them, that he couldn't keep the good news to himself. One memorable afternoon he brought his friends. The first was a timid little fellow who barely found the courage to take the proffered nut from my hand. As he scampered away, another squirrel, seeing that no harm had come to the first, came forward for a handout. Behind him appeared another, and another, and another.…

Yes, seventeen different squirrels gathered in the yard and came one by one up the steps to receive an offering. The question is, How did the friendly squirrel tell the others about the big deal with the pecans? Did he chatter loudly in squirrel language, saying, “Hey, there's a soft touch over at the old stone house! The guy has more pecans than sense. Come on, fellers, I'll introduce you to him!”

Maybe it was something like that. I know there are chatter signals that squirrels use to inform one another about food. However, seventeen squirrels are a lot of squirrels, and hardly more than half of them could have lived within chatter distance of my house. Did the friendly squirrel go all around town and round up hungry acquaintances?

I suddenly remembered another unusual experience.

At that time I had another studio home on a stretch of Florida coast that abounded with wildlife. In front of the house a panther regularly patrolled the water's edge at low tide, and behind it a wildcat lived in the palmettoes, not too far from a family of raccoons. Birds were everywhere. The marshes on either side were full of clacking rails, and in the mornings the edging mangroves would be covered with egrets, looking for all the world like great white blossoms that had opened during the night. Our daily visitors included an eagle, several ospreys, herons of all kinds, and ibis—great flocks of wood ibis that would do precision cartwheels high overhead, often for most of a morning.

In this semitropic abundance, Zan's favorites were the raccoons. He tried to tame Mama Coon by leaving scraps of food out for her every evening. But not until he discovered her taste for sweet rolls and doughnuts did she finally overcome her shyness, and begin appearing at the screen door at suppertime with her family, now grown. If we were a trifle late with the bakery sweets, Mama Coon would summon us by seizing the edge of the door and banging it impatiently against the framing.

Presently we discovered that we were feeding, not three raccoons, but five. Soon there were ten. And such was the amazing popularity of bakery sweets—leftovers that I began hauling by the bushel from every bakery in the region—that the ten raccoons soon became twenty, and finally thirty. At least I counted thirty one evening, though Alice says there were only twenty-five. And twenty-five were quite enough. The sight of that much wild fur swirling about the patio in the early darkness can never be forgotten.

The big puzzler, naturally, is how all those masked marauders so quickly got the word that ambrosian goodies were being passed out in quantity—and in safety, which is very important—at a certain location on the coast.

I wondered about it at the time, but on the seacoast there is so much to arouse wonder that many things have to go unexplained, so I accepted the presence of the raccoons, just as I accepted the curious actions of certain birds and fish. After our experience with the doves, however, the old questions rose again.

Just how did Mama Coon impart the news to the others?

There is hardly any doubt that the information came from her. Nor is it hard to imagine Mama and her family heading along one of the marsh trails one evening and being stopped by Cousin Nosey, who chitters curiously, “Hey, I see you going in this direction every night! What's cooking?”

And Mama, recognizing kin, would no doubt tell him to tag along and find out. All this is possible, for I have often watched coons meet and chitter at each other. Usually it seemed to be only a friendly warning, like, “You keep your distance, and I'll keep mine,” though I have a strong feeling that at times certain basic news items were exchanged. Even so, such encounters would not account for more than a dozen of my patio visitors. They could not explain the many raccoons who came from a distance to join the feast.

I am certain that they must have come from a distance, because they were inlanders, entirely different from the marsh variety of raccoons that lived around us. Mama Coon and her family were smallish brown animals with sharp, foxy faces. These inlanders were often twice her size—big, handsome gray rascals with broad heads and gleaming silvery fur that would have made a trapper's eyes pop.

On the Gulf Coast a raccoon doesn't have to travel far to eat his fill. Every ebbing tide leaves a bountiful feast. The pickings are just as good for the inlanders, for there's a year-round growing season. So it is not surprising that all our patio visitors had a well-fed look. Some of the inlanders were downright fat.

The astonishing thing is that well-fed raccoons would travel deep into strange territory for food they didn't need.

The only way I can explain it is that some receiving portion of their minds picked up, from a distance, three alluring bits of information from Mama Coon. Not that Mama intended to broadcast it to all the world. More likely her joy was so great that she couldn't contain it.

The three bits of information were simply these: (1) an absolutely out-of-this-world kind of goodie was being given to all members of the Masked Brotherhood who called at Marshy Point; (2) there was plenty of it every evening for everyone; and (3) Marshy Point, glory be, was a safe place to dine.

It would have taken something like that to entice a well-fed raccoon so far. And, knowing man for the murderous wretch he is, they would never have accepted personal handouts from the creature without the assurance that there would be no treachery. Even so, our big gray visitors were very wary at first, nor did they ever approach as close as the other raccoons who lived near us.

As I considered that raccoon experience, I felt that I had taken a definite step into the unknown, on the track of something strange.

A dog named Turk gave me even more to think about.…

4

WILD DOG

M
Y NEIGHBOR
the beekeeper lives alone down the valley in an old weather-beaten cottage on the mountainside. He is not really alone, for, besides his bees, he has a host of friends in the branches overhead and in the forest behind him. With most of them—the cardinals, the chickadees, assorted songsters, and one trusting doe—he is on close speaking terms. If he has any real hate in him, it is reserved for two kinds of creatures only—deer hunters and wild dogs.

When I told him about the raccoons, he did not seem surprised. “News gets around in the woods,” he said quietly.

“How?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Don't ask me how. It just gets around. Those raccoons prove it. An' it's the same with the deer. If a hunter's on the prowl, they'll know it. If I put out a fresh block of salt for the doe, they'll know that too. It's a queer thing.”

I was tempted to tell him about Turk, for I wanted his opinion on the matter. But I decided it would be better if I didn't. On the subject of wild dogs he can become grim indeed. “If you ever saw one of those devils catch a doe with a fawn …,” he muttered once, shaking his head.

I have seen wild dogs at work, and I hate them too. So does everyone in the valley. But Turk was different. Most dogs that go wild in the mountains run in packs, and they have homes of sorts they can return to on occasion. Turk had no home. He was a loner, and he had no use for man. But he did like Alice.

All animals like Alice. Maybe, unconsciously, she sends out waves of love for four-footed things, to which they cannot help responding. If there is a stray cat in the valley, it always finds her. I have lost count of the number of stray or abandoned dogs that have come to her to be fed and helped.

Naturally, it was she who saw Turk first and called my attention to him. He was about fifty yards upstream from the house, motionless on the bank of the creek that rushes down past the studio. The fearless and yet calculating way he stood looking back at us made me think of a wolf. He was about the size of a wolf, but he had the short yellow hair of a dingo, and the same broad, flat head and powerful shoulders.

Alice placed food out near the terrace wall for him, but he refused to come close until we had gone back into the house. We were feeding two other dogs at the time, and when both arrived unexpectedly at the eating area, I was sure there would be trouble. There wasn't. Turk merely glanced at them, gave the faintest of growls, and they instantly knuckled under like a pair of cowed privates before a general.

The next day he wagged his tail happily at Alice and permitted her to pet him, but ten feet was as close as he would allow me to come. At that distance he would look at me hard and, though he made no sound, his lip would curl ever so slightly. He seemed to say,
Keep away from me, and I'll not bother you.

The message was absolutely clear. If I had been stupid enough to miss it, the little chill that went up my back would have set me straight in an instant. He was willing to tolerate me because of Alice, but I must stay well away and never attempt to touch him.

Wild animals have given me warnings before, but this was the first time one had ever made me
feel
his thoughts. I was soon to learn that Turk was capable of much greater mental feats. In the next few days he taught me a lesson I shall never forget, and at the same time he cleared up a mystery that had been nagging at me for years.

It had happened back on the coast before we came to the mountains. In a small palm grove beyond our place, a neighbor had placed a pair of goats to graze, tying each with a long rope to keep it from wandering away. One afternoon Alice and I went out to the station wagon, intending to ride into town for our mail. Before we could open the doors, one of the goats suddenly appeared. It rushed up to Alice, stared hard into her face, then whirled around to me and did the same thing.

I couldn't understand, and neither could Alice. Puzzled, we opened the doors and started to get into the wagon, but the goat jumped in ahead of us. I pulled him out, and we got in quickly and closed the doors, but when we started to drive off, the stubborn goat planted himself directly in front of the car and refused to budge.

“What's the matter with the crazy thing?” I muttered.

“It's not crazy,” said Alice. “And it's not stupid.”

Goats are definitely not stupid, as I knew from experience. I remembered the goat Louis Bromfield told about, when writing of his farm. It was always managing to reach the opposite side of a fence that was much too high to jump. The truth gave everyone something to think about. The goat had formed a partnership with a donkey. By standing on the donkey's back, it could leap the fence with ease.

Worriedly we got out of the wagon, wondering what was wrong. The goat looked at us again, gave an entreating little “Ba-a-a!” and began hastening down the lane with the two of us following.

When we reached the palm grove where it had been tied, we found the other goat unconscious on the ground. It was being strangled by its line, which had become looped tightly around its neck. Had we reached it a few minutes later, it would have been dead.

I don't know how the first goat, in a desperate effort to save his companion, ever managed to break his own line in order to go for help, and I shudder to think how slow we were to comprehend. It was a profoundly moving experience, and I shall never forget how hard he looked into our faces, silently trying to tell us something that any other animal would have understood.