The Strange White Doves (5 page)

Do scientists admit that birds and animals have psychic ability, and use ESP to find their way around? Well, not exactly. Scientists are very fond of that word instinct. It covers so many gaps. Blind instinct.

No scientist I know, or whose work I have read, is quite willing to admit that ESP is found in other creatures, or that it has much to do with homing or any other unusual ability.

Scientists do admit, however, that there is a great deal of animal behavior they cannot explain. Many things, they concede, are incredible and defy all the known laws of science. Certain bats, for instance, can locate and catch fish on a pitch-black night in the darkest water, a feat said to be scientifically impossible. This is said because no echoing equipment, be it the bat's own radar or one made by humans, can function below the water's surface when operated from the air. Sent from the air, both sound and electric impulses are always deflected. (You know, of course, that bats guide themselves in the dark by hearing the echo of sounds sent through the nose. This amazing radar system is so high-pitched that human ears cannot hear it. The sound waves vibrate 110,000 times per second.)

Then there are the starfish who can locate clams that have burrowed far down in the sand and hide with shells closed, leaving not the slightest trace of their presence. How do the starfish find the clams? By the same means, I'm sure, that other creatures use to locate other things necessary for their existence—gums for wounds, medicinal roots and special foods in emergencies. This invisible compass seems to link them to a great reality far beyond the range of the ordinary senses.

It enables some animals, like Rolf, a German shepherd dog, to find lost articles that would be impossible to track down by sight or smell. Rolf, who lived on one of the Danish islands, was able to recover thousands of lost articles for people—keys, coins, wallets, glasses, rings, watches, and even objects as small as the gold fillings from teeth. It is said that the value of his finds, over a period of seven years, was more than four hundred thousand dollars.

This mysterious business of being able to locate things is, obviously, very closely related to the homing ability. The same invisible compass is used; only, instead of pointing homeward, the needle turns toward the object to be located.

Of course the idea of the invisible compass is purely imaginary, but it is entirely possible that all creatures, humans included, have a built-in mechanism that works much the same way. Surely there is something that does the job, though no one knows what it is or how it works.

There is another ability some creatures have that is even more incomprehensible. Let me tell you about a cat that saved a bakery.…

9

FORETELLERS OF DANGER

C
ATS ARE STRANGE CREATURES
. No human has ever actually owned one, for the simple reason that it is cats who own people. If there is a cat in your house, he owns you as well as the house, and, unlike a dog, he does just as he pleases. Entirely independent, the cat is a slave to no one, though he can be downright goofy about his chosen person.

The strangest side of a cat is that he sees things we cannot see, hears things we cannot hear, and knows things that are beyond our knowing.

The most knowing of the many cats that have called our house their own is a neat little gray body who responds to the name Periwinkle. She has wisdom far beyond her years, and whenever I see her green eyes bug out at something invisible to humans, I think of the stranger who found her, a half-drowned kitten, abandoned down the valley one blustery night and brought her to us.

The stranger was Randy Grobe, a young person well known in Sarasota for helping homeless cats and dogs. Before he left, Randy told me about another cat, very much like Periwinkle in the matter of knowing things, who owned a bakery in Cincinnati.

A man by the name of Mr. Flach thought he owned the bakery, but of course he didn't. Kitty really owned it. She owned the bakery and everyone in it except Mr. Flach. He didn't care much for cats and merely tolerated her, so naturally she merely tolerated him.

The bakery was large, with a sizable staff to keep the big gas ovens in constant operation. Everyone there—except Mr. Flach—loved Kitty, and she loved them. She was a quiet cat who always minded her own business and never got in anyone's way. But one day she suddenly changed.

She went crazy. All at once she was in everybody's way. She yowled, dashed from one person to another, looked wildly at each of them, then raced like a mad thing to Mr. Flach. Yowling frantically, she dashed back through the bakery to one of the great gas ovens.

Mr. Flach realized almost instantly that Kitty was trying to tell him something. He hastened after her. There was no outward sign that anything had gone wrong, but when he examined the big oven to which she led him, he discovered to his horror that it was about to explode. A minute or two later, the bakery would have been destroyed and possibly everyone in it killed.

Needless to say, Mr. Flach became very fond of Kitty, who turned out to be one of the most loved and pampered cats in Cincinnati.

How could any creature, cat or otherwise, have known ahead of time that something was going to happen? That is the old question. Let me tell you about Pepper.

Pepper was a family cat, a big, black, exceedingly tough tom who caused his folks a great deal of worry one summer when they decided to go away for several months. What was to be done with Pepper? He hated to travel, and he hated being caged. The last family cat, who had been sent to a boarding home for pets when we had gone away some years before, had died quickly of lonesomeness.

Pepper, however, settled the dilemma to suit himself. Two days before we were scheduled to leave, he disappeared. He did not come home the morning we left, nor did the neighbors see any sign of him during the entire three months we were gone.

We returned one afternoon in the fall. As we were unloading the car, Pepper suddenly appeared. He was fat, sleek, and sassy and obviously had enjoyed his vacation fully as much as we had ours.

The fact that Pepper was aware of the family's plans in the beginning is interesting enough. He always seemed to know what was going on. But how did he know ahead of time exactly when we would return?

I choose to think he was tuned in to the future just as the bakery cat was, and just as a host of other creatures are—birds, snakes, crabs, rodents of all kinds, and dogs beyond count—who know in advance that something is going to happen.

Typical is the curious experience of Samuel Leigh, of Miami, who fell asleep in his chair by the fireplace one night and was suddenly awakened and practically driven out of the house by his shepherd dog, Dick. It was a perfect summer night with stars bright overhead, nor was there the least sign of impending trouble anywhere. But hardly had Dick maneuvered his master out to the lawn, well away from the house, when there was an abrupt flash of lightning and a great crash that shook the ground. Evidently the bolt struck the chimney, for it shattered, and a large part of the masonry fell through the roof and smashed the chair where Samuel Leigh had been asleep only seconds before.

I have seen lightning like that come out of nowhere on a tropic night, and it is something the best weatherman on earth would have trouble predicting. Yet Samuel Leigh's shepherd dog not only knew it was coming, but he knew exactly where it was going to strike.

In 1966, just before the Russian earthquake at Tashkent, a spitz dog forced his mistress to leave the house. She had no idea what was wrong until the quake came a few minutes later, reducing the place to rubble. Another dog, a boxer, refused to let his mistress park her car in a certain spot in San Francisco. Shortly after she had driven away, a second car parked there and was crushed by a huge tree that fell on it. Similar incidents involving pets and their masters, or some member of the family, happen all the time. Whole chapters could be filled with them. A great many other incidents, such as the one involving Pepper, go largely unnoticed because they are not spectacular.

Ernest Thompson Seton, the naturalist and writer, tells of a dog he owned out West that howled and made such a fuss one day that it kept him from making the long ride into town. An Indian friend told him afterward that the dog had surely saved his life, for something terrible would have happened if he had not stayed home. Since the day of the doves I have come to believe that absolutely.

At first I thought that only a few specially gifted creatures, like the bakery cat and Samuel Leigh's dog, were tuned in to the future. Then I remembered what I had read about the birds of Krakatau, a volcanic island between Java and Sumatra. Suddenly one day all the birds left. No one could figure out why. A few hours later the island suddenly blew up, killing every living thing on it, including over 36,000 people. It was the most violent volcanic explosion in modern history.

There is no record of the island's animals. But I'm sure they knew something was going to happen, for the animals as well as the birds left the area of Mt. Pelée on Martinique before it erupted. That explosion was not so violent as Krakatau's, though it killed more people.

I lived on the Gulf Coast long enough to be brushed by a goodly number of hurricanes, each of which was preceded by a flight of frigate birds. That is the only time you will see these great flyers near the mainland.

Why? Because the storm drives them there? That's what people say, and they add, “Whenever you see frigate birds, you can bet a hurricane isn't far away.”

The statement is only partly true, for a careful check shows that a frigate bird never allows himself to be driven just anywhere by a storm. He takes off long before it arrives, often in perfectly calm weather, and keeps well away from the path of the dangerous area—the part with the highest winds and rains. There is a good reason for this. Unlike other sea birds, the frigate does not have waterproof feathers. There is nothing wetter than a hurricane rain, and to be caught in one could mean death.

Another fellow that doesn't like hurricanes and tunes in to them ahead of time, is the little fiddler crab. You will see him by the thousands on every marshy beach around the Gulf. He doesn't mind the wind and rain, but an extremely high tide, prolonged by a storm, gives him the jitters. Being a land crab, he has to have a certain amount of air, and a hurricane tide can trap him in his burrow and seal him there. Therefore the moment he receives advance warning that trouble is due, he heads for high ground.

I have seen fiddler crabs cover the road to Marshy Point well ahead of a dangerous tide. Naturalist Ivan Sanderson reports seeing a great army of them heading inland from the Caribbean coast, his first indication that a hurricane was on the way.

Snakes, too, know well in advance when danger threatens, as residents of earthquake areas have learned. It can be said that they are sensitive to minute tremors in the earth that are beyond man's awareness, but I don't believe that that is the reason they swarm into the open before the land begins to shake. They have been known to save themselves this way in dry weather when there was absolutely no sign that torrential rains would come suddenly and turn the hillsides where they live into deadly quagmires of sliding mud.

Because so many creatures, man included, are able at times to make use of foreknowledge, it must be looked upon as another natural defense that has been given for survival. But how can it be explained? Is time itself quite different from what we have always thought it to be?

10

THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEYS

I
HAVE LONG BEEN
guilty of underestimating other creatures, even my own pets. My mistake, of course, was to judge them by rules tailored for humans. Just recently I have discovered that there are several first-rate sets of brains prowling my house on four feet, and at least one super-set. Being cats, they can act like perfect zanies on occasion, and you wouldn't think they had sense enough to come in out of the rain. But even the one I had always considered stupid can make estimates of height and distance I couldn't possibly make, and he is capable of a curious logic that is quite beyond me.

I'm sure, for instance, that he could easily find his way home if he were stolen, placed in a closed box, and taken for a hundred-mile ride before escaping. Oh, he would escape. I'm sure of it. He may be a sort of bumble-head, but he would manage it even if he had to trade in a few of his nine lives and cross a dozen mountains afterward. Other cats have done it. In fact, a great many have done it, and some of them have traveled many hundreds of miles to get back to a home or a family they loved.

A cat named Clementine traveled all the way from Dunkirk, New York, to Denver, Colorado, to find her people. The distance, cat-wise, is at least fifteen hundred miles and probably more. It is an awful trip, especially the last third of it before reaching the mountains. But another cat, named Tom, beat Clementine's record a few years later, in 1951.

Tom made it across the continent from St. Petersburg, Florida, to San Gabriel, California, in a successful search for his family. The distance in this case was a staggering two thousand five hundred miles, and his travel time was two years and six weeks. I happen to have been over that entire route, comfortably on wheels, and I am aghast when I think of Tom doing it on paw power alone. The trip becomes even more incredible when I consider the hazards. It is rattlesnake country all the way, and besides the countless dogs there are predators of every kind, from big cats to alligators and eagles. For nearly half the distance there are swamps without end, and great rivers to cross, followed by deserts, hundreds of miles of mountains, and still more deserts toward the end.

Frankly, I cannot understand how Clementine made it as far as Denver, and Tom's feat leaves me shaken. Yet there is no doubt whatever that these cats actually made these trips, for what they did has become a matter of historical record. Their cases have been carefully investigated, and they have been written about many times.