Chapter IV: Part 4

It was several weeks after Pudgy and I renewed our old friendship that they told me at the studio that Princess, the glorious Bengal tigress, was to be killed. She had grown unmanageable for picture work, they said, too sullen and too treacherous. The picture in hand called for a tiger hunt. She was to be sacrificed for the sake of reality and shot down. Her pelt, they added, would be worth a great deal of money.

But I could not think of Princess in terms of a pelt that was worth money. I felt as if a human being had been sentenced to death. Because she could not find it in her royal heart to cringe beneath the trainer’s lash, she was to die; because she was queenly, and unafraid, she no longer had the right to live.

I have seen the tortures wild animals go through in making pictures. How they are prodded with pointed sticks, made to jump into water from great heights, and forced to run through blazing brush. I have seen lions and tigers struck cruelly on their sensitive noses to make them register rage. All these things had Princess suffered from trainers and directors. I did not blame her for rebelling.

I came upon Pudgy as he sat on a bench near Princess’s cage, his chin in his hand, and he was staring at her while she paced restlessly back and forth with hissing intakes of breath.

“They are going to kill her,” he said slowly, “just because they can’t break her spirit.”

I sat beside him, and together we watched Princess. Pudgy told me how he had tried to ease the fear and hatred of humans in the heart of the jungle tigress by being especially nice to her. How, when she had hurt herself jumping from a springboard into a lake with sharp rocks in it, he had gone into the cage and bathed the swollen paw, and how she had licked his hand with her huge, grating tongue. Once she had had a swelling on her throat; he was the only one whom she suffered to minister to it. And again, when she had sickened with fever, he had stayed in her cage a night and a day, moistening her tongue with water and watching until her eyes lost their glazed stare and became normal once more.

“And they’re going to kill her,” he repeated slowly, “just because she can’t understand the treatment they’ve given her—because she’s not afraid of their whips any more.”

His voice almost broke. And my heart went out to him and to the tawny wild thing in the barred cage. If he could only make the Powers understand, I told him. If only he could make them realize that Princess was not wantonly ferocious, only tortured into savagery by unkind treatment. He shook his head. The Powers, he said, understood nothing that did not have a dollar mark attached.

So the day was set when Princess was to die. It was to be in the out-of-door arena, an oval piece of ground enclosed in upright bars and strong steel wire. At the back was a miniature thicket of bamboo, ferns, and marsh grass. At the front was the camera cage, strongly barred to prevent danger from the wild animals being photographed in action.

My visit to the menagerie that day was accidental. I did not know that the tigress was to be killed. I had only been told that an interesting picture was being made in the arena. So I pushed my way through the double line of carpenters, actors, and onlookers, to the very bars of the huge out-of-door cage. The camera man was already in his barred enclosure, and inside the arena the director, a slim-waisted man with a black mustache, was outlining the action of the scene to the hero of the picture, who, attired in a hunting costume, dabbed at his face with a yellow powder-puff.

“The tiger comes bounding out of the jungle,” the director was saying, “and you shoot from behind that log. Never mind if you don’t get her the first shot. I’ll have my gun on her, and I’ll finish her off. There’s no danger.”

My heart stopped and then thumped painfully. I had stumbled unknowingly on the scene of Princess’s execution. I felt sickened. I could not bear to stay and see her shot at—wounded first by an ill-aimed rifle, then fired upon until she dropped, an inert mass of tawny gold and black—

I turned away, tried to press through the crowd. But there were too many people. Every one from the studio had ceased work to come and see the spectacular death of Princess, the Bengal tigress.

I was dimly aware that men were rolling a cage on wheels up to the side entrance of the arena. From between the bars I caught a glint of sunlight on a body of savage beauty. I saw, too, the white, drawn face of Pudgy, standing by the side of the cage.

Some one opened the side gate of the arena. The director and the actor were still talking. The director was showing graphically how the other should come out of the jungle, should listen for the tigress’s coming, should drop behind the log and fire—

What happened then I can scarcely remember. It was all so sudden, so breath-taking. A confusion of signals had been the cause, they told me afterward. The man at the cage thought the opening of the arena gate was the signal to release Princess—and he had opened the door of her cage!

There was a shout that died away in a gasp of many breaths, a silence that was like a great commotion—for Princess, the royal Bengal tigress, crashed through the flimsy greenery of the mimic jungle and like a tawny statue stopped short, her head raised, her amber eyes wide.

It was a nightmare, that terrible instant. No one moved. The director’s face went pasty white, the actor’s red-lined mouth had fallen open. There in that oval cage the two puny men faced the magnificent creature of the wilds, faced the animal they had planned to kill—and they were helpless.

Only the briefest moment did the tableau last. For Princess’s nostrils dilated with the hated human scent, her eyes narrowed to slits, her nose wrinkled back, and she snarled. The director was speaking jerkily without moving—saying that no one must scream—telling some one to bring the gun—

At the sound of his voice the tigress dropped to a crouch. Her tail lashed her sides. I could not take my eyes from the arena. My throat was dry. I was vaguely conscious that a man had pushed past me. It was Pudgy, the menagerie keeper.

For a scant second a lower crouch—a long-drawn snarl—then a voice spoke, quietly, sharply.

“_Princess!_”

At the sound of the keeper’s voice, the tigress lifted her head ever so little, and her amber, black-rimmed eyes turned toward him.

“Princess!” he said again. “Keep back—steady, old girl!”

He had unfastened the front gate of the arena and opened it. He was unarmed; he carried not so much as a whip. Yet he went toward her quietly, talking in a gentle monotone, and she snarled at him as he came. But he walked quickly, confidently. He placed himself between the two men and the crouching tigress. Then he planted his feet far apart and smiled down at her.

“Maybe you’re mad at these folks, but you wouldn’t be mad at me—your old pal,” he said softly.

There was a moment of sickening suspense. Then the snarl died on Princess’s lips, her tail ceased its frenzied lashing, and she rose from her crouching position.

“The danger is over,” Pudgy said quietly to the men behind him. “Just move out toward the door. Take your time. Don’t run.”

Then he spoke to the tigress again:

“Into your cage, old girl, right out through the same door you came in—Out you go—It’s all right, lady—Don’t be frightened—You know your old pal wouldn’t do anything to hurt you—”

He was stepping forward toward her, urging her gently but firmly back through the side gate of the enclosure. She snarled as she went, and stopped once to roar full-throated defiance. But the mild little man talked to her always, caressing her with his voice, comforting her with the assurance that she was not to be hurt. The tawny body slipped through the door into the wagon cage—the door clanged after her—it was over.

Pudgy came out of the arena at the gate where he had entered. His face was calm, his hands untrembling. I pushed past the people in front of me and in a moment was beside him.

“Tell them, oh, tell them now!” I whispered. And Pudgy, because he, too, loved the things of the wild, understood me.

“Do you think it would do any good?” he questioned under his breath, and I nodded, being almost past speech.

Together we sought the director of the picture. He was one of the Powers. His word would mean much.

He was still white-lipped and breathless, but he attempted a wan smile as he shook Pudgy’s hand.

“Well, she almost got us,” he spoke with forced cheerfulness. “If it hadn’t been for you—” He shuddered in spite of himself. “If there’s anything I can do, old-man, to show my gratitude—”

Pudgy’s eyes turned toward the wagon cage where Princess had commenced her endless pacing. She was still snarling softly, as if dreaming of the vengeance on man which had almost been hers.

“Maybe you don’t know it,” he said slowly, “but the real reason Princess obeyed me was because she knows me and likes me. She knows I like her, too, and she wouldn’t do anything to make me feel bad. And if you really mean what you say—about doing something—why, let Princess live. She—she’s a friend of mine.”

There was a short silence. The director was staring at him curiously.

“That tiger—that bloodthirsty beast—a _friend_ of yours?” he said incredulously.

“Yes,” answered Pudgy simply. “She’s just that, and I don’t want her killed.”

The director turned away, walked a few short steps, and halted. “All right,” he said briefly, “if that’s the way of it—I’ll see what I can do.”

As I said before, this is not my story. I wish it were. I should love to have the friendship of that wonderful tigress as Pudgy has it. But at least I always make it a point, when at the studio, to pay a brief visit to Princess, the Royal Bengal. She paces unceasingly and stares at something beyond the bars which humans may not see. But because Pudgy has let me come inside the railing, and has told Princess that I helped, a very little bit, in obtaining her reprieve from the death sentence, I like to think that her amber eyes as they rest on me are not fierce, but kindly, and that she knows that I love her and wish her well.

_Part Eleven_
ETHEL OF THE WILD HEART

_For I saw her, not a savage, bloodthirsty beast, but a wild thing of
the deep woods, ruled by pain instead of kindliness._
]

_Part Eleven_
ETHEL
_of the_
WILD HEART

This is the story of a lioness in a cage at a great moving-picture studio—a lean, tawny lioness with slanting, amber eyes and flexible muscles that undulated under the loose skin like ripples of water under a blanket of kelp.

They said, the people of the studio, that Ethel was savage, that she had clawed a trainer and injured an actor for life, that she hated women and would not tolerate the touch of a human hand. And they thought me a little mad when I wanted to go into the cage where she and four other lions were taking their exercise.

But I was of the press, so I was permitted to enter the cage with the trainer, to go through the doubled-barred iron doors, and to stand very quietly while the keeper of the lions, with a long whip, lashed the snarling animals to their pedestals.

Of them all, Ethel was the most savage. Her eyes blazed with a wicked light that burned green behind the amber; her tail lashed furiously when the trainer flicked her with his whip; and afraid as she undoubtedly was, the courage of her spirit showed itself in her stubborn crouch and the vicious striking of her powerful paws whenever the lash came near her.

She fascinated me. The other lions were cowed, it seemed, by long experience with the stinging whip. They took their places protesting and snarling, but with alacrity none the less. Ethel would not obey. In defiance of the stern commands of the trainer and the leather thong which flicked remorselessly about her eyes and nose, she would leap from one side of the cage to the other, crouch for an instant, then spring again, shaking the bars in her frenzied attempts to escape the persecuting lash, while the other lions watched her from their pedestals uneasily, with guttural intakes of breath and occasional snarls.

Do you wonder what I felt when Ethel careened about the cage, stubborn, disobedient, mad with rage as well as with a terror born of pain? At first I felt fear, a fear as unreasoning as that of the lioness. For in one of her crazed leaps she brushed against me, so that I was pushed sharply against the iron bars of the cage.

“Do you want to go out?” the trainer was asking me, and I shook my head, for I could not speak.

Then suddenly the fear left me. The thread of ice which had seemed to run from the top of my head to the very soles of my feet melted away as though in a warm sunshine. For Ethel, crouching in snarling defiance, had suddenly raised her head. For an instant we measured each other, eye to eye. And in that moment I remembered another wild thing—this one uncaged—and I remembered myself a little girl alone on the Hill Trail, facing the amber eyes of one of Ethel’s distant kin. I want to tell you what I remembered, so that you will know why the ice thread was melted and why things happened in that barred cage that the trainer said had never happened before.

It was while we still lived in the little cabin on the Bay, and I was yet a child. Brother had gone away to school, and I was lonely, so more than ever I sought the woods and the companionship of the woods creatures there.

It was a sultry day in August when the juncoes were flying in panicky flocks, and when a haze of smoke was in the air that told of forest fires not so far away. All the night before the sky in the west had been reddened with a dull glow that gradually grew brighter, and though we had no fear for ourselves since a cleared space lay between the wooded hills and the cabin we were sorry for the wild things of the woods who would be forced to flee from the red monster that devoured their homes so relentlessly.

The air that day was oppressive, for the smoke hung low, and if we listened carefully, we could hear the distant crackling of tall pines with gum-smeared trunks on fire, and the occasional crash of a giant fir, tortured too long by licking flames.

I sought the Hill Trail, listening, as I climbed, to the ominous crackle of burning trees, much nearer than I would have wished. And perhaps it was because of that intentness that I came, without realizing it, face to face with a wildcat, the largest I have ever seen, stretched across the trail, only a few feet in front of me.

For the first time in my life I knew the fear of which men and books tell you. Many had been the stories told by hunters who passed the cabin, of the ferocity of mountain lions and wildcats, although none of them had ever been seen in the woods around us, because civilization was too near. These beasts, said the hunters, kept to the higher hills and the deeper wooded forests, where game abounded and men seldom came. So when I saw the tawny animal so close that one light spring would have carried the powerful body upon me, my first impulse was to run—blindly, madly—to run until I could run no more, or until the fierce claws of the great cat should bear me to the ground—

The wildcat had not moved except to lift its head ever so slightly and to draw back its jowls in a hissing snarl that displayed cruel, white fangs. The amber eyes watched me without flickering, yet in them I saw distrust, startled anger, and ever so little of a desire to spring—to kill—

In that one instant I had many thoughts—dizzy, rambling thoughts, that chased themselves across my mind like dried leaves blown by a wind. I noticed the straight, white whiskers on either side of the wildcat’s nostrils; I heard the distant fall of a tree; I saw a grasshopper leap from a blade of grass that was bending under his weight; I heard the scuttle of leaves somewhere in the woods and knew that a bevy of quail was there. But I could not move. I stood still in the grip of that numb terror.

What would have happened I can not say. Suddenly the fear left me—for I _knew_! I knew that the tawny animal before me was a wild thing of the woods even as were the other wild things I loved. I knew that fear of fire had driven him from his familiar haunts far up in the mountains, that he sought these woods for protection, not for killing, and I knew that I, having been in those woods longer than he, was hostess there, and that it was my place to make him welcome, to extend to him the friendly greetings that I would have tendered to any of my woods friends. The fear was gone, utterly. I wanted to put my hand on his sleek head, to stroke his glossy back, to put my cheek against the russet satin of his thick coat.

But I made no move. I spoke to him, as I would have spoken to any other of my woods friends, telling him that he was welcome, that the woods were his as well as mine, and that I hoped the fire would spare his relatives who were dear to him.

As I spoke, the amber eyes opened wider, the snarl died away, and suddenly he yawned, voluminously, with a snap of his jaws and a careless licking motion of his red tongue. Then his eyes closed indifferently, and I knew he had understood me. I knew that between us was no thought of fear or hate. I walked past him up the trail, so close that I might have touched him, and he did not move. Only the amber eyes met mine squarely, and it was as if the wild thing from the deeper woods had said with words,

“We are friends—go in peace.”

When I had gone up the trail a way, I stopped at the bend in the path and looked back. The wildcat was in the same position, but he was watching me still with eyes unblinking and unafraid.

So that is why, some years later, when Ethel raised her head and met my eyes, the icy fear slipped away. For I saw her, not a savage, bloodthirsty beast, but a wild thing of the deep woods, girded round with iron bars and stinging whips, a wild thing ruled by pain instead of kindliness, and there surged into my heart a great love and pity for her. I wanted to take the whip from the man, to break it into bits, to tell her that she was free to go back to her mountain fastnesses.

So, disregarding the cry of warning from the trainer and the gasps from those who stood outside the cage, I walked slowly toward the crouching lioness, saying to her the things I would have said had I met her in the woods, telling her that I, too, belonged to the out-of-doors, that I, too, was a captive, that between us there was a bond. Slowly the snarling lips relaxed, the glint of green went out of her slanting eyes, and she no longer crouched. I knelt beside her on the floor of the cage, while the lions above on their pedestals watched with curious, sullen eyes, and the trainer’s voice died away in a series of gulps. Gently I put out my hand and touched her rough, tawny head. She flinched and snarled, but I did not draw my hand away, and the next instant I felt her tense muscles relax, and she was quiet under the steady stroking of my hand.

The trainer spoke to me in an agonized whisper, telling me to come away quickly, and as I rose from my kneeling position, Ethel rose, too. Padding over to the pedestal which was hers, she mounted to it with a spring and sat there quietly, her eyes never leaving me or missing a motion I made.

When we left the cage, Ethel padded close to my side, and the trainer said in jest that I might take her for a pet.

If I only could have! My heart was aching for her as I left, for I, too, am sometimes rebellious at the ways of civilization and of a world that does not know or care about the things of life that have nothing to do with money. I, too, am lonely for the freshness of leaves wet with dew, the feeling of moss underfoot, the glint of sunlight through laced branches. I think I know a little of the longing that is hers as she paces back and forth in her narrow cage, for hers is not a savage heart—only a wild heart; and I know that love can speak to it and soothe its hurt.

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_. ● HTML alt text was used for images that didn’t have captions.