第52章 Saturday's Child(3)

"Why that is the very first lesson Daddy ever taught me when he took me to the mountains and the desert. If you are afraid, your system throws off formic acid, and the animals need only the suspicion of a scent of it to make them ready to fight. Any animal you encounter or even a bee, recognizes it. One of the first things that I remember about Daddy was seeing him sit on the running board of the runabout buckling up his desert boots while he sang to me,'Let not your heart be troubled Neither let it be afraid,'

as he got ready to take me on his back and go into the desert for our first lesson; he told me that a man was perfectly safe in going to the forest or the desert or anywhere he chose among any kind of animals if he had sufficient self-control that no odor of fear emanated from him. He said that a man was safe to make his way anywhere he wanted to go, if he started his journey by recognizing a blood brotherhood with anything living he would meet on the way; and I have heard Enos Mills say that when he was snow inspector of Colorado he traveled the crest of the Rockies from one end of the state to the other without a gun or any means of self-defense.""Now, that is something new to think about," said Donald.

"And it's something that is very true," said Linda. "I have seen it work times without number. Father and I went quietly up the mountains, through the canyons, across the desert, and we would never see a snake of any kind, but repeatedly we would see men with guns and dogs out to kill, to trespass on the rights of the wild, and they would be hunting for sticks and clubs and firing their guns where we had passed never thinking of lurking danger.

If you start out in accord, at one with Nature, you're quite as safe as you are at home, sometimes more so. But if you start out to stir up a fight, the occasion is very rare on which you can't succeed.""And that reminds me," said Donald, with a laugh, "that a week ago I came to start a fight with you. What has become of that fight we were going to have, anyway?""You can search me," laughed Linda, throwing out her hands in a graceful gesture. "There's not a scrap of fight in my system concerning you, but if Oka Sayye were having a fight with you and I were anywhere around, you'd have one friend who would help you to handle the Jap."Donald looked at Linda thoughtfully.

"By the great hocus-pocus," he said, "you know, I believe you.

If two fellows were having a pitched battle most of the girls Iknow would quietly faint or run, but I do believe that you would stand by and help a fellow if he needed it.""That I surely would," said Linda; "but don't you say 'most of the girls I know' and then make a statement like that concerning girls, because you prove that you don't know them at all. A few years ago, I very distinctly recall how angry many women were at this line in one of Kipling's poems:

The female of the species is more deadly than the male,and there was nothing to it save that a great poet was trying to pay womanhood everywhere the finest compliment he knew how. He always has been fundamental in his process of thought. He gets right back to the heart of primal things. When he wrote that line he was not really thinking that there was a nasty poison in the heart of a woman or death in her hands. What he was thinking was that in the jungle the female lion or tiger or jaguar must go and find a particularly secluded cave and bear her young and raise them to be quite active kittens before she leads them out, because there is danger of the bloodthirsty father eating them when they are tiny and helpless. And if perchance a male finds the cave of his mate and her tiny young and enters it to do mischief, then there is no recorded instance I know of in which the female, fighting in defense of her young, has not been 'more deadly than the male.' And that is the origin of the much-discussed line concerning the female of the species, and it holds good fairly well down the line of the wild. It's even true among such tiny things as guinea pigs and canary birds. There is a mother element in the heart of every girl. Daddy used to say that half the women in the world married the men they did because they wanted to mother them. You can't tell what is in a woman's heart by looking at her. You must bring her face to face with an emergency before you can say what she'll do, but I would be perfectly willing to stake my life on this: There is scarcely a girl you know who would see you getting the worst of a fight, say with Oka Sayye, or someone who meant to kill you or injure you, who would not pick up the first weapon she could lay her hands on, whether it was an axe or a stick or a stone, and go to your defense, and if she had nothing else to fight with, I have heard of women who put up rather a tidy battle with their claws.

Sounds primitive, doesn't it?"