A Virginia Mountaineer's Influence Over Wild Animals

1896

An Extraordinary Power

He Can Summon at His Will Snakes, Squirrels and Wild Birds From Their Retreats

If Kipling were here, writes a Rockbridge Alum Springs (Va.) correspondent of the New York Tribune, he would write of another and elderly Mowgli, local genius of this green valley, with its cordon of hills and outlying rocky summits. Thomas Hostetter is his name and his age is absolutely uncertain. He thinks he is about eighty-five years old. The wrinkles on his bronzed face rival in number and complexity those of Loti's mummy. His eyes are small and deep set. He lives somewhere among the crags and blackberry bushes several miles to the north of this place, in the neighborhood of Collierstown, Va.

He suddenly appeared here the other morning with a well-fingered and timeworn fiddle slung over his shoulder, and a huge kohinoor of an alum diamond in his hand. He said he paid $10 for his violin ever so many years ago in Lexington. He seemed confident of the value of the gem, which only stern necessity compelled him to sacrifice for $1, and which the writer bought in the hope of drawing him out. He said his wife was dead. His nine children were all married or scattered. He had never been to a city and was absolutely unversed in knowledge of any life but one — that of the deep wood, with its multitude of silent creatures. Their habits and language were an open book to him. The old man had innumerable little packages of rattlesnake rattles stuck into every conceivable receptacle of his clothing. It seemed that the snakes had come to regard him without animosity. He had acquired an insight into their habits, and when he did not see them with his worn-out eyes he simply sat down on a log and beguiled them out of the nooks and crannies to his feet. He had no Hindoo "tomtom" wherewith to charm the snakes, and apparently exerted no influence upon them other than that which close sympathy always begets. Doubtless they had learned to regard him much in the light of a sorely overgrown and distorted brother.

The writer came across him one dewy morning seated crosswise on a log with a six-foot rattler coiled contentedly at his feet. Not until the stranger appeared on the scene did that flickering tongue protrude or those angry eyes glitter. The two seemed to be simply enjoying a quiet wood talk as the claw-like hand of the man stroked down the diamond patches on the snake's shiny back. Hostetter apparently did not think this situation at all out of the common. He had known rattlesnakes and blacksnakes and moccasins so long and so intimately that any loss of sociability between him and the reptiles would have seemed strange to him. So powerful was his influence over the coiled serpent at his feet that a little further endearment even reconciled the snake to the writer's presence at a reasonable distance.

When in the woods at night Hostetter always sleeps by the side of a convenient fallen tree, and it is no unusual thing for him to wake up in the morning and find a poisonous reptile slumbering between his legs or warmed into deep sleep on his body. He said that the blacksnakes in the mountain meadows actually coil themselves around the legs of cows and milk them, and that the cows actually grow fond of this unnatural milking and come to the same spot in the field each day at the same hour and low for the snakes.

Uttering an inarticulate sound, midway between a sob and a groan, Hostetter sent the snake into the bushes.

"Let me see you bring a squirrel into your lap."

He sat down on the spreading roots of a pine tree and gave utterance to a subdued chorus of chirrups and squeaks in minor keys, and soon the wood seemed to be filled with the pattering of little feet, and the queer old man became the motionless centre of a cluster of bushy brown and gray squirrels. They raced up and down his legs and arms, sniffed at the opening of his bulging pockets, and only avoided the smoke of his pipe. Again, with a sound half inarticulate and a half gesture, he dismissed the nimble footed throng.

"Can you call the wild turkeys, Hostetter?"

The old man seated himself again with his back to a tree, and the writer wandered off into the deep shadows. Scarcely was this done before a familiar "gobble, gobble" was heard, and then after five minutes silence the notes were repeated. A twig snapped and soon through the leaves the beady eyes of a wild turkey peered with hanging comb and one foot lifted. Again a low "gobble, gobble," and the leaves divided and the stately bird strutted directly to a place beside the old man and stared without blinking into his face.