In the long centuries,
stretching back into a dim immeasurable past, so many of this race have
journeyed hither from the mountain and the plain to suffer the sharp
pang of death, that, to the imagination, something of it all seems to
have passed into that hushed and mournful nature. And now one more, the
latest pilgrim, has come, all his little strength spent in his struggle
to penetrate the close thicket; looking old and gaunt and ghostly in the
twilight; with long ragged hair; staring into the gloom out of
death-dimmed sunken eyes. England has one artist who might show it to us
on canvas, who would be able to catch the feeling of such a scene--of
that mysterious, passionless tragedy of nature--I refer to J. M. Swan,
the painter of the "Prodigal Son" and the "Lioness Defending her Cubs."
To his account of the animal's dying place and instinct, Darwin adds: "I
do not at all understand the reason of this, but I may observe that the
wounded huanacos at the Santa Cruz invariably walked towards the river."
It would, no doubt, be rash to affirm of any instinct that it is
absolutely unique; but, putting aside some doubtful reports about a
custom of the Asiatic elephant, which may have originated in the account
of Sindbad the Sailor's discovery of an elephant's burial place, we have
no knowledge of an instinct similar to that of the huanaco in any other
animal. So far as we know, it stands alone and apart, with nothing in
the actions of other species leading up, or suggesting any family
likeness to it.
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