animal instincts Quotes

“I have played the fox, now I must play the cat of the fable.”

“At the man’s heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolf dog, gray-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother the wild wolf. The animal […] knew that it was no time for traveling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than the man’s judgment.”

“He spoke to the dog ... but in his voice was a strange note of fear that frightened the animal. ”

“The dog was disappointed and yearned back toward the fire. This man did not know cold. Possibly all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold one hundred and seven degrees below freezing point. But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge”

“It was ... time to lie snug in a hole ... and wait for a curtain of cloud to be drawn across the face of ... space. ”

Look, Chief, you can’t go off half-cocked looking for vengeance against a fish. That shark isn’t evil. It’s not a murderer. It’s just obeying its own instincts.

“No. No creature can be honorably required to go counter to the law of his nature -- the Law of God.”

“I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the “lower animals” (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.”

“If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.”

“Alex knew he was in trouble the same way an animal does.”

“Squirrels do as squirrels must. It didn’t matter that she would not be there to hibernate during the winter. Autumn was collecting time, so collect is what she did.”

“She tugged again, and all at once was aware of another of those sudden woodland silences which always spell a warning.”

“He had learned from long experience that the roo, lulled by his Call, would ignore her instinctive fear of the open sunlight and follow him.”

“And so the original water fear was born with Tarka, whose mind had to overlay a weak instinct with habit, just as his ancestors had done when he was hungry.”