My first care was to make a fire. Difficult though it might appear to
the degenerate dweller of the city to do this, to the trained woodsman,
such as I had now become, it is nothing. I selected a dry stick, rubbed
it vigorously against my hind leg, and in a few moments it broke into a
generous blaze. Half an hour later I was sitting beside a glowing fire
of twigs discussing with great gusto an appetizing mess of boiled grass
and fungi cooked in a hollow stone.
I ate my fill, not pausing till I was full, careless, as the natural man
ever is, of the morrow. Then, stretched out upon the pine-needles at the
foot of a great tree, I lay in drowsy contentment listening to the song
of the birds, the hum of the myriad insects and the strident note of
the squirrel high above me. At times I would give utterance to the soft
answering call, known to every woodsman, that is part of the freemasonry
of animal speech. As I lay thus, I would not have exchanged places with
the pale dweller in the city for all the wealth in the world. Here I lay
remote from the world, happy, full of grass, listening to the crooning
of the birds.
But the mood of inaction and reflection cannot last, even with the lover
of Nature. It was time to be up and doing. Much lay before me to be done
before the setting of the sun should bring with it, as I fully expected
it would, darkness. Before night fell I must build a house, make myself
a suit of clothes, lay in a store of nuts, and in short prepare myself
for the oncoming of winter, which, in the bush, may come on at any time
in the summer.
I rose briskly from the ground to my hands and knees and set myself to
the building of my house. The method that I intended to follow here was
merely that which Nature has long since taught to the beaver and which,
moreover, is known and practised by the gauchos of the pampas, by the
googoos of Rhodesia and by many other tribes. I had but to select a
suitable growth of trees and gnaw them down with my teeth, taking care
so to gnaw them that each should fall into the place appointed for it
in the building. The sides, once erected in this fashion, another row of
trees, properly situated, is gnawed down to fall crosswise as the roof.
I set myself briskly to work and in half an hour had already the
satisfaction of seeing my habitation rising into shape. I was still
gnawing with unabated energy when I was interrupted by a low growling in
the underbrush. With animal caution I shrank behind a tree, growling in
return. I could see something moving in the bushes, evidently an animal
of large size. From its snarl I judged it to be a bear. I could hear it
moving nearer to me. It was about to attack me. A savage joy thrilled
through me at the thought, while my union suit bristled with rage from
head to foot as I emitted growl after growl of defiance. I bared my
teeth to the gums, snarling, and lashed my flank with my hind foot.
Eagerly I watched for the onrush of the bear. In savage combat who
strikes first wins. It was my idea, as soon as the bear should appear,
to bite off its front legs one after the other. This initial advantage
once gained, I had no doubt of ultimate victory.
The brushes parted. I caught a glimpse of a long brown body and a hairy
head. Then the creature reared up, breasting itself against a log, full
in front of me. Great heavens! It was not a bear at all. It was a man.
He was dressed, as I was, in a union suit, and his face and hands, like
mine, were stained a butternut brown. His hair was long and matted and
two weeks’ stubble of beard was on his face.
For a minute we both glared at one another, still growling. Then the man
rose up to a standing position with a muttered exclamation of disgust.
“Ah, cut it out,” he said. “Let’s talk English.”
He walked over towards me and sat down upon a log in an attitude that
seemed to convey the same disgust as the expression of his features.
Then he looked round about him.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Building a house,” I answered.
“I know,” he said with a nod. “What are you here for?”
“Why,” I explained, “my plan is this: I want to see whether a man can
come out here in the woods, naked, with no aid but that of his own hands
and his own ingenuity and--”
“Yes, yes, I know,” interrupted the disconsolate man. “Earn himself a
livelihood in the wilderness, live as the cave-man lived, carefree and
far from the curse of civilization!”
“That’s it. That was my idea,” I said, my enthusiasm rekindling as I
spoke. “That’s what I’m doing; my food is to be the rude grass and the
roots that Nature furnishes for her children, and for my drink--”
“Yes, yes,” he interrupted again with impatience, “for your drink the
running rill, for your bed the sweet couch of hemlock, and for your
canopy the open sky lit with the soft stars in the deep-purple vault of
the dewy night. I know.”
“Great heavens, man!” I exclaimed. “That’s my idea exactly. In fact,
those are my very phrases. How could you have guessed it?”
He made a gesture with his hand to indicate weariness and
disillusionment.
“Pshaw!” he said. “I know it because I’ve been doing it. I’ve been here
a fortnight now on this open-air, life-in-the-woods game. Well, I’m sick
of it! This last lets me out.”
“What last?” I asked.
“Why, meeting you. Do you realize that you are the nineteenth man
that I’ve met in the last three days running about naked in the woods?
They’re all doing it. The woods are full of them.”
“You don’t say so!” I gasped.
“Fact. Wherever you go in the bush you find naked men all working out
this same blasted old experiment. Why, when you get a little farther in
you’ll see signs up: NAKED MEN NOT ALLOWED IN THIS BUSH, and NAKED MEN
KEEP OFF, and GENTLEMEN WHO ARE NAKED WILL KINDLY KEEP TO THE HIGH ROAD,
and a lot of things like that. You must have come in at a wrong place or
you’d have noticed the little shanties that they have now at the edge of
the New England bush with signs up: UNION SUITS BOUGHT AND SOLD, CAMERAS
FOR SALE OR TO RENT, HIGHEST PRICE FOR CAST-OFF CLOTHING, and all that
sort of thing.”
“No,” I said. “I saw nothing.”
“Well, you look when you go back. As for me, I’m done with it. The
thing’s worked out. I’m going back to the city to see whether I can’t,
right there in the heart of the city, earn myself a livelihood with my
unaided hands and brains. That’s the real problem; no more bumming on
the animals for me. This bush business is too easy. Well, good-bye; I’m
off.”
“But stop a minute,” I said. “How is it that, if what you say is true, I
haven’t seen or heard anybody in the bush, and I’ve been here since the
middle of the morning?”
“Nonsense,” the man answered. “They were probably all round you but you
didn’t recognize them.”
“No, no, it’s not possible. I lay here dreaming beneath a tree and there
wasn’t a sound, except the twittering of a squirrel and, far away, the
cry of a lake-loon, nothing else.”
“Exactly, the twittering of a squirrel! That was some feller up the tree
twittering to beat the band to let on that he was a squirrel, and no
doubt some other feller calling out like a loon over near the lake. I
suppose you gave them the answering cry?”
“I did,” I said. “I gave that low guttural note which--”
“Precisely--which is the universal greeting in the freemasonry of animal
speech. I see you’ve got it all down pat. Well, good-bye again. I’m off.
Oh, don’t bother to growl, please. I’m sick of that line of stuff.”
“Good-bye,” I said.
He slid through the bushes and disappeared. I sat where I was, musing,
my work interrupted, a mood of bitter disillusionment heavy upon me. So
I sat, it may have been for hours.
In the far distance I could hear the faint cry of a bittern in some
lonely marsh.
“Now, who the deuce is making that noise?” I muttered. “Some silly fool,
I suppose, trying to think he’s a waterfowl. Cut it out!”
Long I lay, my dream of the woods shattered, wondering what to do.
Then suddenly there came to my ear the loud sound of voices, human
voices, strident and eager, with nothing of the animal growl in them.
“He’s in there. I seen him!” I heard some one call.
Rapidly I dived sideways into the underbrush, my animal instinct strong
upon me again, growling as I went. Instinctively I knew that it was I
that they were after. All the animal joy of being hunted came over me.
My union suit stood up on end with mingled fear and rage.
As fast as I could I retreated into the wood. Yet somehow, as I moved,
the wood, instead of growing denser, seemed to thin out. I crouched low,
still growling and endeavouring to bury myself in the thicket. I was
filled with a wild sense of exhilaration such as any lover of the wild
life would feel at the knowledge that he is being chased, that some
one is after him, that some one is perhaps just a few feet behind him,
waiting to stick a pitchfork into him as he runs. There is no ecstasy
like this.
Then I realized that my pursuers had closed in on me. I was surrounded
on all sides.
The woods had somehow grown thin. They were like the mere shrubbery of a
park--it might be of Central Park itself. I could hear among the deeper
tones of men the shrill voices of boys. “There he is,” one cried, “going
through them bushes! Look at him humping himself!” “What is it, what’s
the sport?” another called. “Some crazy guy loose in the park in his
underclothes and the cops after him.”
Then they closed in on me. I recognized the blue suits of the police
force and their short clubs. In a few minutes I was dragged out of
the shrubbery and stood in the open park in my pyjamas, wide awake,
shivering in the chilly air of early morning.
Fortunately for me, it was decided at the police-court that
sleep-walking is not an offence against the law. I was dismissed with a
caution.
My vacation is still before me, and I still propose to spend it naked.
But I shall do so at Atlantic City.