If one can just lie close enough to the breast of the
wilderness, he can't help but be imbued with some of the life
that pulses therein.--_From a Frontiersman's Diary_.
Long ago, when the great city of Gitcheapolis was a rather small, untidy
hamlet in the middle of a plain, it used to be that a pool of water,
possibly two hundred feet square, gathered every spring immediately back
of the courthouse. The snow falls thick and heavy in Gitcheapolis in
winter; and the pond was nothing more than snow water that the
inefficient drainage system of the city did not quite absorb. Now snow
water is occasionally the most limpid, melted-crystal thing in the
world. There are places just two thousand miles west of Gitcheapolis
where you can see it pouring pure and fresh off of the snow fields,
scouring out a ravine from the great rock wall of a mountain side,
leaping faster than a deer leaps--and when you speak of the speed of a
descending deer you speak of something the usual mortal eye can
scarcely follow--from cataract to cataract; and the sight is always a
pleasing one to behold. Incidentally, these same snow streams are quite
often simply swarming with trout,--brook and cutthroat, steelhead and
even those speckled fellows that fishermen call Dolly Vardens for some
reason that no one has ever quite been able to make out. They are to be
found in every ripple, and they bite at a fly as if they were going to
crush the steel hook into dust between their teeth, and the cold water
gives them spirit to fight until the last breath of strength is gone
from their beautiful bodies. How they came there, and what their purpose
is in ever climbing up the river that leads nowhere but to a snow bank,
no one exactly knows.
The snow water back of the courthouse was not like this at all. Besides
being the despair of the plumbers and the city engineer, it was a severe
strain on the beauty-loving instincts of every inhabitant in the town
who had any such instincts. It was muddy and murky and generally
distasteful; and lastly, there were no trout in it. Neither were there
any mud cat such as were occasionally to be caught in the Gitcheapolis
River.
A little boy played at the edge of the water, this spring day of long
ago. Except for his interest in the pond, it would have been scarcely
worth while to go to the trouble of explaining that it contained no
fish. He, however, bitterly regretted the fact. In truth, he sometimes
liked to believe that it did contain fish, very sleepy fish that never
made a ripple, and as he had an uncommon imagination he was sometimes
able to convince himself that this was so. But he never took hook and
line and played at fishing. He was too much afraid of the laughter of
his boy friends. His mother probably wouldn't object if he fished here,
he thought, particularly if he were careful not to get his shoes covered
with mud. But she wouldn't let him go down to Gitcheapolis Creek to fish
with the other boys for mud cat. He was not very strong, she thought,
and it was a rough sport anyway, and besides,--she didn't think he
wanted to go very badly. As mothers are usually particularly
understanding, this was a curious thing.
The truth was that little Dan Failing wanted to fish almost as much as
he wanted to live. He would dream about it of nights. His blood would
glow with the thought of it in the spring-time. Women the world over
will have a hard time believing what an intense, heart-devouring passion
the love of the chase can be, whether it is for fishing or hunting or
merely knocking golf balls into a little hole upon a green. Sometimes
they don't remember that this instinct is just as much a part of most
men, and thus most boys, as their hands or their lips. It was acquired
by just as laborious a process,--the lives of uncounted thousands of
ancestors who fished and hunted for a living.
It was true that little Dan didn't look the part. Even then he showed
signs of physical frailty. His eyes looked rather large, and his cheeks
were not the color of fresh sirloin as they should have been. In fact,
one would have had to look very hard to see any color in them at all.
These facts are interesting from the light they throw upon the next
glimpse of Dan, fully twenty years later.
This story isn't about the pool of snow water; it is only partly about
Gitcheapolis. "Gitche" means great in the Indian language, and every one
knows what "apolis" means. There are a dozen cities in the
middle-western part of the United States just like it--with Indian
names, with muddy, snow-water pools, with slow rivers in which only mud
cat live--utterly surrounded by endless fields that slope levelly and
evenly to a drab horizon. And because that land is what it is, because
there are such cities as Gitcheapolis, there has sprung up in this
decade a far-seeing breed of men. They couldn't help but learn to see
far, on such prairies. And, like little Dan by the pool, they did all
their hunting and their fishing and exercised many of the instincts that
a thousand generations of wild men had instilled in them, in their
dreams alone. It was great exercise for the imagination. And perhaps
that has had something to do with the size of the crop of writers and
poets and artists that is now being harvested in the Middle West.
Except for the fact that it was the background for the earliest picture
of little Dan, the pool back of the courthouse has very little
importance in his story. It did, however, afford an illustration to him
of one of the really astonishing truths of life. He saw a shadow in the
water that he pretended he thought might be a fish. He threw a stone at
it.
The only thing that happened was a splash, and then a slowly widening
ripple. The circumference of the ripple grew ever larger, extended and
widened, and finally died at the edge of the shore. It set little Dan to
thinking. He wondered if, had the pool been larger, the ripple still
would have spread; and if the pool had been eternity, whether the ripple
would have gone on forever. At the time he did not know the laws of
cause and effect. Later, when Gitcheapolis was great and prosperous and
no longer untidy, he was going to find out that a cause is nothing but a
rock thrown into a pond of infinity, and the ripple that is its effect
keeps growing and growing forever.
It is a very old theme, but the astonishment it creates is always new. A
man once figured out that if Clovis had spared one life that he
took--say that of the under-chief whose skull he shattered to pay him
for breaking the vase of Soissons--there would be to-day the same races
but an entirely different set of individuals. The effect would grow and
grow as the years passed. The man's progeny each in turn would leave his
mark upon the world, and the result would be--too vast to contemplate.
The little incident that is the real beginning of this story was of no
more importance than a pebble thrown into the snow-water pond; but its
effect was to remove the life of Dan Failing, since grown up, far out of
the realms of the ordinary.
And that brings all matters down to 1919, in the last days of a
particularly sleepy summer. You would hardly know Gitcheapolis now. It
is true that the snows still fall deep in winter, but the city engineer
has finally solved the problem of the pool back of the courthouse. In
fact, the courthouse itself is gone, and rebuilt in a more pretentious
section of the city. The business district has increased tenfold. And
the place where used to be the pool and the playground of Dan Failing is
now laid off in as green and pretty a city park as one could wish to
see.
The evidence points to the conclusion that the story some of the oldest
settlers told about this district was really so. They say that forty and
fifty and maybe seventy-five years ago, the quarter-section where the
park was laid out was a green little glade, with a real, natural lake in
the center. Later the lake was drained to raise corn, and the fish
therein--many of them such noble fish as perch and bass--all died in the
sun-baked mud. The pool that had gathered yearly was just the lake
trying, like a spent prize fighter, to come back. And it is rather
singular that buildings have been torn down and money has been spent to
restore the little glade to its original charm; and now construction has
been started to build an artificial lake in the center. One would be
inclined to wonder why things weren't kept the way they were in the
first place. But that is the way of cities.
Some day, when the city becomes more prosperous, a pair of swans and a
herd of deer are going to be introduced, to restore some of the natural
wild life of the park. But in the summer of 1919, a few small birds and
possibly half a dozen pairs of squirrels were the extent and limit of
the wild creatures. And at the moment this story opens, one of these
squirrels was perched on a wide-spreading limb over-arching a gravel
path that slanted through the sunlit park. The squirrel was hungry. He
wished that some one would come along with a nut.
There was a bench beneath the tree. If there had not been, the life of
Dan Failing would have been entirely different. In fact, as the events
will show, there wouldn't have been any life worth talking about at all.
If the squirrel had been on any other tree, if he hadn't been hungry, if
any one of a dozen other things hadn't been as they were, Dan Failing
would have never gone back to the land of his people. The little
bushy-tailed fellow on the tree limb was the squirrel of Destiny!