There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with
oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to
think idly and slowly as one does it.
There, now I'll fill the kettle with snow, I think, and now I'm crushing
the coffee beans with a stone; later I must beat my sleeping bag well in
the snow and get the wool white again. There is nothing in this of
literature or great novels or public opinion; does it matter? But then I
haven't been toiling just to get this coffee into my life. Literature?
When Rome ruled the world, she was no more than Greece's apprentice in
literature. Yet Rome ruled the world. Let us look too at another country
we know: it fought a war of independence the glory of which still shines,
and it brought forth the greatest school of painting in the world. Yet it
had no literature, and has none today....
Day by day I grow more knowing in the ways of the trees and the moss and
the snow on the ground, and all things are my friends. The stump of a fir
tree stands thawing in the sun; I feel my familiarity with it grow, and
sometimes I stand there loving it, for there is something in it that moves
my soul. The bark is badly broken. One winter in the deep snow, the tree
must have been crippled, and now it points upward long and naked. I put
myself in its place, and look at it with pity. My eyes perhaps have the
simple, animal expression that human eyes had in the age of the mastodons.
No doubt you will seize this opportunity to mock me, for there are many
amusing things you can say about me and this stump of a fir. Yet in your
heart, you know that I am superior to you in this as in everything else,
with the single exception that I have not your conventional
accomplishments, nor have I passed examinations. About the forest and the
earth you can teach me nothing, for here I feel what no man else has felt.
Sometimes I take the wrong direction and lose my way. Yes, truly this may
happen sometimes. But I do not begin to twist and lose myself outside my
very door, like the children of the city. I am twelve miles out, far up
the opposite bank of the Skjel River, before I begin to get lost, and then
only on a sunless day, with perhaps thick, wild snow coming down, and no
north or south in the sky. Then you must know the special marks of this
kind of tree and that, the galipot of the pine, the bark of deciduous
trees, the moss that grows at their roots, the angle of the south and
north-pointing branches, the stones that are moss-covered and those that
are bare, and the pattern of the network of veins in the leaves. From all
these things while there is daylight I can find my way.
But if the dusk falls, I know it will be impossible for me to get home
till the next day. "How shall I pass this night?" I say to myself. And I
roam about till I find a sheltered spot; the best is a crag standing with
its back to the wind. Here I collect a few armfuls of pine needles, button
my jacket tight, and take a long time to settle. No one who has not tried
it knows anything of the fine pleasure that streams through the soul as
one sits in a snug shelter on such a night. I light my pipe to pass the
time, but the tobacco doesn't agree with me because I haven't eaten, so I
put some resin in my mouth to chew as I lie thinking of many things. The
snow continues to fall outside; if I have been lucky enough to find a
shelter facing the right way, the snowdrifts will close in over me and
form a crest like a roof above my retreat. Then I am quite safe, and may
sleep or wake as I please; there will be no danger of freezing my feet.
* * * * *
Two men came to my hut; they were in a great hurry, and one of them called
to me:
"Good morning. Has a man passed this way?"
I didn't like his face. I was not his servant and his question was too
stupid.
"Many people may have passed this way. Do you mean have I _seen_ a
man go by?"
So much for him!
"I meant what I said," the man replied surlily. "I'm asking you in the
name of the law."
"Oh."