Thus Oowikapun heard Mookoomis at the camp fires tell these weird old
stories, and in listening to him he tried to forget his own sorrows and
anxieties.
When he thought he had become so well acquainted with him that he could
make a confidant of him, he told him a little of what he had learned
from Memotas, but he was careful to hide his own secret feelings, for he
knew that Mookoomis was a strong pagan, as well as a great hater of the
whites. Not as yet having met with any of the detested race who were
Christians, he thought they were all alike, and had only come across the
ocean to rob and cheat and kill the poor Indian and take possession of
all his lands.
One evening, when they were alone, Oowikapun ventured to tell him about
the book of heaven which the white man had, and which some Indians had
got hold of and were reading with great interest, and that some of them
had even accepted its teachings and were believing in them. This news
made Mookoomis very angry, and Oowikapun was sorry that he had told him;
but it was now too late, and so he had to listen while the angry man
talked and gave his views on these things.
He said, referring to the legend, that the Great Spirit never intended
the book for the Indian, but that he had made him a hunter, and sent him
out into the forest and the prairies, and on the great lakes and rivers,
and there he was to listen and hear the Great Spirit's voice and see his
works. "This," added Mookoomis, "is the Great Spirit's plan, and he
will be angry with any of his red children who become dissatisfied with
this arrangement, and try to go the white man's way or read his book."
These talks did not bring comfort to Oowikapun, or lift the burden from
his soul; and so, in his desperation, although he did not expect much
comfort, he told Mookoomis of his heart sorrows and disquietude of
spirit. The old man did not get angry, but listened to him very
patiently; and then advised and even urged him to go out into the woods
away from every human sound, and in peaceful solitudes let nature speak
to him and soothe his troubled spirit.
So Oowikapun obeyed the voice of Mookoomis, and, quickly arranging his
affairs, he went out into the solitudes, far away from any human being,
in the hope that there, alone with nature, he might get rest for his
soul. In doing this he was only imitating thousands who, too stubborn
or too ignorant to come to the great Comforter in his own way, are
trying in some other way to find that peace which God alone can give.
We pity those who ignorantly do these things, but what can we say of
those who have been taught the plan of salvation through faith in the
Lord Jesus Christ, and yet will go on talking pertly about God in
nature, and of their ability to find themselves in him by studying him
in his works? God in nature, without Christ, is a riddle, a perplexity,
a mystery.
We pity poor Oowikapun. Just enough light had come to him to show him
that he was a poor, miserable sinner, but he had not yet received enough
to show him the true plan of salvation; and so he was still groping
along in the gloom, and much more to be pitied than the thousands who
know in theory what is God's plan of salvation, but who reject it
because of their pride or hardness of heart:
Everything seemed against him. His eyes were opened to see things now
as never before, for not as a skillful hunter, but as a seeker after
peace, was he out in nature's solitudes. Everything around him seemed
mysterious and contradictory. This teacher, nature, whose lessons he
had come to learn, seemed to be in a very perverse mood, as if to impart
just the reverse of what he would learn, and seemed herself to be
destitute of the very things he had hoped she would have imparted to
him.
Sharp and rude was his first awakening from his illusion. He had not
gone far into the wilderness before it came to him, and it happened
thus. As he was walking along in the forest he heard, but a short
distance ahead of him, a pitiful cry of a creature in distress. Quickly
he hurried on, and was just in time to see the convulsive gasp of a
beautiful young fawn that had been seized and was being mangled by a
great, fierce wolf, which had found it where it had been hidden away by
the mother deer before she had gone into the beaver meadows to feed.
To send the death-dealing bullet through the brains of the savage wolf
was soon done, but, alas! it was too late to save the little innocent
fawn, whose great, big, beautiful eyes were already glassy in death, and
whose life-blood pouring out from the gaping wounds was crimsoning the
leaves and flowers where it had fallen.
"Is this," said Oowikapun, with sadness of spirit, "the first lesson
nature has for me? To her I am coming for peace and quietness of
spirit, and is this what I first see?" Thus on he travelled until he
reached the shores of a great lake, where he had resolved to stay for a
time, at the advice of Mookoomis, to try to find in the solitudes, in
communion with nature, that which his soul craved.
As an observant hunter he had ever been a student of nature, but never
before with such an object in his heart as now filled it. He found no
happiness in his investigations, but was appalled at the sights which
met him and the mysteries with which the study of them baffled him.
Death and discord seemed to reign everywhere, and the strong seemed ever
tyrannising over the weak.
Such sights as the following were ever before him. One day, while
sitting near the shore of the lake, where before him the sunlit waters
played with the pebbles at his feet, he saw a beautiful kingfisher hover
in mid-air for an instant, and then suddenly plunge down in the water
and quickly rise up again with a fine fish in his bill. Almost
instantly, from the top of an old dead tree near the shore, he observed
a fierce hawk, whose sharp eye had seen the fish thus captured. With a
scream that rang out sharp and clear, it flew swiftly after the
kingfisher, and so terrified it that it quickly dropped the fish and
hurriedly flew away to a place of safety. Seizing the fish in its bill,
with a scream of triumph, the hawk was about to return to the shore,
when another actor appeared upon the scene. Away up on the side of the
cliff, which rose up a little back from the shore to the height of
several hundred feet, on a projecting ledge of rocks, a pair of eagles
came year after year and built their crude, wild nest. One of these
great birds was watching the transaction going on below. When it heard
the shrill scream of triumph from the fishhawk, it knew that the time
for action had arrived. With both wings closed it shot down from the
eyrie, and ere the hawk, with its stolen plunder, had reached its old,
storm-beaten tree, the king of birds struck it such a blow that, dazed
and terrified, it dropped the fish, and barely succeeded in getting
away. It was not the fishhawk the eagle was after, but fish; and as the
active bird saw the fish drop from the beak of the fishhawk, it flew
down after it and caught it in mid-air ere it reached the water. Then,
in majestic circles, it slowly ascended to its eyrie. This sight under
other circumstances would have been enjoyable; but now, when he was a
seeker in nature for peace and happiness, the greed and rapacity of the
stronger over the weaker only filled him with sadness.
Thus for several weeks he tried to study nature, or to learn lessons
from her, while, far away from all his people, he dwelt in his little
camp, which he had made at the foot of a beautiful birch tree, or
wandered over the hills or in the forests. But he was no better off,
for all the sights that met his eyes were very similar to those we have
described. It was cruelty and death and destruction everywhere.
Nature alone and unaided does not reveal Christ the Saviour. Since the
fall, and the entrance of sin with all of its attendant miseries into
this once glorious world of ours, the study of nature, with all her
vagaries, without the light of revelation to clear up her mysteries, is
more apt to drive men from God than to draw them to him.
So Oowikapun found out, especially one night, after tossing about on his
bed of balsam boughs in his little tent. While lying there, utterly
miserable and dissatisfied with himself, he was startled by hearing, far
away, the dull, sullen roar of thunder, telling of an approaching storm.
Such was the mode in which he was that this sound was welcomed, and he
sprang up rejoicing, for there had suddenly come into his mind the
thought that perhaps now he would hear something in nature's voice from
which he could draw comfort and happiness.
With this hope in his heart he went out of his tent and seated himself
on a rock near at hand. One by one the stars disappeared as the thick,
black clouds came rolling up, quickly covering the whole expanse of
heaven, and making the night one of inky darkness, save when the cliffs
and forest, islands and lake, were illumined by the vivid lightning's
flash.
Soothed by that awesome feeling which comes to many in the brief last
moments which precede the burst of the tempest, Oowikapun was comforted,
and began to say to himself, "At last I hear the voice of nature for
which I have so long been waiting, and now tranquillised I wait for all
she has to tell me of comfort and of rest."
Hardly had these thoughts passed through his mind ere there came a
lightning flash so vivid, and a thunderbolt so near and powerful,
followed by a crashing peal of thunder so sudden and so deafening, that
Oowikapun was completely stunned and thrown helpless to the ground.
When he recovered consciousness the storm had nearly died away. A few
muttering growls of thunder could still be heard, and some flashes of
lightning upon the distant horizon told in which direction the storm had
disappeared.
Oowikapun staggered to his feet, and tried to comprehend what had
happened. That something had struck him was evident. What it was at
first he was too bewildered to understand. Thinking the best thing he
could do in this dazed condition would be to go back under the shelter
of his little tent, he turned to do so, but found it an impossibility.
The thunderbolt that had stunned him had struck the large birch tree,
and so shattered it to pieces that, as it fell, it had crushed down the
little wigwam into a helpless wreck.
Great indeed was the disappointment and vexation of Oowikapun, who,
while vainly imagining that at length he was about to hear the soothing
voice of nature to comfort and bless him, got from her such a crack that
he was knocked senseless, and, in addition, had his dwelling place
completely wrecked. Groping round in the ruins, he succeeded in finding
his blanket, which he threw over his shoulders as a slight protection
against the heavy rain, which continued falling all night.
Oowikapun still lingered in his lonely forest retreat. His pride
revolted at the idea of having to return to the village and confess that
all his efforts had been in vain and that only defeat and humiliation
had been his lot.
So a new wigwam was built in a more sheltered place amid the dark
evergreen trees. His depression of spirit was such that for a long time
he left his abode only when hunger compelled him to hunt for his
necessary food. When he did resume his wanderings they were generally
in the night. The singing of the birds had no charm for him, and the
brightness of the summer days chased not away his gloom. More congenial
to him were the "watches of the night," when the few sounds that fell
upon his ears were weird and ghostly. Here, amid the gloomy shadows
where the only sounds were the sighing of the winds among the trees, the
melancholy hootings of the owls, or the distant howlings of the wolves,
he passed many weary hours.
The psalmist, with adoring love, could say: "Day unto day uttereth
speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge," but to Oowikapun
neither the "speech" of the day nor the "knowledge" of the night gave
any responsive answer to his heart's longings or led him any nearer to
the source of soul comfort. And yet nature spoke to him as grandly as
it was possible for her to utter her voice, and her last effort was of
the sublimest character and such as but few mortals are permitted to
witness.
It came to Oowikapun one night when he had aimlessly wandered far out
from the shadows of the forest gloom, to a spot where the canopy of
heaven, bright with its multitudes of stars, was above him.
Perhaps in no other land can nature in her varied aspects of sublimity
and grandeur as regards celestial phenomena, be better studied than in
the wild north-land. Her cyclonic storms in summer and her blizzard
blasts in winter are at times not only terrific in their destructive
power, but they are also overwhelmingly grand in their appearance.
Then her "visions of the night" are at times sublimely beautiful. Her
star-decked vault of heaven, absolutely free from all mists and fogs and
damps, seems so high and vast. The stars glisten and twinkle with
wondrous clearness. The flashing meteors fade out but slowly, and the
moon is so white and bright that her shadows cast are often as vivid as
those of the sun in some other lands.
But nothing equals a first-class field night of the mysterious aurora
borealis. No other phenomenon of nature in magnitude of display, in
varied brilliancy of colour, in bewildering rapidity of movement, in
grandeur so celestial, in its very existence so unaccountable, is
calculated to lift man up and away from things earthly, into the very
realm and presence of the spiritual, as does a first-class display of
the northern lights, as seen in the far north-land. While they are
generally more frequent in the winter months than at other times of the
year, yet they are very uncertain in their comings, and sometimes burst
upon the world and illuminate and fill up with celestial glory the brief
hours of some of the short summer nights.
To Oowikapun, in his mental darkness and disquietude, there came one of
these more than earthly visions of entrancing beauty. If in any one of
nature's phenomena she could speak to a troubled soul, surely it would
be in this. For while to Elijah the answer was in the still small
voice, yet man unaided by divine revelation prefers the earthquake and
the fire, or some other grand, overwhelming manifestation of nature's
power, which appeals to the sensuous rather than to the spiritual.
To these Northern Indians the auroras have ever been associated with the
ghostly or spiritual. In some of the tribes the literal translation of
the northern lights is the "spirits of their forefathers going out to
battle."
The display that Oowikapun gazed upon was one of more than ordinary
sublimity. He had left his little wigwam which nestled among the
balsams, and had gone out from the forest gloom and had seated himself
on the shore of the lake where the little waves made soothing music as
they played among the pebbles at his feet. The sun had gone down in
splendour, leaving a glorious radiance of sapphire and crimson on hills
and waves. Quietly and imperceptibly the shadows of night mantled the
long twilight gloaming, and then one by one the stars came out from
their hiding places, until the whole high dome of heaven was bright.
The milky way brightened into wondrous distinctness, until it seemed to
Oowikapun like a great pathway, and he wondered, as held in the
tradition of his people, if on it, by and by, he should travel to the
happy hunting grounds of his fathers.
After a time a brightness began to dawn in the northern sky, and then
from it some brilliant streamers of light suddenly shot up to the
heavens above. Then wavy ribbons of light quickly followed, and rapidly
unrolling themselves parallel with the horizon, quivered and danced in
rhythmic movements, blazing out at times in varied vivid colours as they
gracefully undulated from east to west. Often had Oowikapun seen these
displays, but up to this time he had only gazed with languid interest
upon these nightly visitants. This night, however, there was a display
so glorious that he stood as one entranced.
With a suddenness that can be shown only by electrical phenomena, there
almost instantaneously shot up from below the eastern horizon a dazzling
blaze of gorgeous electrical light, which in successive bounds rushed on
and on until, like a brilliant meteor a million times magnified, it
spanned the heavens, and for a time in purest white it seemed to hang an
arch of truce from heaven to earth. For a little while it quivered in
its dazzling whiteness, and then from it flashed out streamers in all
the colours of the rainbow. With one end holding on to the arch of
snowy whiteness they danced and scintillated and blazed until the whole
heavens seemed aglow. Then breaking loose they seemed to form
themselves into whole battalions of soldiers, and advanced and fought
and retreated until the heavens seemed to be the battlefield of the
ages, and stained with the blood of millions slain. During all the
apparent carnage, great streamers waved continuously above the
contending armies, and seemed like great battle flags leading on the
forces to greater deeds of valour. Sometimes they seemed to change into
great fiery swords, ready to add to the apparent carnage and destruction
that seemed so intensely real.
Thus in ever-changing glories the vision of the heavens above continued,
while Oowikapun, awed and subdued in spirit, felt thankful that he was
only a spectator upon such scenes of ghostly carnage and blood. But
impressive and glorious as what had already been revealed, the auroras
had yet in reserve the climax of their display, and when it came it
nearly froze his blood in his veins, and threw him trembling and
terrified on his face upon the ground. Suddenly did the change come.
With, the rapidity of a lightning flash, the great quivering arch of
light transformed itself, into a corona of such dazzling splendour that
no words can describe it. From purest white the multitudes of
streamers, of which it was now composed, suddenly changed to pink and
blue, and green and yellow, all the time flitting and scintillating so
rapidly that the eyes were pained in their vain efforts to follow the
rapid flights.
Then in a twinkling of an eye the whole changed to a deep, blood-red
crimson--so bloodlike, so terrible, so dazzling, so awful, that the
brave man was crushed down, terrified and subdued before this blinding
display of the omnipotent power of the Great Spirit.
The dauntless courage that had made him exult at the prospect of meeting
the fiercest bear in the forest, with no other weapon than his trusty
hunting knife, or the most hostile foe of his tribe, was of no avail
here, and so, a crushed and vanquished man, as soon as he could, he
cowered back to his wigwam, where, wrapping himself in his blanket, he
long remained. He trembled at the thought of having been in such
apparent contact with the spirit land, while his unhappy soul chided him
with a sense of his unfitness for that unknown life beyond.
Poor Oowikapun, he was like many who, although they live under happier
influences and amid the blaze of Gospel day, yet foolishly think that if
some heavenly manifestation of the glory beyond, some glimpse of the
land that is afar off, or some sight of its celestial inhabitants, were
given them to enjoy, very quickly would they be convinced and converted.
John, the beloved disciple, saw the New Jerusalem and its inhabitants;
dazzled and confused he fell at the feet of one of those redeemed ones,
and worshipped the creature instead of the Creator.
Something more than the mere visions of heaven's glories or northern
auroras are necessary to give peace to the troubled soul. Even so found
unhappy Oowikapun, for when the excitement of these night visions wore
off, he felt more than ever crushed down with a sense of his own
littleness, while darker seemed his spiritual vision than ever before
these auroral glories had blazed and flashed around him.
Disgusted and disappointed, he packed up his few things and returned to
his village more miserable and depressed in spirit than ever.
He had had many evidences of a Creator, but had met with nothing that
told him of a Saviour. The idea of being able to "look up through
nature unto nature's God," is an utter impossibility unless the one
looking has some knowledge of God in Christ Jesus. With this knowledge
in his possession he can answer as did the devout philosopher when asked
the question, "What are the latest discoveries in nature?" replied, "God
everywhere."
With God revealed in Christ Jesus there is something real in which to
trust. Her mysteries that long perplexed are cleared up, and darkness
that long continued is dissipated, and the trusting one realises that no
longer is he slowly and feebly feeling his way along on the "sinking
sands" of uncertainties, but is securely built on the "Rock of ages."