_The First Trail_ MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS 3
_The Second Trail_ I BECOME A KILLER 29
_The Third Trail_ MY BROTHERHOOD 53
_The Fourth Trail_ THE ROAD TO FAITH 83
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_The First Trail_ MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS
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_The First Trail_ MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS
To-night I am in a little cabin in the heart of a great wilderness.
Outside it is dark. I can hear the wind sighing in the thick spruce
tops. I hear the laughter of a stream out of which I took my supper
of trout. The People of the Night are awake, for a little while ago I
heard a wolf howl, and, not far away, in an old stub, lives an owl that
hoots at the light in my window. I think it’s going to storm. There
is a heaviness in the air, and, in the drowse of it, the sweetness of
distant rain.
I am strangely contented as I start the writing of this strangest of
all the things I have written. I had never thought to give voice to the
things that I am about to put on paper; yet have I dreamed that every
soul in the world might know of them. But the task has seemed too great
for me, and I have kept them within myself, expecting them to live and
die there.
I am contented on this black night, with its promise of storm, for
many reasons--though I am in the heart of a peopleless forest fifteen
hundred miles from my city home. In the first place, I have built,
with my own hands, this cabin that shelters me. My palms are still
blistered by the helve of the ax. I am the architect of the fireplace
of stone and mud in which a small fire burns for cheer, though it is
late spring, with summer in the breath of the forests. I have made the
chair in which I sit and the table on which I write, and the builder of
a marble palace could take no greater pleasure in his achievement than
have I.
I am contented because, just now, I have the strange conviction that,
in this wild and peopleless place, I am very close to that which many
peoples have sought through many ages and have not found.
In the distance, I can hear thunder, and a flash of lightning illumines
my window. A cry of a loon comes with the flash. It is strange; it
is weird--and wonderful. And also, in a way, it has just occurred
to me that it is a fitting kind of night to begin that which I have
been asked to write. For this night, for a short space, will be like
the great world at large--a world that is rocking in the throes of a
mighty tumult--a tumult of unrest, of discontent, of mad strivings,
of despair, and lack of faith--a world that is rushing blindfold into
unknown things, that is seeking rest and peace, yet can never find them.
It is, I repeat, a strange night to begin the writing of that which I
have been asked to write, and yet I do not think that I would have the
night changed. It seems to picture to me more vividly the unrest of the
world fifteen hundred miles away--and fifteen thousand miles away. I
seem to see with clearer vision what has happened during the past two
years--the mad questing of a thousand million people for a spiritual
thing which they cannot find. I see, from this vantage-point of the
deep forest, a world torn by five hundred schisms and religions, and I
see not one religion that fills the soul with faith and confidence. I
see the multitudes of the earth reaching up their arms and crying for
the Great Mystery of life to be solved. Questions that are racking the
earth come to me in the whisperings of the approaching storm. Can the
ghosts of the dead return? Can the spirits of the departed commune with
the living? Is the world on the edge of an inundation of spiritualism?
Does the salvation of humanity lie there--or there--or there? What
shall I believe? What _can_ I believe?
The rain is beginning to beat on the roof of my cabin and, in number,
the drops of the rain remind me of the millions and the tens of
millions of restless men and women who are reading avidly, in the pages
of magazines and books, the “experiences” of those who are giving voice
to new creeds and new beliefs or reviving old ones long lost in the
dust of forgotten ages.
Ghosts have been revived; spirits are on the move again. New
generations are drinking in with wonder and suspense the whole bagful
of tricks worn out ten thousand generations ago. To-morrow it may be
the revival of witchcraft. And the next day new prophets may arise
and new religions take the place of the old. For so travel the minds
of men; and so they have traveled for hundreds of thousands of years
before Christ was born and Christianity was known; and so they will go
on seeking until God is found in a form so simple and intimate that all
humanity will at last understand.
The storm has broken. It is like a deluge over the cabin. The thunder
and crash of it is in the spruce tops--and such is the dreadfulness of
the tumult and the aloneness of the place that I am in, that I would
cease where I am did I think that anything I am about to say might be
sacrilege. But when a mind gives expression to that which it holds as
truth, there cannot be sacrilege.
I have been asked to put on paper something of that religion which I
have discovered for myself in nature. There are many who will laugh;
there are many who will disbelieve, for it will be impossible for me to
make myself entirely clear in such a matter as this. For I have found
what, to me, is God; and I cannot expect to startle the world, even
if I desired to do so, for what I have found has been found in a very
simple way--without bringing spirits back from the dead, or hearing
voices out of tombs, or gathering faith through the inspiration of
mediums.
I have found the heart of nature. I believe that its doors have
opened to me, and that I have learned much of its language. Through
adventure and bloodshed I have come to a great understanding; and
understanding has brought me health and faith and a joy in life. And
because these things will do the world no harm, and may do some good,
I am undertaking to write the story of a great and inclusive God whom
men and women and little children should be made to know, but to
whom, unfortunately, the swift pace of the times has made most of us
strangers.
I fear that I am going to shock many people, and so I am of a mind
to get the shock over with and come to the meat of what I have to
say. But I shall start with something which those who read this must
concede--that everyone in the world seems to be looking for something
which will bring him more comfort and more happiness from life. That,
I think, is the reason the Catholic Church is the only Church which
is growing to any extent. It is growing because it is the only Church
which is holding out its arms as a mother and giving a human being a
breast upon which to lay his head when he is in trouble. Yet I am not
a Catholic. Neither am I a Protestant. I do not belong to the High,
Low, Broad, or Free Church. I do not confess to Romanism, Popery, or
Protestantism any more than I do to Mohammedanism, Calvinism, or the
doctrines of the Latter-Day Saints. I am not a sectarian any more
than I am a Shaker or a Restitutionist. I do not believe that one
necessarily goes to hell because he does not accept Christ as the Son
of God. I believe that Christ was a good man and a great teacher of
his times, just as there have been other good men and great teachers
in their times. I can look upon the Mussulman at prayer, or the Parsee
at his devotion, or the Eskimo calling upon his unseen spirits with
the same feeling of brotherhood and understanding that I can see a
congregation of Baptists or Methodists singing their praise to the God
on high. I do not pity or condemn the African savage and the Indian of
the Great Barrens because they see their God through another vision
than that of the Christian. There were many roads that led to old Rome.
And there are many roads, no matter how twisted and dark they seem to
us, that lead to the better after-life.
I wish that some mighty power would rise that could show to man how
little and how insignificant he is. Only therein, I think, could the
thorns and brambles be taken out of that path to peace and contentment
which he would like to find, and would find if he were not blinded
by his own importance. He is the supreme egoist and monopolist. His
conceit and self-sufficiency are at times almost blasphemous. He is
the human peacock, puffed up, inflated, flushed in the conviction
_that everything in the universe was made for him_. He looks down in
supercilious lordship on all other life in creation. He goes out and
murders millions of his kind with his scientific inventions; yet he
calls a tiger bad and a pest because the tiger occasionally kills the
two-legged thing that hunts it. If he kills a man illegally, it is
called murder, and he is hanged and goes to hell. If his government
tells him it is proper to kill a thousand men, he kills them, and is
called a hero--and a chosen place is kept waiting for him in heaven.
His conceit blinds him to fact. He thinks our little earth was the
chosen creation of the Supreme Power--forgetting that the earth is
but a fly-speck compared with the other worlds in space. He thinks
that Christ was born a long time ago, and that time began with our own
knowledge of history--when, as a matter of fact, he has no reason for
disbelieving that man lived and died hundreds of thousands of years
ago, and that countless religions have come and gone in the eons of the
past. He does not stop to reason that, in number, he is as a drop in
the ocean compared with other beating hearts on earth.
To me, every heart that beats is a spark from the breath of God. I
believe that the warm and beating heart in the breast of a singing
robin is as precious to the Creator of things as the heart of a man
counting money. I believe that a vital spark exists in every blade of
grass and in every leaf of the trees. It is the great law of existence
that life must destroy in order to live, and when destruction is
inevitable and necessary, it ceases to be a misdemeanor. But to let
live, when it is not necessary to destroy, is a beautiful thing to
consider.
Before men find a satisfying faith and peace, they must come to see
their own littleness. They must discover that they are not _alone_ in
a partnership with God, but that all manifestation of life, whether in
tree or flower or flesh and blood, is a spark loaned for a space by
that Supreme Power toward which we all, in our individual ways, are
groping. There is one teacher very close to us, as close to the poor
as to the rich, to show us this littleness and make us understand.
That teacher is nature--and, in my understanding of things, all nature
is rest and peace. I believe that nature is the Great Doctor, and, if
given the chance, can cure more ills and fill more empty souls than all
the physicians and preachers of the earth. I have had people say to me
that my creed is a beautiful one for a person as fortunately situated
as myself, but that it is impossible for the great multitudes to go out
and find nature as I have found it. To these people, I say that one
need not make a two-thousand-mile trip along the Arctic coast and live
with the Eskimo to find nature. After all, it is our nerves that kill
us in the long run, our over-restless minds, our worrying, questing
brains. And nature whispers its great peace to these things even in
the rustling leaves of a corn field--if one will only get acquainted
with that nature. And my desire--my ambition--the great goal I wish to
achieve in my writings is to take my readers with me into the heart of
this nature. I love it, and I feel that they must love it--if I can
only get the two acquainted.
“Fine line of talk for a man whose home is filled from cellar to garret
with mounted heads and furs,” I hear some of my good friends say.
Quite true, too. It is hard for one to confess oneself a murderer, and
it is still harder to explain one’s regeneration. Yet, to be genuine, I
must at least make the confession, though it is less the fact of murder
than the fact of regeneration that I have the inclination to emphasize,
now that I have the opportunity. There was a time when I took pride
in the wideness and diversity of my killings. I was a destroyer of
life. Now I am only glad that these killings ultimately brought me to a
discovery which is the finest thing I have to contemplate through the
rest of my existence.
In my home are twenty-seven guns, and all of them have been used.
Many of the stocks are scarred with tiny notches whereby I kept track
of my “kills.” With them, I have left red trails to Hudson’s Bay, to
the Barren Lands, to the country of the Athabasca and the Great Bear,
to the Arctic Ocean, to the Yukon and Alaska, and throughout British
Columbia. This is not intended as a pæan of triumph. It is a fact which
I wish had never existed. And yet it may be that my love of nature and
the wild things, at the last, is greater because of those reckless
years of killing. I am inclined to believe so. In my pantheistic heart,
the mounted heads in my home are no longer crowned with the grandeur
of trophies, but rather with the nobility of martyrs. I love them. I
commune with them. I am no longer their enemy, and I warm myself with
the belief that they know I am fighting for them now.
In this religion of the open, I have come to understand and gather
peace from the whispering voices and even the silence of all God-loving
things. I have learned to love trees, and there are times when I put
my hands on them because I love them, and rest my head against them
because they are comrades and their comradeship and their might give
me courage. There is a gnarled old cripple of an oak in the yard of
my Michigan home, a broken and twisted dwarf which many people have
told me to destroy. But that tree and I have “talked over” many things
together; it has pointed out to me how to stand up under adversity,
has shown me how to put up a man’s fight. For, eaten to the heart, a
deformity among its kind, each spring and summer saw it making its
valiant struggle to “do its best.” It was then I became its friend,
gave it a helping hand, stopped its decay and death, and each season
now the old oak is stronger, and often I go out and sit with my back
against it, and I hear and understand its voice, and I know that it is
a great friend that will never do me wrong.
It is thus that this religion of mine finds its strength from the
sources of great and unknown power. But before it comes in all its
peace and joy, man must bring down his head from out of the clouds of
egoism, and say, “The oak is as great as I--perhaps greater.”
Not long ago, it seemed to me that my world had gone dark and that it
would never grow completely light again. In perhaps the darkest hour,
I flung myself down upon the ground close to the bank of a stream. And
then, close over my head--so close I could have tossed a pebble to
it--a warbler near burst its little throat in song. And the miracle of
it was that it was a dark and sunless day. But the warbler sang, and
then he chirped in the boughs above; and when I looked at the ground
beside me again, I saw there, peeping up at me out of the grass, a
single violet. And the bird and the violet gave me more courage and
cleared my world for me more than all the human friends who had told me
they were sorry. The violet said, “I am still here; you will never lose
me,” and the little warbler said, “I will always sing--through all the
years you live.” And stronger than ever came the faith in me that these
things were no more an accident of creation than man himself.
Once I saw this Great Doctor of mine a burning, vibrant force in a
room of a crowded tenement, from the roof of which one could not see
a blade of grass or a tree. In fact, that force filled three rooms, in
which lived a man and woman and five children. I spent an hour in those
rooms on a Sunday afternoon, and the experience of that hour in a hot
and crowded tenement was a mightier sermon than was ever preached to
me in the heart of a forest. At every window was a box in which green
stuff was growing. There were flowers in pots. A pair of canary-birds
looked down upon the smoky roofs of a great city and sang. What
interested me most was two contrivances the man had made to force oats
into swift germination and growth. In a week, he told me, the green
sprout of an oat would be two inches long. Then I saw why they were
grown. Several times while I was there would a dove come to a window
and wait for a bit of the green. I could see they were different doves.
They told me at least a dozen were accustomed to come in that way. They
were the children’s pets. A little baby in arms cooed at them and waved
his arms in delight. I have seen many poor tenement families, but that,
I think, was the only happy one. The singing of the birds, the coming
of the doves, the growing of green things in their room were their
inspiration, their hope, the promise of dreams that would some day
come true. Nature had become their religion, and yet they did not know
it as such. It was calling them out into the great open spaces--and
they were living in anticipation of that day when they would answer the
call.
Because I have spent much of my time in adventuring in distant
wildernesses, and exploring where other men have not gone, it has been
accepted by many that my love for nature means a love for the distant
and, for most people, the inaccessible wilds. It is true that in the
vast and silent places one comes nearer, perhaps, to the deeper truths
of life. Of the wild and its miracles I love to write, and when I come
to that part of my story, I shall possibly be happiest. But I would be
unfair to myself, and the religion of nature itself, if the great truth
were not first emphasized that its treasures are to be possessed by
mankind wherever one may turn--even in a prison cell. I was personally
in touch with one remarkable instance of this in the Michigan State
Penitentiary, at Jackson, where a canary-bird and a red geranium saved
a man from madness and eventually gained him a pardon, sending him out
into the world a living being with a new and better religion than he
had ever dreamed of before.
But the open skies and the free air were intended from the beginning of
things as the greatest gifts to man, and it is there, if one is sick in
body or soul, that one should seek. Whether it is a mile or a thousand
miles from a city makes little difference. For nature is the universal
law. It is everywhere. It is neither mystery nor mysterious. Its pages
are open; its life is vibrant with the desire to be understood. The
one miracle is for man to bring himself down out of the clouds of his
egoism and replace his passion for destruction with the desire to
understand.
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