I had a very dear friend, a newspaper man, whose wife had died. I don’t
know that I ever saw a man more utterly broken up, for his love for
her was more than love. It was worship. He grew faded and thin, and a
gray patch over his temple turned white. The mightiest efforts of his
friends could do nothing. He wanted to be alone, alone in his home,
where he could grieve himself to death by inches. I knew that his case
was harder because he was merely tolerant of religion. One day, the
idea came to me that resulted in his spiritual and physical salvation.
I took him in my auto, and we went out into the country four or five
miles, opened a gate, drove down a long lane, and stopped at the edge
of a forty-acre wood.
“Fred, I am going to show you a wonderful city,” I said. “Come with
me--quietly.”
We climbed over the fence, and I led him to the heart of the wood, and
there we sat down, with our backs to a log.
“Now, just to humor me, be very still,” I said. “Don’t move, don’t
speak--just listen.”
It was three o’clock in the afternoon, that wonderful time of a summer
day when nature seems to rouse herself from midday slumber to fill the
world with her rustling life. The sun fell slantwise through the wood,
and here and there, under the roofs of the trees, we could see golden
pools and streams of it on the cool earth.
“This is one of the most wonderful cities in the world,” I whispered,
“and there are hundreds and thousands of such cities, some of them
within the reach of all.”
The musical ripple of a creek came to our ears. And then, slowly
at first, there came upon my friend the wonder of it all. He
understood--at last. About us, through all that forty acres of wood,
the air seemed to whisper forth a strange and wonderful life. Over our
heads, we heard a grating sound. It was a squirrel gnawing through the
shell of a last autumn’s nut. On an old stub, a woodpecker hammered.
Close about us were the “cheep, cheep, cheep,” and “twit, twit, twit,”
of little brown brushbirds. A warbler burst suddenly into a glorious
snatch of song. A quarter of a mile away, a crow cawed, and between us
and the crow we heard a fox-squirrel barking, and, a little later, saw
it, with its mate, scrambling in play up and down the trees. My friend
caught my arm and pointed. He was becoming interested, and what he saw
was a fat young woodchuck passing near us on a foraging expedition to a
neighboring clover field.
For an hour we did not move, and through all that city was the drone
and voice of life, and that life was a soft and wonderful song,
soothing one almost to sleep. And when, at last, my friend whispered
again, “It sounds as though everything is talking,” I knew that the
spirit of the thing had got into him. Then I drew his attention to a
colony of big black ants whose fortress was in the log against which we
were resting. They were working. Two of them were trying to drag a dead
caterpillar over my friend’s knee. When we rose to go, I led him past
a little swale in which a score of blackbirds had bred their young. On
a slender willow, a bobolink was singing. A land-turtle lumbered back
into the water, and the bright eyes of green-headed frogs stared at
us from patches of scum. Under a bush, a score of toads were teaching
their tiny youngsters to swim. When my friend saw the little fellows
clinging to their mothers’ backs, he laughed--the first time in many
months.
When we went back to the car, I said:
“You have seen just one ten-thousandth of what nature holds for you and
every other man and woman. You haven’t believed in God very strongly.
But you’ve got to now. That’s God back there in the wood.”
That was four years ago. To-day, that man not only lives in the heart
of nature but, from a special assignment man, he has risen to the
managing editorship of a big metropolitan daily. He has only his summer
vacation in which to get out into the big woods, but he has made room
for nature all about him. From early spring until late autumn, his
front and back yard fairly burst with life. And it is not, like most
yards, merely for show and passing pleasure to the eyes. He has brought
himself down out of the clouds of man’s egoism, and is learning and
taking strength from nature--which he now worships as the great “I am.”
He has developed a hobby for “interbreeding plants,” as he calls it,
and especially gladioli. Each morning in spring and summer and autumn,
he goes out into his garden, and, from the thousand living things
there, he receives strength for his nerve-racking duties of the day;
and at night, after his task is done, he returns to his garden to seek
that peace which is the great and vibrant force of the life that is
there. During the months of winter, he has his little conservatory. And
this man--for more than thirty years--hardly knew whether an oak grew
from an acorn or a seed!
Yet has he one great regret. And more than once he has said to me, with
that grief in his voice which will never quite die out: “If we had only
found these things before, she would be with me now. I am convinced of
it. It was this strength she needed to keep her from fading away--to
build her up into joyous life again. Sometimes I wonder why the Great
Power that is above did not let her live to go into the wood with us
that day.”
* * * * *
Hours have passed since I first sat down to write these thoughts that
were in my mind. The storm has passed, and, following it, there has
come a marvelous silence. Both my door and window are open, and there
is rare sweetness in the breath of the rain-washed air. I can hear
the near-by trees dripping. The creek runs with a louder ripple. The
moon is shimmering through the fleecy clouds that are racing south and
east--toward my “civilized” home, fifteen hundred miles away. Over all
this world of mine there is, just now, a vast and voiceless quiet. And
if I were superstitious, or filled with the imagination of some of the
prophets of old, I am sure I would hear a Voice speaking out of that
mighty solitude, and it would say:
“O you mortal, blind--blind as the rocks which make up the mountains!
“Blind as the trees which you think have neither ears nor eyes!
“Made to see, yet unseeing; making mystery out of that which was born
with you; seeking--yet seeking afar for that which lies close at hand!
“You want peace. You go in quest of a Breast mightier than all life to
rest thy tired head upon. And thy quest is like the drifting of a ship
without a rudder at sea. For you think that the world is young because
thou livest in it now--and it is old, so old that thousands and tens
of thousands of peoples lived and died before Christ was born. You
think that civilization has come to pass, and ‘civilization’ has died a
thousand times under the dust of the ages. You believe you are treading
the only path to God--yet have a million billion people died before
you, unknowing the religions which you now know.
“O you mortals of to-day, you are small and near-sighted, and hard of
hearing--even more than they who lived a million years before you, when
the world was an hour or two younger than now!
“What are you? Proud of thy purse, vain of thy power, conceited in
thy self-glorification--yet you seek a simple thing and cannot find
it. You cannot find _rest_. You cannot find _faith_. You cannot find
_understanding_. You cannot find that Breast mightier than all life
upon which to rest thy head when the end comes and when you go to join
those trillions who have gone before you.
“And, in your despair, you cry out that you know not which way to turn,
that you seek in darkness, that the world is a wilderness of schisms
and religions, and that you cannot tell which is the right and which
is the wrong. For you know that worlds have lived and died through the
eons of centuries before Christianity was born. And you are oppressed
by doubt even as you grope!
“Yet you know deep in thy soul that the heavens were not an accident.
You know that hundreds and thousands of worlds greater than thine own
have traveled their paths in space for eternities. You know that the
sun was set in the skies so long ago that all the people of the earth
could not count the years of its life. And you know that a Great Hand
placed it there. And that Hand, you say, was God.
“Yet you seek--and you seek--and you seek--and doubt everlastingly
clouds thine eyes; and when darkness comes and you stand at the edge of
the Great Beyond, you look back, and--lo!--the path you have traveled
seems very short, and it is cluttered with brambles and thorns and the
wreckage of shattered hopes and wasted years.
“And then you see the Light!
“And, as thy spirit departs, the mystery unveils--the answer comes.
“For that which you sought, you looked too far. Close under thy feet
and close over thy head might you have found it!”
* * * * *
_The Second Trail_ I BECOME A KILLER
* * * * *
_The Second Trail_ I BECOME A KILLER
This morning is a glory of sunshine and peace after last night’s rain.
It seems inconceivable that the blue sky above the forest was filled
a few hours ago with the crash of thunder and the blaze of lightning.
I was up at dawn, wakened by a pair of red squirrels playing upon the
roof of my cabin. Together we watched the sun rise, and after that they
chattered about my open door while I prepared my breakfast. We are
becoming great friends. One of them I have given the name of Nuts, and
for no reason in the world unless it is because there are no nuts up
here; and the other, the sleek, beautiful little female, I call Spoony
because she looks at me so slyly, with her pretty head perked on one
side, as if flirting with me.
It is only eight o’clock, yet we have been up nearly four hours. At
the edge of the creek, less than a stone’s throw from the cabin, I
have built me a narrow table of smooth-hewn saplings between two old
spruce trees, and this is my open-air studio when the weather is fine.
Word of it has gone abroad, though I am many hundreds of miles from
civilization. Many kinds of wild things have come to get acquainted
with me, fascinated chiefly, I think, by the marvelous new language
of my clicking typewriter. The welcome and friendship of these little
wilderness-hearts are growing nearer and more apparent to me every day;
and with each day the Great Truth speaks to me even more clearly than
the day before--that each of these beating hearts, like my own, is a
part of that nature which I worship and is as vitally a spark of its
life as the heart which is beating inside my own flannel shirt.
These friends of mine, gathering about me more intimately and in
greater number with each passing day, are individuals to me because
I have come to understand them and know their language. There is the
Artful Dodger, for instance--I sometimes call him Bill Sykes or Captain
Kidd--screaming close over my head this very moment. In very intimate
moments I call him Arty, or Kid, or Bill. He is a big blue jay. In
spite of all that has been said and written against him, I have a
very brotherly affection for Bill. He is a man’s man, among birds,
notwithstanding that he occasionally breakfasts on the eggs of other
birds, and kills more than is good for his reputation. Also, he is the
greatest liar and the biggest fraud and the most brazen-faced cheat in
the bird kingdom. But I know Bill intimately now, where I used to kill
him as a pest, and I love him for all his sins.
He is a pirate who never loses his sense of humor. He is always
raising a disturbance just for the excitement of it, and when he has
drawn a crowd, so to speak, he will slip slyly away to some nearby
vantage-point and laugh and chuckle over the rumpus he has raised.
Right now, he is screaming himself hoarse forty feet above my head.
Two others have joined him, and they are making such a bedlam of sound
that Nuts and Spoony have ceased their chattering. There!--I have fired
a stick at them, and they are gone. They have had their joke, and are
quite satisfied--for the present.
I can hear the musical rippling of the creek again, now that Bill and
his blustering pals are gone, and my typewriter is like a tiny machine
gun sending its clicking notes out into the still forest. A pair of
moose-birds, almost as big as the jays, are hopping about, so near
that, at times, they are perched on the end of my sapling table.
They are the tamest birds in the wilderness, and within another day
or so will be eating out of my hand. Unlike the jays, they make no
disturbance. They are soft and quiet, never making a sound, and their
big, beautiful eyes fairly pop with their intense interest in me. I
like their company, because there is a philosophy about them. They
never tire of looking at me, and studying me, and at times I have the
very pleasant fancy that they are bursting with a desire to speak. They
are very gentle, and never fight or scold or commit any sins that I
know of; and just now, as the two look at me with their big soft eyes,
I find myself wondering which of us is of most account in the final
analysis of things.
Ten or fifteen rods above me, the creek widens and forms a wide
pool overhung with trees, so that, in the hottest weather, it must
be a delightfully refreshing place. I can see it plainly from where
I am sitting, for the creek twists a little, so that it is running
directly toward me when I look in that direction. Many wild things
come to that pool. This morning, I found a bear-track there, and the
fresh hoof-prints of a doe and fawn. Yesterday, a pair of traveling
otters discovered it, but when I tried them out with the voice of my
typewriter, they turned back. I am confident they will return, and that
we shall get acquainted.
At the present moment, in looking toward the pool, I am struck by what
at first thought I might consider a discordant note in this wonderland
of quiet and peace that is about me. At the edge of the pool, rigid
and watchful, a hawk is poised on a dead limb projecting from a
lightning-struck stub. He is hungry and eager to kill. I have seen him
launch himself twice after a victim, but each time without success.
Finally, he will succeed. He will kill a living thing that he himself
may continue to live. Yet I have no inclination to shoot him. For to
live, and to cherish that spark of life that is in him, is as much his
right as it is mine. He is not, like man, a killer for the love of
killing. He wants his breakfast.
And in fairness to him I think of two tender young spruce-partridges
which I shot late last evening, and which I shall roast for my dinner,
along with a potato and a flavor of bacon. My religion does not demand
vegetarianism any more than it does flesh; for that, too, is life.
For the trees whispering above me now are as alive to me as the
moose-birds perched at the end of my table, yet when necessity comes
I cut them down with an ax, and make a cabin or cook my food with
them. All nature cries out that life must exist upon life, that one
tree must grow upon the mold of another, that for each green blade of
grass another blade must die. It is not against a wise and necessary
destruction that the God of all nature cries out. The crime--the crime
greater than all other crimes--is destruction without cause.
* * * * *
That is what I must come to now, even in this glory of peace that is
whispering about me--I must face the task of confessing my own sins as
a killer, as a destroyer of life for the love and thrill of killing. I
was born, like all the children of men, a monumental egoist. My parents
were egoists. My forefathers for ten thousand generations were egoists
before me, and I was the last product of their egoism--one of the
billion and a half people who are living to-day in the blindness of a
self-conceit that has filled their worlds with schisms and religions as
false and as unstable as the treacherous sands of human “almightiness”
upon which they have been built.
From the beginning, I did not need argument or education to tell me
that I was the greatest of all created things--that my particular
brand of life, of all life on the earth, was the only life that God
had intended to be inviolate. That fact was pounded home to me in the
public schools; it was preached to me in the churches. I was part and
parcel of the great “I Am.” For me, all the universe had been built.
For me, the Great Hereafter was solely created. All other life was
merely incidental, and created especially for my benefit. It was mine
to do with as I pleased. In a mild sort of way, the school and the
church told me to have a little charity, and not to “hurt the poor
little birdies.”
But church and school did not tell me, and has never told its pupils,
that all other life on the earth was as precious as my own, and had
an equal right to fight for its existence. It is true I was told that
never a sparrow falls that God does not see it, but it is also true
that, for six years, my state urged its children to kill sparrows for
a bounty of two cents a head. I found no course in school or college
that attempted to teach me that the spark of life animating my own
body was no different from the sparks which animated all other living
things. Both religion and school instilled into me that I was next in
place to God. All other life, from the life of trees and flowers to
that of beasts and birds, was put on earth for my special benefit. No
other life had a right to exist unless the human egoist saw fit to let
it live. And all this simply because human life happened to be the most
powerful life, and cleverest in the art and science of destroying other
life.
I wonder what would happen if for ten generations the churches and
schools would teach their little children and their grown-ups that
there is a heaven for flowers and trees and birds and butterflies
just as surely as there is a heaven for man! What would happen if the
teaching of the Great Truth of nature began in the kindergarten, and
went on through the lives of men and women, growing stronger in the
race as generation added itself to generation? It is something to think
about in these days when, in our madness for a faith, we are reviving
ghosts and phantom voices and are frightening our children again with
the diseased and weird belief that the spirits of the dead can come
back to us. We want something that is clean and healthy and inspiring,
something that is beautiful to contemplate, and which is not an
overwhelming insult to that Great Power of the universe of which we are
so small a part--and in the kindergarten we could plant the seed of
that thing, so that, through the school and the church and all life, it
would continue to grow stronger with each generation, until, at last,
man would shake off that deadliest of all his enemies, his own egoism
and self-conceit. Then, and not until then, will he find contentment
and peace and happiness in the brotherhood of all other life that is
about him.
But I seem to be evading the issue--my own confession as a monumental
egoist and a killer. I have said that my parents were egoists, like
all their forefathers before them. Yet the world never held a better
mother than mine. I do not except any who may sit in heaven at the
present time. And my father, as a man, was far better than his son will
ever be. He was a gentleman of the old school, living, as he died, an
example of courage and fearlessness and honor to all who knew him.
Yet did these two splendid people, like all other parents, foster and
cultivate my egoism from the beginning. They did it unconsciously,
blindly, as hundreds of millions of other parents are doing to-day.
My father loved hunting and fishing, and at eight years of age I
possessed my own gun. I remember with what pride he taught me to shoot
and to stalk my first living victims; and when we returned from a hunt,
if I had killed anything, it was always to me that my beloved mother
gave her greatest attention and commendation. We lived on an Ohio farm
then, and I became a sort of boy prodigy in the art of hunting. When
I was nine years old, a newspaper in a near-by city published a story
of my prowess, and I do not think I was more puffed up over it than my
father himself. By the time I was twelve, I had lost all respect for
that life which the laws of our state said I might take. I had a fine
collection of birds’ eggs, and another “splendid” collection of birds’
wings. My room was decorated with the wings.
I always recall with an odd sort of feeling that at this particular
height of my boyish slaughter of life I “got religion,” and got it
hard. At Joppa, a “four-corners” two miles from our farm, a series
of revival meetings was going on that winter, and I cannot remember
anyone in all our community who did not get the religious fever,
except most of the youngsters. But it hit me hard. I felt that I was
actually inspired. So deeply did the excited preachings effect my mind
that frequently, when I was alone, I felt that angels were with me.
One moonlight night, in returning from a revival, I actually saw an
angel, and the beautiful thing with white wings and white raiment and
wonderful flowing hair walked halfway home with me. When I told that
story at school the next day, and insisted that it was true, I had five
different fights. My mother said that it probably was true, for she was
delighted that I had become religious. So I fought, and licked--and got
licked--for about a month because of my faith.
But what I am coming to is this: Though practically our whole township
was converted, at no time did this religion tell me to stop killing. So
inspired was I that Mr. Teachout, the revivalist, had me give a short
“sermon” one evening--and I recall vividly how, in “introducing” me,
he said, in a loud voice and with a great flourish of his arms, that
I “was the best hunter in all Erie County and could kill more game
in a day than almost any grown hunter there.” Whereupon there was a
mighty applause from the hundred people present, and I was the proudest
youngster in Ohio.
Why?
Because from a church rostrum I was hailed as the greatest boy killer
in that county! No one of all those Christians told me that I should
stop killing. They made a hero of me because I was already becoming
a master in the art of killing. They built up my egoism to a point
where it became blasphemous--to a point where it more than offset my
mother’s pleadings that I stop shooting birds for their wings. Then
came a thing which, as I look back upon it now, seems to me monstrous.
There was to be a big “hunters’ supper” to end the revival. The men
chose sides, and on a certain day all these men set out to kill. They
were to kill nothing “outside the law.” But all life not protected by
law might be sacrificed. I remember that a rabbit counted five points,
a squirrel four, a hawk six, a blue jay two, and so on. The side that
lost out on “points,” or, in other words, destroyed the least life,
was compelled to furnish the supper. How I did slaughter! When I came
in to the “count” that night, my game-bag was filled to the brim with
dead things. Among other creatures I had killed seventeen blue jays!
Any wonder that Captain Kidd and his pals screamed over my head this
morning?
And yet good Christian people still regard with horror the day when
pagan Rome burned the martyrs.
My education in the art of destruction increased as my years grew in
number. I was not alone. All the human world was destroying, just as
it is destroying to-day. We moved back to the little city of Owosso,
in Michigan, where I was born. In Erie County, Ohio, my nickname had
been Slippery--just why I don’t know; now, in Michigan, it became
Nimrod and Wildcat Jim. I haunted our beautiful Shiawassee River as
ghosts are now haunting some of our scientific writers. I trapped and
hunted and fished more than I studied--so much more, in fact, that I
became decidedly unpopular with our high-school principal, Mr. Austin,
who is now my very good friend. At last, I stood at the splitting of
the ways--and I chose my own course. I trapped a season, and, with
the money earned, started in on a special course at the University of
Michigan. Things went well. I slipped through college with the ease of
an eel, took up newspaper work in Detroit, became a special writer and
a magazine writer and the youngest metropolitan newspaper editor in
Michigan. I felt inclined to believe that I was a wild and uproarious
success.
But under it all burned my desire to get back to my old job of
destruction, and this desire led me into my long years of adventuring
into the far northern wildernesses.
As I sit here now, clicking my typewriter in the still heart of the
forest, it is a wonder to me that some colossal spirit of vengeance
does not rise up out of it and destroy me. And yet, when I consider, I
know why that vengeance does not come--and in the face of this “great
reason,” I see my littleness as I have never seen it before. It is
because, very slowly, my egoism is crumbling away. And as it crumbles,
my big brother--all nature--grips my hand ever more closely, and
whispers to me to tell others something of what I have found. And that
big brother is not only the spirit of the heart-beating things about
me, but also the spirit and voice of the trees, of the living earth
that throbs under my feet, of the flowers, the sun, the sky. It is
all reaching out to me with a great show of friendliness, and I seem
to feel that fear and misunderstanding have slipped away from between
us. It is inviting me to accept of it all that I may require, yet to
cherish that which I cannot use. It is telling me, as it has whispered
to me a thousand times before, the secret of life; that the life in
my own breast and all this that is about me are one and the same--and
that, in our partnership for happiness, we each belong to the other.
And there must be no desire for vengeance between us.
Yet, to me, it does not seem like justice, looking at it from the
warped and narrow point of view of my human mind. It is the human
instinct to demand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. And I
cannot see why my God of nature should give me such reward of peace and
friendship after what I have done. It has always been my logic that
life is the cheapest thing in existence. There is just so much earth,
so much water, so much air about us; but of life there is no end. So
we go on destroying. If nature would keep this destroyed life unto
herself for a few generations, instead of giving it back to us in her
unvengeful way, the earth would soon become a desert. Then we would
learn our lesson.
I am thinking, as I write this, of a beautiful little forest in a
wonderful valley in the heart of the British Columbia mountains. It
was a glorious thing to look down upon that day when I destroyed it.
I call it a forest, though there was not more than an acre of it, or
two at the most. And the valley was really a “pocket” among the mighty
peaks of the Firepan Range. It was of balsams and cedars, rich green,
and densely thick--a marvelous patch of living tapestry, vibrant with
the glow and pulse of life in the sunset of that day. Into its shelter
we had driven a wounded grizzly which had refused to turn and fight.
And so thick and protecting was the heart of it that we could not get
the grizzly out. Night was not far away, and in its darkness we knew
our game would escape us. And the thought came to us to burn that
little paradise of green. There was no danger of a spreading fire. The
mountain walls of the “pocket” would prevent that. And it was I who
struck the match!
In twenty minutes, the little forest was a sea of writhing, leaping
flame. It cried out and moaned in the agony of conflagration. The bear
fled from its torture and its ruin, and we killed him. That night, the
moon shone down on a black and smoldering mass of ruin where a little
while before had been the paradise.
In our camp, we laughed and exulted. The egoism of man made us feel our
false triumph. What it had taken a thousand years to place in that
cup of the mountains we had destroyed in half an hour--yet we felt no
regret. We had destroyed a thousand times more life than filled our own
pitiable bodies, yet did the false ethics of our breed assure us that
we had done no wrong--simply because the life we had destroyed had not
possessed a form and tongue like our own.
“This man must be losing his reason,” I hear some of my readers say. Is
it that, or is a bit of reason just returning to me, after a million
years of sleep? If it is madness, it is of a kind that would comfort
the world could all be mad as I am mad. Life is Life. It is a spark
of the same Supreme Power, whether in a tree, a flower, or a thing of
flesh and blood. To me, as I view it now, the wanton destruction of
that little paradise was as tragic as the destruction of life carried
about on two legs or four. I feel that the crime of its destruction was
as great as that of another day which I recall most vividly in these
moments.
I was in another wonderland of the northern mountains, and my companion
was a grizzled old hunter who had learned the art of killing through
a lifetime of experience. With our pack-outfit of seven horses, we
were hitting for the Yukon over a trail never traveled by white man
before. So glorious was the valley we were in on this day of which I
write that at noon we struck our camp. So awesome was the vastness
and beauty of it that my soul was held spellbound with the magic of
it. On all sides of us rose the mighty mountains, with snow-crowned
peaks rising here and there out of the towering ranges. The murmur of
rippling water filled the soft air with soothing song; green meadows,
sweet with the perfume of wild hyacinths, violets, and a hundred
other flowers, carpeted the rich earth about us; on the sun-warmed
rocks, whistlers lay in fat contentment, calling to one another like
small boys whistling between their teeth; the slopes were dotted with
ptarmigan; a pair of eagles soared high above us, and from the patches
and fingers of timber came the cry and song of birds. With my back
propped against a pile of saddles and panniers I carefully scanned the
slides and slopes through my hunting-glasses. High up on the crag of
a mountain-shoulder, I picked up a nanny-goat feeding with her kid.
Still farther away, on a green “slide” at least two miles from camp, I
discovered five mountain-sheep lying down. And after that, swinging
my glasses slowly, I came to something which sent a thrill through
my blood. It was a mile away, a great, slow-moving hulk that I might
have mistaken for a rock had my eyes not been trained to the ways and
movement of game. It was a grizzly.
Alone I went after him, armed with man’s deadliest weapon of
extinction, a .405 Winchester. Inside of half an hour I was well in the
teeth of the breeze coming up the valley, and almost within gunshot of
my victim. I came to a coulee and crept up that, and when I reached the
table-land meadow where it began, a thousand feet above the valley, I
found myself within a hundred yards of the grizzly.
He was digging like a dog for a gopher. And, then, suddenly, my heart
gave a thump that almost choked me. In a twist of the mountain-bench,
not more than seventy or eighty yards above me, were two more
grizzlies. I hesitated, and looked back down the coulee, for a moment
doubtful whether to retreat or declare war. Then I decided. In my hands
was a killer of the deadliest and surest kind. I was an expert shot and
my nerves were steady. I began. I think I fired five shots in perhaps
thirty seconds, and the three big grizzlies died almost in their
tracks. A conqueror returning in his triumph to old Rome could not
have been more elated than I. I remember that I leaped and danced and
shrieked out at the top of my voice in the direction of camp. I was mad
with joy. Three thousand pounds of flesh and blood lay hot and lifeless
under my eyes, and I, the human near-god, with my own two insignificant
hands and a mechanical thing, _had taken the life from it_!
I sat down on one of the huge carcasses that still breathed under me.
I wiped my face, and my blood was running a race that heated me as if
with fire. And the thought came to me: “Oh, if the world could only see
me now--here in my glorious triumph--with these great beasts about me!”
For it was a mighty triumph for man, the egoist. In thirty seconds I
had destroyed a possible one hundred years of throbbing, heart-beating
life, a hundred years of winter, a hundred years of summer, a hundred
mating-seasons, and the thousand other lives that now would never be
born! I stood up, and shrieked again toward the camp, and far above me
out of the blue of the sky I heard an answering cry from one of the
eagles....
Yes, as I sit here, looking back over the days that are gone, I wonder
that the spirit of vengeance does not rise up out of the forest and
destroy me, even as I have destroyed. It would be justice, according to
that justice which man the egoist metes out. And yet, even as I wonder,
the answer comes to me very clearly. I am no different than hundreds of
millions of others. I have destroyed in my own way, while others have
destroyed in theirs. And nature, the most blessed of all things, is not
vengeful. God forgives. And nature is God. It is God that lives in the
rose, in the violet, in the tree, just as he lives in the heart of man.
It is God that breathes in the grass which makes the earth sweet to
tread upon, and it is God that lives in the song of birds. His “life”
is all-encompassing, the vital spark of all existent things. Instead of
sending ghosts back to earth to prove his power, he gives us all these
things, and lives and breathes in them, that we may have him with us in
physical things all the days of our lives if we will only rise out of
our egoism--and understand.
And now I have come again to the parting of a way. I have bared the
black side of my ledger, and it has not been pleasant work for
me. To-morrow begins the joyous part of my task--the beginning of
that story which will tell how at last my eyes were opened, how
understanding came to me, and with that understanding a new faith which
will live with me through all the rest of the years of my life.
* * * * *
_The Third Trail_ MY BROTHERHOOD
* * * * *
_The Third Trail_ MY BROTHERHOOD
To-day is Sunday, and I have just returned from a week’s hike up the
mysterious little creek that runs past my cabin. It seems good to be
home again, and Nuts and Spoony and Wild Bill, the blue jay, have given
me a royal welcome, and I am almost convinced my pop-eyed moose-bird
friends are trying to tell me who was the thief in my cabin while I
was gone. On that “to-morrow” when I had promised myself another day
of writing, the _Wanderlust_ came to me, and I packed up a kit and a
week’s supply of grub and started out to explore my creek. It is a
very individual sort of creek--it has character, even, if it hasn’t a
name. It comes out of deep, dark, and unexplored masses of forest to
the north, and I have fancied it bringing down all sorts of romance
and tragedy out of the hidden places if it could only talk. So I went
to the end of it to find out its secrets for myself. And there was so
much of interest that I could fill a book with it. I don’t think any
other white feet have ever traveled up this creek, which I now call
“Lonesome.” Surely not even an Indian has been along it for at least a
generation, for I did not find the mark of an ax or sign of a fire or
vestige of deadfall or trap-house.
But it did take me forty miles back into a country of such savage
wilderness and dense forests that I have almost determined to build me
another cabin there a little later, if for no other reason than to live
for a while with the hundreds of owls that inhabit certain parts of it.
I have never seen so many owls anywhere in the Northland, and I figure
this is because the big snow-shoe rabbits have been multiplying for
several years past, and now exist there literally in thousands. At many
places along the creek, the earth was beaten hard by their furred feet.
By all the signs, I have predicted that next year, or the year after,
the “seven-year rabbit-plague” will come along and kill off ninety out
of every hundred. Then the owls will scatter, and most of the lynxes
and foxes and wolves will wander off into other hunting grounds, for
the rabbit is the staff of life of the flesh-eating birds and beasts
of the big northern forests, just as all the world over wheat is the
mainstay of human stomachs.
But I am wandering a bit from the point in mind--which is to say that,
in leaving on my journey of exploration, I forgot to close the window
of my cabin, and through that open window entered the rascally thief
whom the pair of moose-birds are trying to tell me about. I think Bill
knows also, but I don’t believe he would give a brother robber away,
even if he did have four feet and a tail. By tracks and two or three
other signs, I know the thief is a wolverine, who, like the pack-rat
over in the mountains, steals almost entirely for the fun of it. This
mischief-making humorist, among other things, has carried away a hat,
one of my two frying-pans, several tins, half a slab of bacon, and my
favorite fish-cleaning knife during my absence. But I know this clever
fellow’s ways, and have hope that I shall soon recover my property if I
keep my eyes open and listen with both my ears.
And I shall not kill him, no matter how red-handed--or red-footed--I
catch him. A few years ago, I would have planned to ambush him with
a rifle. But now I have the desire to become as intimate with him as
possible and learn a little more definitely what he wants with a
knife, a skillet, and my pans. I feel that, for his theft, he should
in some way be rewarded and not slain, for he has added to my interest
in life by rousing a keen and harmless curiosity. His is only one way
in which nature is constantly adding fullness of life and greater
contentment to my years. Everywhere, even to the smallest things under
my feet and at my hand, I am learning more and more of the marvelous
ways and life of all creation, and the more I learn the more I am
convinced that I am simply an atom in its vast brotherhood, and I am
finding a great happiness by making myself actually a part of it.
Heretofore, I have been a self-expatriated spark of life, so to speak;
in my human egoism, I have held myself apart from all other sparks of
life that were not formed in my own poor and unlovely shape--and, even
then, I considered myself considerably better than those who did not
happen to be of my particular color and breed.
Two very simple things are adding to my pleasure in life this early
afternoon, and illustrate the point I have in mind--if one can bow
one’s head down to the level of understanding. I am writing again
between the two big spruce trees, but during my week of absence other
sparks of life have, in a way, taken possession of my table. From
between two of the hewn saplings that form the top of this table, where
the big storm of wind must have flung a bit of earth and a seed, a
tender green sprout of something has started to grow. It is a single
spear now, not of grass, and its green is the whitish green of the
lower part of an asparagus shoot. To me, it seems fairly to pulse with
life, and I have the very foolish feeling within me that nature planned
this little surprise for me while I was away, and that, if I give it a
bit of brotherly attention, I am going to have a flower on my table,
not transplanted or plucked, but there deliberately through friendship
for me. However foolish this notion may be, it is a very pleasant one
to have, and its effect is to bring me much nearer to the Creator of
things than any sermon I could hear preached from a pulpit; for I am
not listening merely to words about God, but I am looking directly at a
physical part of God, and I find a great satisfaction in this faith.
A second interesting thing that has happened to my table is that it has
become a plain across which now runs the trail of a big tribe of ants.
These ants, I have found, climb up the farthest right-hand support of
my table and proceed straight across to the big spruce on my left, up
which they disappear; and a returning file of the workers come down
the spruce and hit it “cross-country” to the table-leg again. They
don’t seem to be bearing any burdens, yet they move with precision and
purpose, and I have come to understand that, when ants move in this
way, they have something very definite in mind. I am convinced they
are moving from one fortress home to another, or at least that every
“working” individual in the tribe is personally investigating some new
discovery that has been made either up the spruce or in the direction
of the creek. Later, I will know more about it.
But the point that impresses itself upon me most is that, in my
destroying days, I would have swept the friendly little green sprout
from its cradle, and would have driven the ant tribe from my property,
destroying as many of them as possible. Again I want to emphasize
that I am not a crank, or narrow-minded in my religion of “live and
let live.” If this same tribe of ants had invaded my cabin, and were
preying on things necessary to me, I would destroy them or drive them
away. That is my nature-given privilege--to protect myself and what is
mine. It is also the privilege of every other spark of life. These same
ants, were I to stand on their fortress, would attack me desperately.
But now they do not molest me. And I do not molest them. It is the
beautiful law of “live and let live”--so long as the necessity for
destruction does not arise.
When I sat down at my typewriter an hour ago, I had planned to
begin immediately the telling of what I have wandered somewhat away
from--the story of a few incidents which helped to bring about my own
regeneration, and which at last impressed upon me this great Golden
Rule of all nature--live and let live. The big dramatic climax in that
part of my life happened over in the British Columbia mountains, where
my love of adventure has taken me on many long journeys.
But the change had begun to work in me before then. My conscience was
already stabbing me. I was regretting, in a mild sort of way, that
I had killed so much. But I was still the supreme egoist, believing
myself the God-chosen animal of all creation, and when at any time I
withheld my destroying hand, I flattered myself with a thought of my
condescension and human kindness.
At the particular time I am going to write about, I was on a big
grizzly-hunt in a wild and unhunted part of the British Columbia
mountains. I had with me one man, seven horses, and a pack of Airedales
trained to hunt bear. We had struck a grizzly-and-caribou paradise,
and there had been considerable killing, when, one day, we came upon
the trail of Thor, the great beast that showed me how small in soul
and inclination a man can be. In a patch of mud his feet had left
tracks that were fifteen inches from tip to tip, and so wide and deep
were the imprints that I knew I had come upon the king of all his
kind. I was alone that morning, for I had left camp an hour ahead of
my man, who was two or three miles behind me with four of the horses
and the Airedale pack. I went on watching for a new campsite, for the
thrill of a great desire possessed me--the desire to take the life of
this monster king of the mountains. It was in these moments that the
unexpected happened. I came over a little rise, not expecting that my
bear was within two or three miles of me, when something that was very
much like a low and sullen rumble of far-away thunder stopped the blood
in my veins.
Ahead of me, on the edge of a little wallow of mud, stood Thor. He
had smelled me, and, I believe, it was the first time he had ever
smelled the scent of man. Waiting for this new mystery in the air, he
had reared himself up until the whole nine feet of him rested on his
haunches, and he sat like a trained dog, with his great forefeet, heavy
with mud, drooping in front of his chest. He was a monster in size,
and his new June coat shone a golden brown in the sun. His forearms
were almost as large as a man’s body, and the three largest of his five
knifelike claws were five and a half inches long. He was fat and sleek
and powerful. His upper fangs, sharp as stiletto-points, were as long
as a man’s thumb, and between his great jaws he could have crushed the
neck of a caribou. I did not take in all these details in the first
startling moments; one by one they came to me later. But I had never
looked upon anything in life quite so magnificent. Yet did I have no
thought of sparing that splendid life. Since that day, I have rested in
camp with my head pillowed on the arm of a living grizzly that weighed
a thousand pounds. Friendship and love and understanding have sprung
up between us. But in that moment my desire was to destroy this life
that was so much greater than my own. My rifle was at my saddle-horn in
its buckskin jacket. I fumbled it in getting into action, and in those
precious moments Thor lowered himself slowly and ambled away. I fired
twice, and would have staked my life that I had missed both times. Not
until later did I discover that one of my bullets had opened a furrow
two inches deep and a foot long in the flesh of Thor’s shoulder. Yet I
did not see him flinch. He did not turn back, but went his way.
Shame burns within me as I write of the days that followed; and yet,
with that shame, there is a deep and abiding joy, for they were also
the days of my regeneration. Day and night, my one thought was to
destroy the big grizzly. We never left his trail. The dogs followed
him like demons. Five times in the first week we came within long
shooting-range, and twice we hit him. But still he did not wait for us
or attack us. He wanted to be left alone. In that week, he killed four
of the dogs, and the others we tied up to save them. We trailed him
with horses and afoot, and never did the spoor of other game lure me
aside. The desire to kill him became a passion in me. He outgeneraled
us. He beat all our games of trickery. But I knew that we were bound
to win--that he was slowly weakening because of exhaustion, and the
sickness of his wounds. We loosed the dogs again, and another was
killed.
Then, at last, came that splendid day when Thor, master of the
mountains, showed me how contemptible was I--with my human shape and
soul.
It was Sunday. I had climbed three or four thousand feet up the side
of a mountain and below me lay the wonder of the valley, dotted with
patches of trees and carpeted with the beauty of rich, green grass,
mountain-violets and forget-me-nots, wild asters, and hyacinths. On
three sides of me spread out the wonderful panorama of the Canadian
Rockies, softened in the golden sunshine of late June. From up and down
the valley, from the breaks between the peaks, and from the little
gullies cleft in shale and rock that crept up to the snow-lines came a
soft and droning murmur. It was the music of running water--music ever
in the air of summer, for the rivers and creeks and tiny streamlets
gushing down from the melting snow up near the clouds are never still.
Sweet perfumes as well as music came to me; June and July--the last
of spring and the first of summer in the northern mountains--were
commingling. All the earth was bursting with green; flowers were
turning the sunny slopes and meadows into colored splashes of red
and white and purple, and everything that had life was giving voice
to exultation--the fat whistlers on their rocks, the pompous little
gophers on their mounds, the squirrel-like rock-rabbits, the big
bumblebees that buzzed from flower to flower, the hawks in the valley,
and the eagles over the peaks.
Earth, it seemed, was at peace.
And I, looking over all that vastness of life, felt my own greatness
thrust upon me.
For had not the Creator, of all things, made this wonderland for _me_?
There could be no denial. I was master--master because I could think,
because I could reason, because I held the reins to an unutterable
power of destruction. And then the vastness of time seized upon me like
a living thing. Yesterday, a thing had happened which came strongly
into my thoughts of to-day. Under a great overhanging cliff I had found
a part of a monster bone, as heavy as iron--a section of a gigantic
vertebra. Two years before I had found part of the skeleton of a
prehistoric creature, identical with this, and, from photographs which
I took of it the scientific departments of the University of Michigan
and the government at Ottawa agreed that the bones were part of the
skeleton of a mammoth whale that once had swum where the valleys and
peaks of the Rocky Mountains now disrupt the continent.
And on this Sunday, looking down, I thought of the monster bone I
had found yesterday in the dry shale and sand under the cliff. When
the Three Wise Men saw the star in the east, that bone was as I had
found it. It was there when Christ was born. It was there, unmoved
and untouched, before Rome was founded, before Troy died in the mists
of the past, before history, as we know history, began. It was there
a million years ago, ten million, fifty, a hundred. And, thinking of
this, I felt myself growing smaller and smaller; my egoism died away,
and I saw these mountains obliterated and under the blue of a vast
ocean, and rising out of that ocean I saw other continents, peopled
with other people, moved by other religions, beating to the pulse of
other civilizations long dead. I heard the beat of waves below me,
where grew the grass and the flowers of the valley. And the droning
music of that valley seemed to change into the low whisperings of
countless trillions of men and women and little children who had
lived and died in those other civilizations of the lost ages; and
that fancied whispering of dead worlds told me a great truth--that
the Supreme Arbiter of things had watched over all those trillions
just as he was now watching over me, that I was but a pitifully small
grain of dust in the great scheme of things, that my egoism was
criminal, sacrilegious, a curse set upon myself by myself. And the
soft and droning whisper also told me the time would come when my own
“civilization” would be obliterated, to be followed by a hundred, a
thousand, or a million others, each in its turn to live and die.
And it was then, on that Sunday precious to me, that I asked myself an
old, old question in a great, new way--“What is God?”
And looking down into the valley, and up into the sky, understanding
came to me. God is there, and there, and there. He is the Infinite
Power. He is Life. Life began infinities ago, and it will continue
through other infinities. While we are squabbling among ourselves with
our little religions and our little views, while we are preaching the
damnation of beliefs that are not ours, while sects fight to convert
sects that do not think as they think, while our narrow-gage minds
travel in their narrow-gage paths,--that Infinite Power is watching
and waiting, as it has watched and waited from the beginning, and
as it will watch and wait until the end. And I stared down into the
valley, green and glorious and filled with sunshine and peace, and that
low-sung whisper seemed to say, “If this is not God what _is_ God?” And
then also, in a new way, came something in my brain which said to me,
“_And who are you?_”
* * * * *
I climbed higher up the mountain. I felt my greatness gone. Kindly,
something had told me how pitiful I was. I was not mighty. I was no
more in the ultimate of things than a blade of grass. My egoism, on
that glorious Sunday, began to crumble in my soul. And then, by chance
if you will have it so, came the climax of that day.
I came to a sheer wall of rock that rose hundreds of feet above me.
Along this ran a narrow ledge, and I followed it. The passage became
craggy and difficult, and in climbing over a broken mass of rock, I
slipped and fell. I had brought a light mountain-gun with me, and in
trying to recover myself I swung it about with such force that the
stock struck a sharp edge of rock and broke clean off. But I had saved
myself from possible death, and was in a frame of mind to congratulate
myself rather than curse my luck. Fifty feet farther on I came to
a “pocket” in the cliff, where the ledge widened until, at this
particular place, it was like a flat table twenty feet square. Here I
sat down, with my back to the precipitous wall, and began to examine my
broken rifle.
I laid it beside me, useless. Straight up at my back rose the sheer
face of the mountain; in front of me, had I leaped from the ledge,
my body would have hurtled through empty air for a thousand feet. In
the valley I could see the creek, like a ribbon of shimmering silver;
two or three miles away was a little lake; on another mountain I
saw a bursting cascade of water leaping down the heights and losing
itself in the velvety green of the lower timber. For many minutes,
new and strange thoughts possessed me. I did not look through my
hunting-glasses, for I was no longer seeking game. My blood was
stirred, but not with the desire to kill.
And then, suddenly, there came a sound to my ears that seemed to
stop the beating of my heart. I had not heard it until it was very
near--approaching along the narrow ledge.
It was the click,--click,--click of claws rattling on rock!
I did not move. I hardly breathed. And out from the ledge I had
followed came a monster bear!
With the swiftness of lightning, I recognized him. It was Thor! And, in
that same instant, the great beast saw me.
In thirty seconds I lived a lifetime, and in those thirty seconds
what passed through my mind was a thousand times swifter than spoken
word. A great fear rooted me, and yet in that fear I saw everything to
the minutest detail. Thor’s massive head and shoulders were fronting
me. I saw the long naked scar where my bullet had plowed through
his shoulder; I saw another wound in his fore leg, still ragged and
painful, where another of my soft-nosed bullets had torn like an
explosion of dynamite. The giant grizzly was no longer fat and sleek
as I had first seen him ten days ago. All that time he had been
fighting for his life; he was thinner; his eyes were red; his coat was
dull and unkempt from lack of food and strength. But at that distance,
less than ten feet from me, he seemed still a mighty brother of the
mountains themselves. As I sat stupidly, stunned to the immobility of a
rock in my hour of doom, I felt the overwhelming conviction of what had
happened. Thor had followed me along the ledge, and, in this hour of
vengeance and triumph, it was I, and not the great beast, who was about
to die.
It seemed to me that an eternity passed in these moments. And Thor,
mighty in his strength, looked at me and did not move. And this thing
that he was looking at,--shrinking against the rock,--was the creature
that had hunted him; this was the creature that had hurt him, and
it was so near that he could reach out with his paw and crush it!
And how weak and white and helpless it looked now! What a pitiful,
insignificant thing it was! Where was its strange thunder? Where was
its burning lightning? Why did it make no sound?
Slowly Thor’s giant head began swinging from side to side; then he
advanced--just one step--and in a slow, graceful movement reared
himself to his full, magnificent height. For me, it was the beginning
of the end. And in that moment, doomed as I was, I found no pity for
myself. Here, at last, was justice! I was about to die. I, who had
destroyed so much of life, found how helpless I was when I faced life
with my naked hands. _And it was justice!_ I had robbed the earth of
more life than would fill the bodies of a thousand men, and now my
own life was to follow that which I had destroyed. Suddenly fear left
me. I wanted to cry out to that splendid creature that I was sorry,
and could my dry lips have framed the words, it would not have been
cowardice--but truth.
I have read many stories of truth and hope and faith and charity.
From a little boy, my father tried to teach me what it meant to be a
gentleman, and he lived what he tried to teach. And from the days of my
small boyhood, mother told me stories of great and good men and women,
and in the days of my manhood, she faithfully lived the great truth
that of all precious things charity and love are the most priceless.
Yet had I accepted it all in the narrowest and littlest way. Not until
this hour on the edge of the cliff did I realize how small can be the
soul of a man buried in his egoism--or how splendid can be the soul of
a beast.
For Thor knew me. That I know. He knew me as the deadliest of all
his enemies on the face of the earth. Yet until I die will I believe
that, in my helplessness, he no longer hated me or wanted my life. For
slowly he came down upon all fours again, and, limping as he went, he
continued along the ledge--_and left me to live_!
* * * * *
I am not, in these days, sacrilegious enough to think that the Supreme
Power picked my poor insignificant self from among a billion and a half
other humans especially to preach a sermon to that glorious Sunday
on the mountainside. Possibly it was all mere chance. It may be that
another day Thor would have killed me in my helplessness. It may all
have been a lucky accident for me. Personally, I do not believe it,
for I have found that the soul of the average beast is cleaner of hate
and of malice than that of the average man. But whether one believes
with me or not, does not matter, so far as the point I want to make is
concerned--that from this hour began the great change in me, which has
finally admitted me into the peace and joy of universal brotherhood
with Life. It matters little how a sermon or a great truth comes to
one; it is the result that counts.
I returned down the mountain, carrying my broken gun with me. And
everywhere I saw that things were different. The fat whistlers, big as
woodchucks, were no longer so many targets, watching me cautiously from
the rock-tops; the gophers, sunning themselves on their mounds, meant
more to me now than a few hours ago. I looked off to a distant slide
on another mountain and made out the half-dozen sheep I had studied
through my glasses earlier in the day. But my desire to kill was gone.
I did not realize the fullness of the change that was upon me then.
In a dull sort of way, I accepted it as an effect of shock, perhaps
as a passing moment of repentance and gratitude because of my escape.
I did not tell myself that I would never kill sheep again except when
mutton was necessary to my camp fire. I did not promise the whistlers
long lives. And yet the change was on me, and growing stronger in my
blood with every breath I drew. The valley was different. Its air was
sweeter. Its low song of life and running waters and velvety winds
whispering between the mountains was new inspiration to me. The grass
was softer under my feet; the flowers were more beautiful; the earth
itself held a new thrill for me.
* * * * *
A few nights later, beside a small fire we had built in the
cool of evening, I tried to tell old Donald something about the
Transfiguration, how Christ had gone up on the mount with Peter and
John and James, and what had happened there.
“It wasn’t that Christ himself was actually changed as he prayed on
the mountain-top,” I said to Donald. “The change was in Peter and John
and James, who in these moments saw Christ with a new vision and a new
understanding. The Transfiguration was simply a mental process of their
own; they saw clearly now where before they had been half blind. And I
am wondering if this old world of ours wouldn’t change for us in the
same way if we saw it with understanding, and looked at it with clean
eyes?”
* * * * *
So, on this other Sunday, as the evening draws on, I look back through
the years between me and that day on the mountain-top, and the memory
of Thor fills a warm corner of my heart. Through him I have the happy
thought that I was given birth into a new world, and all things now
hold a new significance for me. I have discovered for myself, in a
small way, the wonderful secret of the instinctive processes of nature,
and in a thousand ways I have found this instinct, coming directly from
the fount of supreme direction, far more amazing than reasoning itself.
I understand more clearly, I think, why all humanity loves a baby, no
matter how ugly it may be. It is because it is so utterly dependent
upon instinct alone, so completely helpless, so absolutely without
reason or protection of its own. We like to believe that a baby is very
close to God, simply because it has no reasoning and because it is as
yet purely a creature of instinctive processes. And yet, as we lay down
our lives for its protection, we forget that adult man, with all his
reasoning and his power, was originally a creature of instinct himself.
We forget that it took millions of years to give him a language, and
that possession of language alone has made him a super-creature. For
it is language that gives birth to reason, allows of communication
of thought, and should man be suddenly bereft of all language and
thought-communication he would, in the course of ages, revert again
into a creature guided solely by instinct. In that event he would be
nothing more or less than a brother to all other creatures of instinct.
He would again become an ordinary member of the Ancient Brotherhood of
Common Heritage, and could no longer call himself the Chosen One and
the Ordained of God. But good luck came to him, perhaps even in the
days when he may have swung from the trees by his tail--good luck in
the discovery of a crude method of thought-communication, a discovery
that developed through the ages, until now his head is turned, so to
speak, and for tens of thousands of years he has looked down more and
more upon his poor relations who have not had his own good fortune.
But I am learning that time has not freed him, and never will free
him, from his blood relationship. And creed may follow creed, and
religion may follow religion, but never will he find that full peace
and contentment which might be his lot until he recognizes and admits
into his comradeship again the soul of that nature which is his own
mother, and forgets his monumental egoism in a new understanding of
those instinctive processes of nature through which he, himself, passed
in the kindergarten of his own existence.
This is my faith, my religion. Close to where I am sitting is an old
stub, clothed in a mass of wood-vine, warm and vivid in the golden glow
of the setting sun. The wood-vine has climbed, instinctively, to the
top of the stub, and now, finding their support gone, half a dozen long
tendrils are reaching out toward a tall young birch six or eight feet
away. One tendril, stronger and older than the others, has reached and
clasped the nearest branch. The others are following unerringly. _Yet
they have no eyes to see._ No voice calls back to them to point out
the way. It is the instinct of life itself that is guiding them, the
same instinct, in a smaller way, that dragged man up bit by bit from
out of the black chaos of the past. In a thousand other ways, if one
will take the blindfold from his eyes and try to understand, he may see
this mightiest of all the forces of the earth--instinct--a vibrant,
breathing, struggling thing about him, a force so much more powerful
than his own, so all-consuming and indestructible that it stands out as
a giant mountain compared with the mole-hill of his own littleness. In
my own faith, I see it as a vast and inexhaustible reservoir of life,
of strength, of “upward climb,” of inspiration. I see it as the one
great, all-necessary force of creation--a force more precious to man
than all the mines of the earth, more precious than all the treasure of
the mints, if he would forget his greatness and reach out his hands to
it in the gladness of a new brotherhood.
Dusk is falling. And, as I stop my work, here in the heart of a forest,
I seem to see the smiles of many who will read this, and I seem to hear
the low and unbelieving laughter of those who think themselves of the
flesh and blood of God. And I seem to hear their voices saying:
“He is wrong. Nature is beautiful--sometimes. Also, it is crude. It
is rough. It is destructive. It is, half the time, a pest. While
we--we--have we not performed wonders? Have we not _proved_ ourselves
the chosen of God? Have we not created nations? Have we not built up
great cities? Have we not accumulated vast riches? Have we not invented
the Dollar? Are we not, in a hundred ways, shackling nature as a man
harnesses a horse, proving ourselves its masters, and it our slave?”