“Yea! you are great--in your own eyes. You have made nations and
cities and great tabernacles--and you have created the Dollar. But,
when, for a moment, you cease the mad struggle you are making, you
are _afraid_. Yes; you cry out loudly then in your fear. You fight to
bring ghosts back, that they may tell you what happens when you lie
down and die. You cry out for a religion which will give you absolute
faith and comfort and cannot find it. You think you are great because
you have built skyscrapers and ride close to the clouds and have made
it possible to rush swiftly through a country choked with dust. But you
forget quickly. You forget how little you were--yesterday. You do not
tell yourself that you are a pest, perhaps the greatest of all. Yea;
you are great, and in your greatness you are wise, but all that which
you have achieved cannot give you that which you so vainly seek--the
contentment of a deep and abiding faith.”
* * * * *
_The Fourth Trail_ THE ROAD TO FAITH
* * * * *
_The Fourth Trail_ THE ROAD TO FAITH
It has been some time since I sat down to work at my table under the
tall spruce trees. I have had an experience during the past five or six
days which is one of my rewards for letting nature live, and, for a
space, it quite completely upset me, so far as work was concerned.
In other words, I have been having an experience with a species of
vermin which I love. The baby vermin of this particular species are,
to me, almost as lovable and quite as cute in their ways as human
babies; and for the adult vermin, the mothers and fathers of the
babies, I have a far greater love and respect than I have for many
males and females of my own breed. And, taking it all round, they are
a cleaner, handsomer, and more wholesome-looking lot than the average
crowd of humans, though they are--because of the mightiness of man’s
edict--nothing more than vermin.
I am speaking of bears. A few years ago, one of my most thrilling
sports was to hunt them--blacks, grizzlies, and polars. Now I consider
them, in a way, my brothers, and I am having a lot of fun in the
comradeship. I am filled with resentment when I consider that in all
the states of this country, with the exception of two or three, the
law says these friends of mine are “vermin,” along with lice and fleas
and maggots, and that they may be killed on sight, babies and all,
because,--perhaps once in his lifetime,--a bear living very close to
civilization may make a meal of pig or lamb. If every human mother in
the land could hold a baby cub in her arms for five minutes, there
would be such an uprising of feminine sympathy that the laws would be
repealed.
In thinking again of our mothers, I would give a good year of my
life if a million of them could have seen what I have seen during
the past few days. For, after all, I believe that nearly all great
movements toward better and bigger and more beautiful things must and
will begin with women. No amount of “equality” will ever take that
blessed superiority to men away from them. To-day, even religion,
shameful to men as the fact may be, rests on a pillar of women’s white
shoulders, and all the faith that the world possesses first finds
its resting-place in their soft breasts. And I look ahead to the day,
with unbounded faith of my own, when women will see, and understand,
and begin the great fight toward comradeship with all that other life
which is so utterly dependent about them now--life which throbs and
urges in every living thing from the grass-blade and the oak to the
“instinct” creatures of flesh and blood. Then shall we have a “religion
of nature,” with a force and a might behind it which will glorify the
earth, and man will come to realize that he is not God, but only an
insignificantly small part of God’s handiwork. And when man comes to
that point, where he casts off his arrogance and his ego, then will the
time have come for the birth of a satisfying and universal faith in
that great and all-embracing Power which we know and speak of in our
own language as God.
And the very foundation of this faith, I believe, will be an
understanding of _all_ life, the acknowledgment at last that man
himself may not be a more precious physical manifestation of the
Supreme Vital Force than many of the other created things about him.
It is because I believe that nature, the mother of all life, is trying
to teach us this great truth in a thousand or a million different ways,
in the smoke and grime and crush of big cities as well as in farm-land
and forest, that I come back to my little experience with the bears.
About six or seven miles to the north of me is a great ridge, plainly
visible from one of the halfway limbs of my lookout spruce, a sort
of barrier which rises up between me and the still vaster hinterland
beyond it. Sometime in the past, a fire swept over it, so that now
it is covered with a gorgeous and splendid growth of young birch and
poplars, and virile patches of vines on which, a little later, there
will be an abundance of strawberries, raspberries, rose-berries, and
black currants. It is also richly sprinkled with mountain-ash trees,
which give promise of a yield of hundreds of bushels of fruit this late
summer and autumn. Altogether, it is an ideal feeding-range for wild
things, hoof, claw, and feathers. Three times I have traveled for miles
along the cap of this ridge. To me, in all its richness and promise,
it is a glorious manifestation of Life. It breathes under me and about
me. I can fairly hear its compelling youth bursting from its growing
leaves, its swelling fruits, its flowers, and from the mold that
pulses and throbs with the vital forces under my feet. I almost think I
could live and die on this ridge, or another ridge like it, and never
be at loss for company.
On my first visit to the ridge, being overtaken by storm, I built me
a brush shelter in a lovely spot close to it, with a tiny creek of
spring-cold water not more than a dozen paces away. On my third and
last visit, I returned to this spot, and ran face on into my adventure.
From the sheltered bower of balsams where I had built my wigwam, I
could look up a rolling, meadowy breast of the ridge, so perfect in its
adornment of vine and bush and small clumps of young trees that, to
one not entirely acquainted with the exquisite art of nature, it would
almost seem as though a human landscape-architect had “laid out” the
little paradise which was my hillside back yard. On this particular
morning, coming up quietly, my eyes were greeted by an amazingly pretty
spectacle. The green hillside, soft and velvety in the sunlight and
shadow of the morning, was in full possession of two families of black
bears.
So close were the nearest of them to me that I dropped like a shot
behind a big rock, and the breath of air that was stirring being in my
favor, I was at a splendid vantage-point to take in the whole scene.
Within forty yards of me were a mother and three cubs, and a little
higher up--perhaps twice that distance--were a mother and two cubs.
At almost the very crest of the ridge were two more bears, which I at
first thought were adults. A closer inspection assured me they were
last year’s cubs, and possibly not more than a third grown, though to
which of the two mothers they belonged, if to either, I could not make
up my mind. Frequently, instead of setting out in life for itself, a
black bear cub will follow its mother through a second season, and I
judged this to be the situation here.
For two hours, I did not move from my place of concealment. That
spectacle of motherhood and babyhood on the hillside, with the virile
and luxuriant life of nature pulsing and beating all about it, was
a new chapter in my book of religion. It was pointing out to me, in
perhaps a hundredth or a thousandth lesson, that all life is the same,
and that it is only language, or the want of language, that makes the
difference in the “life-relationship” of all created things. I could
fancy, as I lay there, just how the Supreme Arbiter of things had
given physical being to all this life that was about me, as well as
the life that was in me. It has all come from the same dynamo, so to
speak--a spark of it in each tree, a spark of it in each flower and
shrub, and blade of grass, a spark of it in each of the beasts of flesh
and blood on the hillside, and a spark of it in me. Our life was the
same. It had all come from the same vital source, from the same supreme
fount of existence. Yet how different were the forms it animated! Close
to my hand was a beautiful rock-violet, blue as the sky, its velvety
petals freckled with tiny flecks of gold; a few yards away, perched
among the rustling leaves of a birch, a brush-warbler filled the air
with melody; back of me, the tops of the thick balsams whispered
softly, and up there I could hear the grunting of the mother bears,
the squealing of the little cubs, and a gentle murmuring sound that
came from the ridge itself, as if all living things were fighting for a
language, struggling to give voice to something that was in them.
I have had some amusement and a little discord over the teapot tempests
that so-called nature-scientists occasionally stir up among themselves
over the “humanizing” of wild life. Man’s ego has possessed him so
utterly that it is distasteful to him to concede anything “humanlike”
to any creature that is not in his own flesh and form. For my part,
loving all wild life as I do, I am proud and glad that it does not
possess more of our human qualities. If I write honestly of what has
come to me in my own wide experience in nature, I must--no matter how
unpleasant the statement may be--confess that wild life _does_ possess
a great many characteristics that are very “human,” and the ways of its
members are in many instances strangely the same. I could see little
difference between my bears on the hillside and two human mothers and
their children, except in their physical appearance, and the fact that
the humans would undoubtedly have made a great deal more noise. But the
bears were handsomer--begging the ladies’ pardon. Their sleek coats
shone like black satin in the sun, and the cubs were cute enough to
hug to death. But they were a worry to their mothers for all that, and
especially one of them, which appeared to be the hog-it-all member of
the family nearest me. Whenever the mother bear pawed over a stone or
pulled down a tender bush, this little customer was always there ahead
of the rest of the family, licking up the choicest grubs and ants and
getting the first mouthful of greens. Half a dozen times, the mother
slapped him with her paw, rolling him over like a fat ball. But there
could have been no very great corrective power in the cuffings, or else
he was toughened to them by usage, for he was back on the job again
without very much loss of time.
For almost two hours, the bears fed on the hillside. Several times
the two families drew so near together that the cubs intermingled and
the mothers almost rubbed sides. I feel that the interest of this
particular page would be greatly increased for many of my readers
if I added a ferocious imaginary fight between the two mothers and
a bloody feud between the youngsters. Bears do fight when they
meet--sometimes--just like humans, only not as often. But it is my
duty to relate that these bears were at peace on this particular day,
and that they seemed to enjoy the mutual companionship. It was all so
fine that I had an impelling desire to go up on the hillside and become
a comrade with them. When the feeding was over, and the cubs were
wrestling and running about in play, I almost rose up from behind my
rock to call out my friendship to them. The lack of one thing held me
back--that one thing which all nature is crying out for--_a language_.
I feel they would have welcomed me could I have told them I was a
friend, and wanted to play with them, and make them a present of some
sugar. But instead of that this is what happened:
In their play, two of the cubs had descended within twenty feet of my
rock. One of these was the gourmand. Somehow, he lost his balance,
rolled over, and came tumbling down. When he stopped he was not more
than half a dozen feet from me. As he brought his fat little body to
its feet he saw me. His eyes fairly popped. It seemed to me that for a
full minute he did not move or breathe. And during that same minute I
remained as still as a rock. In his amazement and his wonder, he was
the funniest thing I had ever seen, and in spite of myself, my face
broke into a grin. Instantly there came out of him a little, piggish
grunt,--and he was off. Up that hillside he went as if the world was
after him. He did not stop when he reached his mother and the other
cubs, but seemed to hit it still faster for the top of the ridge. The
mother looked after him, sniffed the air, and rose to her feet. In
half a minute, she was lumbering after him, the two remaining cubs
hustling ahead of her.
A hundred yards away, the second mother bear took the warning. In a
very short time, they had all disappeared over the cap of the ridge.
I had not shown myself. I had made no sound. The wind was still in my
favor. Yet the frightened cub had given warning to them all. For no
other creature but man would they have fled like that. Even in the face
of a pack of wolves, the mothers would have turned to fight. Something
had told them that man was near--yet only the cub had seen and smelled
that man, and he had probably never seen or smelled another. Yet he
knew, and all the others knew, that man was the deadliest of all
enemies. And I am half convinced, as I write this, that nature has
at least the beginning of a universal language, that the centuries
and hundreds of centuries have given it four words, and these words
are: “Man is our enemy.” I might fancy that the winds carry these
words, that the tree-tops whisper them, that they are in the undertone
of running waters, that all life outside of man and man’s pitiably
few friends has, in some strange way, come to learn them. It is, I
confess, an elusive sort of fancy,--but it sets one to thinking.
It makes one wonder, for instance, why man is so jealous of himself.
The Supreme Power is immeasurable, he tells himself. It has no such a
thing as limitation. Heaven, no matter in what form he may conceive
it, is utterly boundless. Yet he is jealous of it. He does not want to
concede that any other life will form a part of it but that of his own
breed. He has tried, through unnumbered centuries, to fool himself into
the belief that he is the one and only thing in all creation upon which
the Ruling Power of the universe has its guardian eye. He has tried
to make himself believe that he is the one toad in the huge puddle of
life. He has not conceded that an all-powerful but tender God might
love flowers and birds and trees and many other living things as well
as he loves man. And as I sit here under my spruce trees again, it
seems to me that, just because he has been so near-sighted, man has not
yet found a faith which is all-comforting and of which he is utterly
sure.
I seem to see a very clear reason for this. In this age, though
still fettered by his egoism, man is not utterly blind to his own
deformities. As “civilization” progresses, he sees more and more what
a monster he has been in the past, and what a monster in many ways he
is to-day. He sees his breed committing every crime known to the ages,
from petty larceny to world-slaughters that devastate nations. He sees
everywhere the strong taking advantage of the weak. He sees millions go
hungry and cold that a few may profit. In great convention-halls, he
sees the “statesmen” that rule the destiny of a mighty nation cutting
capers and acting generally like a lot of silly little children. He
sees every man in a great game fighting to see who can accumulate the
most dollars, no matter at what cost to the others. He sees sickening
and disgusting fads come and go. He looks on a world-brothel of
iniquity, of discontent, of avarice and greed and butchery among men.
Nowhere does he see the stability, the dignity, and the mighty forces
of good that should walk hand in hand with “the chosen of God.”
He is beginning to see himself, at last, as a contemptible specimen of
life--in spite of his brain and his inventions.
He is beginning to understand that the most perfect airship his brain
will ever conceive cannot take him to heaven.
He is beginning to realize that there is a thing greater than brain,
greater than mechanical progress.
And as he comes to understand more and more how imperfect a thing he
is, the more unstable his faith becomes; and the sacrilegious thought
comes to him, unconsciously but with terrific force: “If I am the
chosen handiwork of God, then I can have no very great faith in the
judgment and workmanship of God.”
And as the suspicion grows upon him that he may not be the “one and
only” child of God, he cries out wildly in these modern days for
evidence. He tries to bring spirits back from the dead that they may
offer him some proof. He quests vainly for “revelations” that may
satisfy him. He says with his mouth, “Yes; I believe absolutely in
God,” yet, in his heart, he knows that he is half lying,--because of
fear of what his neighbor will think if he speaks the truth. He wants
to believe there is a God. He wants to _know_ there is a God. Yet he is
afraid.
And, personally, I am glad that the time has come when he is afraid. I
think it is the real beginning of his salvation and the dropping-away
of his egoism. To-day he is beginning to see all life as he did not
see it yesterday. And to-morrow his eyes will be wide open.
That is my faith. I believe that God is greater than humanity has ever
conceived him to be. I think he is “a common sort of fellow,” and I
write these words with all the holy reverence of which the soul is
capable. I do not mean to imply that I think he is in my form, or in
any particular form. But he is Life. And it is his intention and his
desire that every living thing that is worthy of life be a part of him.
I am almost Indian in this faith. I can hear the buoyant, cheering call
of Life in a waterfall. The inspiration of it comes into my own body
from out of a whispering tree, from a bush glowing with bloom, from a
flower, from the song of a bird, from the rain itself. I find great
peace and contentment in my faith that this God is everywhere, and that
we may meet him face to face fifty times a day if we throw off the hard
shell of our egoism, and realize that all nature is God--and that we,
as men and women and children, are a part of that all-embracing nature.
Even now the sun is filtering through the tree-branches upon this
partly written page. I look at it, and I see again the inconceivable
greatness of the Supreme Power, and my own microscopic littleness. For
we of the earth have thought that the earth is great, and that we,
having inherited the earth, are of all things greatest. Yet is that sun
which warms and lights my page as I write--more than a million times
as large as the earth--more than eight hundred thousand miles from
one end of its diameter to the other. And the still more stupendous
fact is that this sun is itself only a small bit of mechanism in the
mighty forces of infinity, for there are a _hundred million other
suns in space_, each lighting and warming its own worlds--innumerable
worlds--each peopled with its own type of flesh and blood, and each
possessing, perhaps, its own peculiar forms of “civilization” and its
own savagery.
Just that great, and vast, and all-embracing is the handiwork of that
vital force which rules all infinity--and to which we have given the
name of God.
And here I emphasize again that great truth which nature has impressed
upon me--that, just so long as man considers himself the one and only
chosen part of God, and therefore next to him in greatness, just that
long will his egoism and self-conceit blind him to the greatness and
glory of the real truth, and to the glory of the faith which might be
his. I believe that Christ was a great teacher, that he was a great
student of his times, and incorporated into his teachings all that was
highest and best in the teachings of other great men who had lived
and died before him. And I have always regretted that Christ was
unfortunate to have for his historians a set of men who were unequal
to their task, many of them narrow-minded, moved by “visions” and
superstitions instead of fact, men who believed in all the miracles of
the imagination from conversing with angels to stopping the sun,--men
utterly incapable of writing down calmly and truthfully those mighty
teachings of Christ which, had they been written as they were spoken,
would have meant so much for the world to-day. For I believe, in my
own heart, that Christ was the greatest lover of nature that history
knows of to the present day. I believe that in the many years of his
“disappearance,” Christ was not only studying the teachings of the
past, but that, close to the breast of nature, he was learning the
splendid truths of life--all life--which were afterward the very heart
and soul of his messages to mankind.
I believe that Christ, could he return to earth to-day, would say:
“My biographers have given you a wrong impression of me, and they
have misquoted me. What my soul was called upon to teach nineteen
hundred years ago, they have clothed in the raiment of superstition, of
misunderstanding, and of impossible miracle. For I am a man, even as
thee and thine. But I have found the true faith. And that faith, as I
told them then, depends utterly upon the dropping of the scales of self
from man’s eyes, and his understanding of _all life_. For that I gladly
died.”
The greatest regret I have is that Christ, as a man, did not foresee
more clearly the tremendous influence his teachings were to exert upon
humanity through the ages. Had he guessed this, he would have written
down with his own hand those teachings which were so carelessly left
to the mercy of superstitious--frequently fanatical--and at nearly all
times incapable biographers. For Christ, of all men that ever lived,
was undoubtedly one of the best and the most humble. His teachings
came straight from his heart. He did not intend that they should be
smothered in hyperbole, metaphor, and rhetorical embroidery until no
two living men could agree absolutely upon their meaning. I believe
that he spoke simply and directly, for only in that way could he have
reached the hearts of the masses. And I believe that the greatest of
all his lessons was the lesson of humility. As a man, he had dropped
his egoism, had submitted himself to the Master of all life, and in
that submission he had found the truth, and the glory of a great
faith. The misfortune of the humanity to follow in after-ages was that
the world of Jesus Christ was small--so small that by word of mouth
he could reach from end to end of it. Had he dreamed that there were
still undiscovered worlds so great that in comparison his own was but a
handful of dirt out of a wagon-load, I am convinced within myself that
the world to-day would not be struggling to understand a faith written
in parables and riddles, for Christ would have set his own hand to the
task which others so poorly accomplished.
With such a priceless inheritance in the form of Christ’s own
handiwork, I am equally sure that humanity would no longer have
an excuse for its egoism, or be ashamed of that humility which
is necessary to the understanding of life, and essential to the
possession of a deep and abiding faith.
* * * * *
I have, at times, heard intelligent people express amazement that
I should dare to place human life on an equal level with all other
life, that I should so “blaspheme the Creator” as to say that the
life in a two-legged animal who can talk is the same as that in a
flower or a plant or a tree or some other animal which cannot talk. I
have sometimes allowed myself to point out the innumerable advantages
possessed over man by many living things which have no language, as
we know language. I could fill a dozen volumes with word-pictures of
the thousands and tens of thousands of advantages which living things
outside of man possess over man, and which, if man could achieve, would
be stupendous miracles. But man, collectively, is blinded by his egoism
to the marvelous attainments of all life that does not walk and talk as
he walks and talks. When confronted by the incontrovertible wonder and
apparent miracle of other life as compared with his own I have nearly
always found that men and women fall back, as a last resort, on the
absurd and shallow argument: “But this other life you speak of has
only instinct. It cannot talk; it cannot reason, and therefore it is
impossible for it to have a soul.”
Once a beautiful young matron said to me, “There is much in your creed
that is inspiring and beautiful, but it reaches a point where it is
inconceivable, for you must concede that a human being is the most
perfect of all created things.”
I gave her an exquisite rose which I had plucked from my garden only a
few minutes before.
“There are, outside of men and women and children, innumerable things
more perfectly created than this flower,” I said. “Are you, in your
youth and beauty, as perfect as that rose?”
* * * * *
And yet I know that such arguments as these, innumerable though they
might be, cannot prevail until men and women bring themselves face
to face with nature itself, filled with a willingness and a yearning
to understand. They point out the pests of life--the serpent, the
deadly insects, the plants that scar and poison; yet they cannot
see themselves as perhaps the deadliest and the most relentless of
all pests. For it is one of the mysterious laws of Creation that
every living thing--flower, and tree, and beast, and man--has a pest
born unto it; and unto these pests other pests are born, until at
last,--when the thing is analyzed,--a pest is a pest only in so far as
its enemy, and not its friends, judge it to be a pest. If the world
to-day were eliminated of human pests as each individual in the world
might judge for himself, how many of us would be left alive to-morrow?
And always, when I have listened to the age-old arguments prompted by
man’s egoism and self-glorification, I love to return to the peace
and the comfort of nature, whether that nature be in the form of a
deep forest, a clover field, an orchard, or the little back plot of a
crowded city home. And if I am where there is no cool earth to stand my
feet upon, I find my peace and rest in the printed pages which describe
that nature-world of mine. From the most beautifully written volumes
to the honest pages and unembellished fact of farm-journals, I have,
times without number, found enthralling interest, consolation, and the
strength and courage of the cool and glorious earth itself. Nature’s
Bible is not hard to find. It is everywhere, living, breathing,
printed--the one universal and ever-present Book of Life.
Whenever I think of the commonest of human arguments: “But this other
life you speak of has only instinct. It cannot talk; it cannot reason,
and therefore it is impossible for it to have a soul,” my mind always
travels back to a certain incident in my experience as a refutation. I
could, had I the space, answer that argument with a hundred compelling
facts; I might answer it from the point of the flower, the vine, the
tree, the grass that carpets the earth, but I always think first of the
particular tragedy I am going to describe, because of the chief human
actor in it, and because this actor was, in my humble estimation, one
of the most physically perfect of her species.
I will not give her name. She is the daughter of one of the best known
men in the nation, and one of the foremost scientists of the world; and
should she happen to read these lines, I hope that she will see, with a
new vision and a new understanding, that “triumph” of years ago.
I think she was about twenty when my outfit happened to join trails
with her father’s in the far north. She will remember that early
afternoon when we camped together close to the Cochrane, in the
Reindeer Lake country.
I believe that I am quite reasonably sure of myself when I say that
she was the most beautiful woman I had seen up to that time or have
seen since. It is simply because of her perfection that she has
always appealed as having furnished to me one of the most dramatic
object-lessons of my experience. She was athrill with life. She
worshiped her father. She loved the sun, the sky, the wind, the trees,
the whole world. Life seemed to have given her everything that it
possessed--the rare coloring of the most beautiful flower under her
feet, a form that was divine, hair and eyes that no artist could paint,
and, I think, one of the sweetest voices I have ever heard. She is,
I have heard, beloved in her own environment. She is a worker for
human betterment, and spends much of her time in actual work with the
poor. Not long ago she was responsible for the building of a home for
unfortunate little children.
That day in camp there was a sudden excitement. Three of the Indians
had driven a cow moose, a yearling, and a bull into a small cover. It
was a splendid chance for the girl. I can see her eyes glowing with
the fires of excitement now, as she caught up her rifle and hurried
with her father and brother and the Indians to the refuge-place of
the family of moose. She was placed at the head of an open space, and
the moose were driven out. First came the yearling calf, then the
mother, and after them came the old bull. The girl’s lovely face, as I
looked at it, was flushed. It seemed as though I might hear the excited
beating of her heart as she waited, quivering with the desire to kill.
She fired first at the calf, and then at the mother--and from that
moment all that was big and beautiful and noble in life seemed to
leave her own body and enter that of the old bull moose. For the first
shot had struck the calf, laming it so that it could run but slowly,
with the mother urging it on from behind. Not once in the moments that
followed did the mother run ahead of her calf. And then I beheld a
thing that I believe to be as noble as anything that man has ever done
in all the ages. Believe, if you will, that the magnificent old bull
had no reason. Believe, if you cannot sacrifice your egoism, that he
did not think. Do not give him the credit of possessing a heart or a
soul or feelings, if that sacrifice of egoism hurts you. But consider
what happened.
The old bull ran alongside the cow, alongside the calf, and then, by
reason or instinct, he _knew_ what had happened. He did not forge
ahead. He did not race for safety, but deliberately he dropped behind,
turned himself broadside, and stopped, _making of his own splendid body
a barrier in the path of the bullets_.
I heard the girl’s rifle cracking. Twice I saw the bull flinch, and I
knew that he was struck. Then I heard her cry out, almost frantically,
that her last shot was gone. In the same instant, her brother ran up
from the cover and thrust his own rifle into her hands.
“Give it to him, sis!” he cried. “Give it to him!”
The big bull had turned. He staggered a bit as he ran, but in a hundred
feet he had overtaken the cow and the calf. The calf was going still
more slowly, and in my desire to see the cow and the bull break away, I
shouted.
Almost simultaneously with the sound of my voice, the bull stopped
again. He placed himself broadside, at perhaps a three-quarter angle,
so that, by turning his head slightly, he was looking back at us. He
was directly between the cow and the calf, and the girl’s bullets
continued to rip into him. I remember that I cried out in protest, but
she did not sense my words. Every fiber of her being was strung to
the thrilling achievement of that crime. She was deaf and blind to the
nobility of the great-hearted beast who, in my eyes, was deliberately
sacrificing his life. The flaming lust to kill had driven all other
things out of her heart and soul. Her father had run up, and brother
and father cried out in triumph when the old bull sagged suddenly in
the middle and almost fell to his knees. Four times he had been struck
when again he went on.
From my experience in big-game hunting, I knew that he was done for.
Yet, even in these moments when he was dying, the glorious soul of him
was unafraid. Three hundred yards away he stopped and turned again,
giving the cow and the calf a last chance to reach the timber. The
girl fired her last shots, and missed. Then the bull swung after the
cow and the calf and disappeared in the cover. But, as he went, there
came back to us a terrible, deep-chested cough, and my heart gave up
its hope. It told me the heroic old bull was shot through the lungs.
I did not hurry after the girl and her father and brother as they ran
over the blood-stained trail. I continued to hear the coughing for a
few moments. Then it was silent. When I came up to them, just inside
the timber, the three were standing in triumph close to the dead body
of the bull. Hardly more than twenty paces from it was the yearling
calf, dying, but not quite dead. The brother had ended it with a
revolver-shot.
And then I looked at the creature who had committed this double murder.
Many times I had done this same crime, but with me, crude and rough,
with all the inborn savagery of man, killing had not seemed quite so
horrible. And standing there, a little later,--red-lipped, her face
aflame, her eyes glowing, exquisite in her beauty,--the girl had her
picture taken in triumph as she stood with one booted little foot on
the neck of her victim.
When I hear of the vaunted human soul, and when men and women tell me
there is no soul but the soul of a human, my mind goes back to that
day. I might tell of a hundred other instances that are convincing unto
myself, but that one stands out with unforgettable vividness.
I am sure, for instance, that the soul of a flower once saved my life.
This is not unusual, or even remarkable, for the souls of flowers
have saved unnumbered lives, as well as giving cheer and courage to
countless millions; and when we die it is still the Soul of the Flower
that watches over us in our resting-places. No place in the world do
flowers live more beautifully than in our gardens of the dead, cheering
us when we come with our grief to the place of our lost ones, giving
us courage to go on. Take the Soul of the Flower away from us, and the
world would be hard and bleak to live in.
To me, the soul is synonymous with life. I do not disassociate the
two. When we breathe our last, our life--our soul--is gone. The two, I
believe, are one. When we pluck a flower we destroy neither, but when
we tear it up by the roots so that it dies, then has its soul, or its
life, gone the same way as that of man who dies. I have spent many
wonderful hours in those gardens of the dead which every city, hamlet,
and countryside must have. To me, there are only beauty and the glory
of God in a cemetery. It seems to me that there, if never before, one
must come to understand the brotherhood of all life. It seems to me
that the very stillness and peace of a resting-place of the dead softly
whisper to us the great secret which those who are lying there have at
last discovered--that life is the same, that its only difference is in
form and manifestation. I seem to feel that I have come into the one
place where there are only charity and faith and good will, and I have
always the thought--which to me gives courage and hope--that this is
why the flowers and the trees are so beautiful and so comforting there.
I have stood in other cemeteries which, to the passing eye, have been
barren and ugly, where man has lent but very feebly a helping hand, but
even there, if I looked a little closer, I have found the Soul of the
Flower, the same peace, the same tranquillity, perhaps even greater
courage to inspire one to “keep on.”
I have a case in point, so convincing to myself that all the preaching
in the world could not change my sentiment in the matter. I happened,
at this particular time, to be traveling alone in the Northland, and
when a certain accident befell me, the nearest help I knew of was at
a half-breed’s cabin between twenty and thirty miles away. Thirty
miles is not a very great matter in a country of paved roads and
level paths, but it is a far distance in a country of dense forest
and swamp, without trails or guide-posts--and especially when one is
badly crippled. Like the most amateurish tenderfoot, I took a chance
along the face of a cliff near a small waterfall, slipped, fell, and
came tumbling down a matter of thirty feet with a sixty-pound pack and
my rifle on top of me. In the fall, my foot received a terrific blow,
probably on a projecting ledge of rock.
The man who has faced many situations is usually the man who is
cautious, and though I had just committed an inexcusable error in my
carelessness, I now lost no time in putting up my small silk tent while
I could still drag myself about. It was well I did so. For ten days
thereafter, I was not able to rest a pound of weight upon my injured
foot.
With the music and refreshing coolness of the waterfall less than a
hundred feet from my tent door, and the creek itself not more than
a quarter of that distance, I was most fortunately situated under
the circumstances. The first morning after my fall found me almost
helpless. Every move I made gave me excruciating pain. My entire foot
and ankle, and my leg halfway to the knee, were swollen to twice their
normal size. This first day I dragged myself to a sapling, cut it as I
lay on my side, and made me a rough crutch of it. The second day, my
entire lower limb was swollen until it had lost all semblance to form,
and was so badly discolored that a cold and terrible dread began to
grow in me. I had only thirty cartridges. I fired ten that first day,
in the futile hope that some wandering adventurer might have drifted
within the sound of my rifle. Occasionally I hallooed. Night of the
second day found me in the beginning of a fever, and, at a cost of
physical agony, I prepared myself for the worst--placed my possessions
within the reach of my hands, and dragged myself up from the creek with
a small pail of water.
I shall never forget the dawn of the third day. Racked with pain, with
the fever in my blood, my leg now stiff as a board to the thigh, I was
still not blind to the beauty of the morning. The rising sun first
lighted up the waterfall, then it fell in a warm and golden flood where
I had made my camp. In that silence, broken only by the music of the
water, every soft note that was made by the wild things came to me
distinctly. It was a morning to put cheer and hope into the heart of a
dying man. Then my eyes turned, and, a few feet beyond the reach of my
hand, I _found something looking at me_.
Yes; to me, in that moment, it was a thing living and vibrant with
life, and yet it was nothing more than a flower. It grew on a stem a
foot high, and the face of it made me think of one of our home-garden
pansies; only, the flower was all one color, with longer petals--a
soft, velvety blue. It seemed to have turned to face the morning sun,
and, in facing the sun, it was squarely facing me--a piquant, joyous,
laughing little face, asking me as clearly as in words, “What can
possibly be the matter with you on this fine morning?”
I am not going into the psychology or soul-language of that flower. I
am not going to argue about it at all, but simply tell what it did for
me. Perhaps, if you want to lay it all to something, you may say it was
because I was out of my head a part of the time with fever. But that
flower was my doctor through the days of torture and hopelessness that
followed. Now and then a bird sang near me; occasionally a wild thing
would come and peer at me curiously, then go its way. But the flower
never left me, and only turned its face partly away from me in the
hours of its evening worship. For its God was the sun. It faced the sun
in the morning, wide-awake and open. Late in the afternoon, it would
turn a little on its stem, and with the setting of the sun, its soft
petals would begin to close, and it would go to sleep, like a little
child, with the coming of dusk. Day after day, it grew nearer and more
of a beloved comrade to me.
After the fourth day, it did not, for an instant, allow me to think
that I was going to die. Never for an instant did it lose its cheer and
confidence. It was there to say “Hello!” to me every morning, and there
to say “Good-night” to me when the shadows grew deep--and all through
the day it talked to me, and bobbed its little head in the whispers of
the breezes, and I had the foolish sentiment, at times, that it was
actually flirting with me. I do not think I realized how precious it
had become to me until, one day, there came a terrific thunder-storm.
I thought the first blast of the wind and beat of rain were going to
destroy my comrade, and, almost in a panic, I dragged myself right and
left, forgetful of pain, until I had built a protection about my flower.
That was the sixth day, and, from that day, the swelling and the pain
began to leave my limb. On the tenth, I could move about a little on my
feet. On the fifteenth, I was prepared to undertake my journey again.
I felt a real grief in leaving that solitary flower. It had become
a part of me, had encouraged me in my blackest hours, had cheered
and comforted me even in the darkness of nights, because I knew it
was there--my little comrade--waiting for the sun. For me, it had
individualized itself from among all the other flowers in the forest.
And now, when I was about to go, I saw that the flower itself had about
lived the span of its life; in a very short time it would fade and die.
On the morning I left, the petals were drooping, and its tiny face did
not look up at the sun and at me as brightly as before, and I fancied
that I could hear its little voice saying, “Please take me with you.”
And I did. Call it foolish and trivial sentiment if you will, but the
flower and I went together, and afterward I wrote a novel and called it
“Flower of the North.”
I have often heard strong men say, “Oh, that is merely a matter of
sentiment. Life is too hard and real for a thing like that.”
I agree with them to an extent. Sentiment does not play a large part
in the world to-day. For sentiment, as that word is understood by the
millions, is the heart and soul of all that is good and great. Without
sentiment in the hearts of a man and a woman, there cannot be the
fullness of real love between them, even though the law has made them
man and wife. Without sentiment, no good act is ever done from the
heart out. Without sentiment--a sentiment that warms the soul as a fire
warms a cold room--there will never be a deep and comforting faith. I
have seen this “co-operation of rational power and moral feeling” make
plain faces beautiful, and I have seen the lack of it make others hard
as rock. Selfishness, egoism, the desire to get everything possible out
of life, no matter at what expense to others, is its antithesis.
As I write these last pages, I have at hand facts which seem to show
that sentiment, and therefore faith, is as nearly dead as it has ever
been. For science in all the great nations of the earth is planning and
plotting frantically for the extermination of their fellow men, and
this, in the hour when all the world is crying out for a faith, is what
is being achieved:
Deadly gases that will make gunpowder and the rifles anachronisms, that
in the next war will depopulate whole regions, men, women, and little
children alike.
Perfection of the lethal ray, which will shrivel up and paralyze human
beings over vast areas, irrespective of whether they are combatants or
not.
Development of plans for “germ-warfare,” whereby whole nations will be
infected by plagues.
And then consider the words of one great military scientist of the
English-speaking race: “Germ-warfare was tried on a small scale in the
late war, and its results have been promising. The method of its use
was in the poisoning of water supplies with cholera and typhus germs,
and the loosing of dogs inoculated with rabies and of women inoculated
with syphilis into the enemy country. _Here apparently is a promising
beginning from which vast developments are to be hoped for._”
A promising beginning--vast developments expected for the
future--typhus--rabies--the commercial breeding of diseased women.
Yes; the world is crying aloud for a great faith, even as it smashes
itself into moral fragments on the rocks of its own egoism and its own
selfishness. But there has come a rent in its armor, and as it commits
crimes and plans for still greater crimes, it also begins to realize
its colossal wickedness. And in its terror it shrieks aloud for a
manifestation of the Divine Power. It demands proof.
And again I say that the proof is so near that the world looks over
its head--and does not see it. Not until man’s egoism crumbles will he
understand. For ghosts will not come back from the dead to quiet his
frenzies, nor will angels descend from out of the heavens. The Divine
Power is too great and all-encompassing for that. God, speaking of that
Power as God, is not a trickster. He is not a mountebank. He is not a
lawyer arguing his case. He is Life. And this Life That Never Dies has
no favorites. Such is my humble faith.
* * * * *
A long time has passed since I wrote these pages. All day the
countryside has lain in that sleepy, golden shimmer that is the pulse
of Indian summer. The nights are touched with frost. There is glory in
the warmth of the sun.
I am in a little valley that I love--Sleepy Hollow, I call it.
The farmhouse is old and unpainted, and it has stood on its stone
foundation for almost a century. The barn is sagging in the middle,
and between the barn and the house is an old well that a long-dead
grandfather rigged when the timber in the hollow knew the howl of
wolves and the screech of bobcats. Crowding close up to the back of the
old house is an orchard of apple and cherry trees, so old they could
tell many an interesting story if they could talk.
And all about the sides and the front of the house are great trees--a
huge cottonwood, and ancient oaks from which the Indians may have shot
squirrels with their bows and arrows two hundred years ago. The “woman
of the house” has been in an invalid’s chair for years, and the husband
does little but care for her. Therefore Life has crept up and almost
inundated the place. The grass grows high and uncut. Wild flowers bloom
in the yard. Quail come to feed with the chickens. And beyond this, all
about, is the whisper of corn fields in growing-time, the ripples of
fields of wheat and oats and rye, the music of the mowing-machine and
the lowing of cattle. In this little old house of Sleepy Hollow, there
is a woman who has not walked for years, and who will never walk again;
and there is a little man with a great fierce mustache who watches
her tenderly, and who knows that he must go on watching her until the
end of her time--and yet in this house there is happiness, and also
_a great faith_. And nature seems to rejoice in that faith. Birds
build their nests under the porches. There is melody in the trees. At
night, crickets sing in the long grass under the open windows, and the
whippoorwills come and perch on the roof under the old sycamore.
Here are suffering--and peace; few of the riches of man, but an
unlimited wealth of contentment and faith. These two, prisoned to the
end of their days, have found what all the world is seeking. The little
old house of the hollow, even with its tragedy, is glad. And life has
made it so, the understanding of life, the voice and living presence of
life as it whispers about me now in the golden sheen of Indian summer.
And its whisper seems to be, “Men are seeking me, reaching out for me,
crying for me--yet they do not find me. They are looking far, and I am
very near--so far that they look over and beyond me when I am waiting
at their feet. When at last they see me, and understand, then will they
have discovered the greatest of all treasures--Faith!”
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Punctuation has been made consistent.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in
the original publication.