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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
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.