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
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.