It seemed to me that an eternity passed in these moments. And Thor, mighty in his strength, looked at me and did not move. And this thing that he was looking at, – shrinking against the rock, – was the creature that had hunted him; this was the creature that had hurt him, and it was so near that he could reach out with his paw and crush it! And how weak and white and helpless it looked now! What a pitiful, insignificant thing it was! Where was its strange thunder? Where was its burning lightning? Why did it make no sound?
Slowly Thor’s giant head began swinging from side to side; then he advanced – just one step – and in a slow, graceful movement reared himself to his full, magnificent height. For me, it was the beginning of the end. And in that moment, doomed as I was, I found no pity for myself. Here, at last, was justice! I was about to die. I, who had destroyed so much of life, found how helpless I was when I faced life with my naked hands. And it was justice! I had robbed the earth of more life than would fill the bodies of a thousand men, and now my own life was to follow that which I had destroyed. Suddenly fear left me. I wanted to cry out to that splendid creature that I was sorry, and could my dry lips have framed the words, it would not have been cowardice – but truth.
I have read many stories of truth and hope and faith and charity. From a little boy, my father tried to teach me what it meant to be a gentleman, and he lived what he tried to teach. And from the days of my small boyhood, mother told me stories of great and good men and women, and in the days of my manhood, she faithfully lived the great truth that of all precious things charity and love are the most priceless. Yet had I accepted it all in the narrowest and littlest way. Not until this hour on the edge of the cliff did I realize how small can be the soul of a man buried in his egoism – or how splendid can be the soul of a beast.
For Thor knew me. That I know. He knew me as the deadliest of all his enemies on the face of the earth. Yet until I die will I believe that, in my helplessness, he no longer hated me or wanted my life. For slowly he came down upon all fours again, and, limping as he went, he continued along the ledge —and left me to live!
I am not, in these days, sacrilegious enough to think that the Supreme Power picked my poor insignificant self from among a billion and a half other humans especially to preach a sermon to that glorious Sunday on the mountainside. Possibly it was all mere chance. It may be that another day Thor would have killed me in my helplessness. It may all have been a lucky accident for me. Personally, I do not believe it, for I have found that the soul of the average beast is cleaner of hate and of malice than that of the average man. But whether one believes with me or not, does not matter, so far as the point I want to make is concerned – that from this hour began the great change in me, which has finally admitted me into the peace and joy of universal brotherhood with Life. It matters little how a sermon or a great truth comes to one; it is the result that counts.
I returned down the mountain, carrying my broken gun with me. And everywhere I saw that things were different. The fat whistlers, big as woodchucks, were no longer so many targets, watching me cautiously from the rock-tops; the gophers, sunning themselves on their mounds, meant more to me now than a few hours ago. I looked off to a distant slide on another mountain and made out the half-dozen sheep I had studied through my glasses earlier in the day. But my desire to kill was gone. I did not realize the fullness of the change that was upon me then. In a dull sort of way, I accepted it as an effect of shock, perhaps as a passing moment of repentance and gratitude because of my escape. I did not tell myself that I would never kill sheep again except when mutton was necessary to my camp fire. I did not promise the whistlers long lives. And yet the change was on me, and growing stronger in my blood with every breath I drew. The valley was different. Its air was sweeter. Its low song of life and running waters and velvety winds whispering between the mountains was new inspiration to me. The grass was softer under my feet; the flowers were more beautiful; the earth itself held a new thrill for me.
A few nights later, beside a small fire we had built in the cool of evening, I tried to tell old Donald something about the Transfiguration, how Christ had gone up on the mount with Peter and John and James, and what had happened there.
“It wasn’t that Christ himself was actually changed as he prayed on the mountain-top,” I said to Donald. “The change was in Peter and John and James, who in these moments saw Christ with a new vision and a new understanding. The Transfiguration was simply a mental process of their own; they saw clearly now where before they had been half blind. And I am wondering if this old world of ours wouldn’t change for us in the same way if we saw it with understanding, and looked at it with clean eyes?”
So, on this other Sunday, as the evening draws on, I look back through the years between me and that day on the mountain-top, and the memory of Thor fills a warm corner of my heart. Through him I have the happy thought that I was given birth into a new world, and all things now hold a new significance for me. I have discovered for myself, in a small way, the wonderful secret of the instinctive processes of nature, and in a thousand ways I have found this instinct, coming directly from the fount of supreme direction, far more amazing than reasoning itself. I understand more clearly, I think, why all humanity loves a baby, no matter how ugly it may be. It is because it is so utterly dependent upon instinct alone, so completely helpless, so absolutely without reason or protection of its own. We like to believe that a baby is very close to God, simply because it has no reasoning and because it is as yet purely a creature of instinctive processes. And yet, as we lay down our lives for its protection, we forget that adult man, with all his reasoning and his power, was originally a creature of instinct himself. We forget that it took millions of years to give him a language, and that possession of language alone has made him a super-creature. For it is language that gives birth to reason, allows of communication of thought, and should man be suddenly bereft of all language and thought-communication he would, in the course of ages, revert again into a creature guided solely by instinct. In that event he would be nothing more or less than a brother to all other creatures of instinct. He would again become an ordinary member of the Ancient Brotherhood of Common Heritage, and could no longer call himself the Chosen One and the Ordained of God. But good luck came to him, perhaps even in the days when he may have swung from the trees by his tail – good luck in the discovery of a crude method of thought-communication, a discovery that developed through the ages, until now his head is turned, so to speak, and for tens of thousands of years he has looked down more and more upon his poor relations who have not had his own good fortune.
But I am learning that time has not freed him, and never will free him, from his blood relationship. And creed may follow creed, and religion may follow religion, but never will he find that full peace and contentment which might be his lot until he recognizes and admits into his comradeship again the soul of that nature which is his own mother, and forgets his monumental egoism in a new understanding of those instinctive processes of nature through which he, himself, passed in the kindergarten of his own existence.
This is my faith, my religion. Close to where I am sitting is an old stub, clothed in a mass of wood-vine, warm and vivid in the golden glow of the setting sun. The wood-vine has climbed, instinctively, to the top of the stub, and now, finding their support gone, half a dozen long tendrils are reaching out toward a tall young birch six or eight feet away. One tendril, stronger and older than the others, has reached and clasped the nearest branch. The others are following unerringly. Yet they have no eyes to see. No voice calls back to them to point out the way. It is the instinct of life itself that is guiding them, the same instinct, in a smaller way, that dragged man up bit by bit from out of the black chaos of the past. In a thousand other ways, if one will take the blindfold from his eyes and try to understand, he may see this mightiest of all the forces of the earth – instinct – a vibrant, breathing, struggling thing about him, a force so much more powerful than his own, so all-consuming and indestructible that it stands out as a giant mountain compared with the mole-hill of his own littleness. In my own faith, I see it as a vast and inexhaustible reservoir of life, of strength, of “upward climb,” of inspiration. I see it as the one great, all-necessary force of creation – a force more precious to man than all the mines of the earth, more precious than all the treasure of the mints, if he would forget his greatness and reach out his hands to it in the gladness of a new brotherhood.
Dusk is falling. And, as I stop my work, here in the heart of a forest, I seem to see the smiles of many who will read this, and I seem to hear the low and unbelieving laughter of those who think themselves of the flesh and blood of God. And I seem to hear their voices saying:
“He is wrong. Nature is beautiful – sometimes. Also, it is crude. It is rough. It is destructive. It is, half the time, a pest. While we – we – have we not performed wonders? Have we not proved ourselves the chosen of God? Have we not created nations? Have we not built up great cities? Have we not accumulated vast riches? Have we not invented the Dollar? Are we not, in a hundred ways, shackling nature as a man harnesses a horse, proving ourselves its masters, and it our slave?”
I hear – and then I hear another voice, and softly, distantly, it says:
“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
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.