God's Country; The Trail to Happiness

“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.

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.