God's Country; The Trail to Happiness

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.

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.