The Face of the Fields

by Dallas Lore Sharp

She weaves—fresh robes for mangled earth;

She sings—fresh hopes for desperate things.

“For the rest,” says Hathi, most unscientific of elephants, in the most impossible of Jungle Stories, “for the rest, Fear walks up and down the Jungle by day and by night.... And only when there is one great Fear over all, as there is now, can we of the Jungle lay aside our little fears and meet together in one place as we do now.”

Now, the law of the Indian Jungle is as old and as true as the sky, and just as widespread and as all-encompassing. It is the identical law of my New England pastures. It obtains here as it holds far away yonder. The trouble is all with Hathi. Hathi has lived so long in a British camp, has seen so few men but British soldiers, and has felt so little law but British military law in India, that very naturally Hathi gets the military law and the Jungle law mixed up.

Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty are they;

But the head and the hoof of the Law, and the haunch and the hump is—Obey!

else one of the little fears, or the BIG FEAR, will get you!

But this is the Law of the Camp, and as beautifully untrue of the Jungle, and of my woods and pastures, as Hathi’s account of how, before Fear came, the First of the Tigers ate grass. Still, Nebuchadnezzar ate grass, and he also grew eagles’ feathers upon his body. Perhaps the First of the Tigers had feathers instead of fur, though Hathi is silent as to that, saying only that the First of the Tigers had no stripes. It might not harm us to remember, however, that nowadays—as was true in the days of the Sabretooth tiger (he is a fossil)—tigers eat grass only when they feel very bad, or when they find a bunch of catnip. The wild animals that Hathi knew are more marvelous than the Wild Animals I Have Known, but Hathi’s knowledge of Jungle law is all stuff and nonsense.

There is no ogre, Fear, no command, Obey, but the widest kind of a personal permit to live—joyously, abundantly, intensely, frugally at times, painfully at times, and always with large liberty; until, suddenly, the time comes to Let Live, when death is almost sure to be instant, with little pain, and less fear.