None of his views surprised her as much as this. He knew the snows and the cold, this man; the persecution of the elements and the endless struggle and pain of life, yet he held no rancor. "It's all part of the game," he explained. "It's some sort of a test, a preparation—and there's some sort of a scheme, too big for human beings to see, behind it."
He believed in a hereafter. He thought that the very hardship of life made it necessary. Earthly existence could not be an end in itself, he thought: rather the tumult and stress shaped and strengthened the soul for some stress to come. "And some of us conquer and go on," he told her earnestly. "And some of us fall—and stop."
"But life isn't so hard," she answered. "I've never known hardship or trial. I know many men and girls that don't know what it means."
"So much to their loss. Virginia, those people will go out of life as soft, as unprepared, as when they came in. They will be as helpless as when they left their mother's wombs. They haven't been disciplined. They haven't known pain and work and battle—and the strengthening they entail. They don't live a natural life. Nature meant for all creatures to struggle. Because of man's civilization they are having an artificial existence, and they pay for it in the end. Nature's way is one of hardship."
This man did not know a gentle, kindly Nature. She was no friend of his. He knew her as a siren, a murderess and a torturer, yet with great secret aims that no man could name or discern. Even the kindly summer moon lighted the way for hunting creatures to find and rend their prey. The snow trapped the deer in the valleys where the wolf pack might find easy killing; the cold killed the young grouse in the shrubbery; the wind sang a song of death. He pointed out that all the wilderness voices expressed the pain of living,—the sobbing utterance of the coyotes, the song of the wolves in the winter snow, the wail of the geese in their southern migrations.
In these talks she was surprised to learn how full had been his reading. All through her girlhood she had gone to private schools and had been tutored by high-paid intellectual aristocrats, yet she found this man better educated than herself. He had read philosophy and had browsed, at least, among all the literature of the past; he knew history and a certain measure of science, and most of all, the association of areas of his brain were highly developed so that he could see into the motives and hearts of things much more clearly than she.
In the nights he told her Nature lore, the ways of the living-creatures that he observed, and in the daytime he illustrated his points from life. They would take little tramps together through the storm and snow, going slowly because of the depth of the drifts, and under his tutelage, the wild life began to reveal to her its most hidden secrets. Sometimes she shot grouse with her pistol; once a great long-pinioned goose, resting on the shore of frozen Gray Lake, fell to her aim. She saw the animals in the marshes, the herds of caribou that are, above all creatures, natives and habitants of the snow-swept mountains, the little, lesser hunters such as marten and mink and otter. One night they heard the wolf pack chanting as they ran along the ridge.
Life was real up here. The superficialities with which she had dealt before were revealed in their true light. Of all the past material requisites, only three remained,—food and warmth and shelter. Others that she did not think she needed—protection, and strength and discipline—were shown as vitally necessary. Comradeship was needed, too, the touch of a helping hand in a moment of fear or danger; and love—the one thing she lacked now—was most necessary of all. It was not enough just to give love. For years she had poured her adoration upon Harold, lost it too, reciprocally; and this she might find strength for the war of life, even a tremulous joy in meeting and surmounting difficulties.
The snow fell almost incessantly and the tree limbs could hold no more. The drifts deepened in the still aisles between trunk and trunk. When the clouds broke through and the stars were like great precious diamonds in the sky, the cold would drop down like a curse and a scourge, and the ice began to gather on Grizzly River.
On such nights the Northern Lights flashed and gleamed and danced in the sky and swept the forest world with mystery.