TRAIL NEAR TIMBER-LINE, INDIAN HENRY'S PARK, MOUNT RAINIER
At the primitive beaver house it takes a look as it crosses the expanded brook upon the beaver dam. A fallen tree gives it a way across the river. In a gorge it hears the ouzel from the rocks pour forth his melody—joyous notes of happy, liquid song.
It crosses a moraine to examine the useful débris that the Ice King formed while he was sculpturing the mountains and giving lines to the landscape. Clouds bound for definite ports in the trailless sky adorn its realm with floating shadows. It passes a picturesque old landmark, a pine of a thousand years. In this one spot the ancient pine has stood, an observing spectator, while the seasons and the centuries flowed along. His autobiography is rich in weather lore, full of adventures, and filled with thrilling escapes from fires, lightning, and landslides. During his thousand years, strange travelers and processions have passed along. He often saw victor and victim and the endless drama of the wilderness.
The trail is followed by wild life, and along it the wild flowers fill the wild gardens. It has the spirit of the primal outdoors. It extends away ever to the golden age. Many a night this way across the earth is as thick with fireflies as the great Milky Way across the sky with stars. The moon, the white aspens, and the dark spruces pile it with romantic shades, and on a sunny day it is often touched by the fleeting shadow of an eagle in the sky.
This old acquaintance would have you carry your own pack, and, like your best friend, expects your best on every occasion. The trail compels you to know yourself and to be yourself, and puts you in harmony with the universe. It makes you glad to be living. It gives health, hope, and courage, and it extends that touch of nature which tends to make you kind. This heroic way conducted our ancestors across the ages. It should be preserved. It has for us the inspiration of the ages.
A dim trail led our wandering primeval ancestors out from the twilight. It was a trail ever winding, shadowy, and broken, but ever under the open sky and ever from "yesterday's seven thousand years." It had its beginning in the walks of beasts that prowled the solemn primeval forests. Over it our half-lost ancestors painfully advanced. A fallen tree was their first bridge and a floating log their first boat. They wondered at the strange alternating day and night at which we still wonder. With joy they watched the shining dawn, and with fear and dread they saw the dusk of dying day. They learned the endless procession of seasons. The mysterious movements of wind and water aroused their curiosity, and with childlike interest they followed the soft and silent movements of the clouds. The wide and starry sky appealed strangely, strongly, to their imagination, and in this luminous field of space their fancy found a local habitation and a name for the thousand earthly fears and factors of their lives. They dared the prairie, climbed the hills, but long kept close to the forest.
After hard and fearful ages—after "a million years and a day"—the camp-fire came at last. This fragment of the Immortal Sun conquered the cold and the night, and misery and dread gave way to comfort and hope. No more the aspen trembled. It became a dancing youth, while the strange, invisible echo was a merry hiding child. The fireflies changed to fairies, and Pan commenced to pipe the elemental melody of the wild.
Nature ever showed her pictures and interested her children in fairylands. Winter, cold and leafless; spring, full of song and promise; the generous wealth of summer; and autumn with its harvest and color, came and disappeared, and came again through all the mysterious years. Lightning, the echo, with roar and whisper of the viewless air, the white and lonely moon, the strange eclipse, the brilliant and fleeting rainbow,—Nature's irised silken banner,—the mystery of death, these seeds of thought bloomed into the fanciful, beautiful myths and legends that we know.
Once, like a web of joy, trails overspread all the wild gardens of the earth. The long trail is gone, and most others are cut to pieces and ruined. The few broken remnants are but little used.
The traveler who forgets or loses the trail will lose his way, or miss the best of life. The trail is the directest approach to the fountain of life, and this immortal way delays age and commands youth to linger. While you delay along the trail, Father Time pauses to lean upon his scythe. The trail wanders away from the fever and the fret, and leads to where the Red Gods call. This wonderful way must not be buried and forgotten.