[1] See Border Rifles, same Publishers.
CHAPTER IV.
TWO ENEMIES.
In the great work of creation, God indubitably most profoundly set the seal of his omnipotence in the heart of forests. The ocean, despite its immense extent, offers sailors only a despairing monotony, or sudden upheavals, which fill the mind with a secret and invincible terror. The mountains which stud the globe, and elevate to immense heights their serrated peaks, covered with eternal snow, only inspire terror, and represent to the astonished eyes of the tourist a terrific maze of chaos and travailing nature.
But when you reach the verge of one of those splendid oases of verdure which are called virgin forests, you undergo involuntarily an impression of religious contemplation and gentle melancholy at the sight of these thousand arches of foliage, intertwined like the ceiling of an old Gothic church, in which the moss-clad trunks of centennial oaks represent the clustered columns, rising at one spot only a few feet from the ground, at others soaring to the skies.
Then, animated by the purer air, breathing with the full power of the lungs, attracted and fascinated by the mobile and infinite perspectives that open out on all sides—feeling the movement easier on the soft carpet of soil and dust accumulated by departed ages, the traveller's step grows freer, his glance more piercing, and his hand more firm, and he begins sighing for the hazardous and masculine life of the desert. The further he proceeds beneath these shifting shadows, while life is as noisy all around as a rising tide, the more does the freshness which circulates through the foliage purify the blood, and strengthen the limbs; and he comprehends more and more the irresistible attractions of the forest, and the religious love the wood rangers have for it.
Men habituated to a desert life are never willing to quit it again; for they understand all its voices, have sounded all its mysteries, and to them the forest is a world which they love much as the sailor does the sea. When a glowing sun enlivens the wild and picturesque landscape, when the glistening snow on the far-off peaks stands out like a silver ribbon above the masses of verdure, when the birds twitter among the leaves, the insects buzz on the grass, and the wild beasts in their unknown lairs, add their solemn sounds to the concert;—at such a moment all invites reverie and contemplation, and the wood rangers feel themselves the nearer to God, because they are the further from man.
These bold explorers of the desert are picked men, and powerfully built, kept constantly in movement, and forced each second into a contest with the obstacles that incessantly arise before them. No danger terrifies them, no difficulty arrests them; perils they brave, difficulties they surmount as if in sport; for, hurled by the divine will beyond the pale of common law, their existence is only a succession of strange incidents and feverish adventures, which cause them to live a century in a few moments.
The hesitation of the Border Rifles was short; for these half-savage men, an obstacle to be overcome could only prove a stimulus for their minds, so fertile in resources.