He was digging like a dog for a gopher. And, then, suddenly, my heart gave a thump that almost choked me. In a twist of the mountain-bench, not more than seventy or eighty yards above me, were two more grizzlies. I hesitated, and looked back down the coulee, for a moment doubtful whether to retreat or declare war. Then I decided. In my hands was a killer of the deadliest and surest kind. I was an expert shot and my nerves were steady. I began. I think I fired five shots in perhaps thirty seconds, and the three big grizzlies died almost in their tracks. A conqueror returning in his triumph to old Rome could not have been more elated than I. I remember that I leaped and danced and shrieked out at the top of my voice in the direction of camp. I was mad with joy. Three thousand pounds of flesh and blood lay hot and lifeless under my eyes, and I, the human near-god, with my own two insignificant hands and a mechanical thing, had taken the life from it!
I sat down on one of the huge carcasses that still breathed under me. I wiped my face, and my blood was running a race that heated me as if with fire. And the thought came to me: “Oh, if the world could only see me now—here in my glorious triumph—with these great beasts about me!” For it was a mighty triumph for man, the egoist. In thirty seconds I had destroyed a possible one hundred years of throbbing, heart-beating life, a hundred years of winter, a hundred years of summer, a hundred mating-seasons, and the thousand other lives that now would never be born! I stood up, and shrieked again toward the camp, and far above me out of the blue of the sky I heard an answering cry from one of the eagles....
Yes, as I sit here, looking back over the days that are gone, I wonder that the spirit of vengeance does not rise up out of the forest and destroy me, even as I have destroyed. It would be justice, according to that justice which man the egoist metes out. And yet, even as I wonder, the answer comes to me very clearly. I am no different than hundreds of millions of others. I have destroyed in my own way, while others have destroyed in theirs. And nature, the most blessed of all things, is not vengeful. God forgives. And nature is God. It is God that lives in the rose, in the violet, in the tree, just as he lives in the heart of man. It is God that breathes in the grass which makes the earth sweet to tread upon, and it is God that lives in the song of birds. His “life” is all-encompassing, the vital spark of all existent things. Instead of sending ghosts back to earth to prove his power, he gives us all these things, and lives and breathes in them, that we may have him with us in physical things all the days of our lives if we will only rise out of our egoism—and understand.
And now I have come again to the parting of a way. I have bared the black side of my ledger, and it has not been pleasant work for me. To-morrow begins the joyous part of my task—the beginning of that story which will tell how at last my eyes were opened, how understanding came to me, and with that understanding a new faith which will live with me through all the rest of the years of my life.
The Third Trail
MY BROTHERHOOD