God's Country: The Trail to Happiness

by James Oliver Curwood

And then I looked at the creature who had committed this double murder. Many times I had done this same crime, but with me, crude and rough, with all the inborn savagery of man, killing had not seemed quite so horrible. And standing there, a little later,—red-lipped, her face aflame, her eyes glowing, exquisite in her beauty,—the girl had her picture taken in triumph as she stood with one booted little foot on the neck of her victim.

When I hear of the vaunted human soul, and when men and women tell me there is no soul but the soul of a human, my mind goes back to that day. I might tell of a hundred other instances that are convincing unto myself, but that one stands out with unforgettable vividness.

I am sure, for instance, that the soul of a flower once saved my life. This is not unusual, or even remarkable, for the souls of flowers have saved unnumbered lives, as well as giving cheer and courage to countless millions; and when we die it is still the Soul of the Flower that watches over us in our resting-places. No place in the world do flowers live more beautifully than in our gardens of the dead, cheering us when we come with our grief to the place of our lost ones, giving us courage to go on. Take the Soul of the Flower away from us, and the world would be hard and bleak to live in.

To me, the soul is synonymous with life. I do not disassociate the two. When we breathe our last, our life—our soul—is gone. The two, I believe, are one. When we pluck a flower we destroy neither, but when we tear it up by the roots so that it dies, then has its soul, or its life, gone the same way as that of man who dies. I have spent many wonderful hours in those gardens of the dead which every city, hamlet, and countryside must have. To me, there are only beauty and the glory of God in a cemetery. It seems to me that there, if never before, one must come to understand the brotherhood of all life. It seems to me that the very stillness and peace of a resting-place of the dead softly whisper to us the great secret which those who are lying there have at last discovered—that life is the same, that its only difference is in form and manifestation. I seem to feel that I have come into the one place where there are only charity and faith and good will, and I have always the thought—which to me gives courage and hope—that this is why the flowers and the trees are so beautiful and so comforting there. I have stood in other cemeteries which, to the passing eye, have been barren and ugly, where man has lent but very feebly a helping hand, but even there, if I looked a little closer, I have found the Soul of the Flower, the same peace, the same tranquillity, perhaps even greater courage to inspire one to “keep on.”

I have a case in point, so convincing to myself that all the preaching in the world could not change my sentiment in the matter. I happened, at this particular time, to be traveling alone in the Northland, and when a certain accident befell me, the nearest help I knew of was at a half-breed’s cabin between twenty and thirty miles away. Thirty miles is not a very great matter in a country of paved roads and level paths, but it is a far distance in a country of dense forest and swamp, without trails or guide-posts—and especially when one is badly crippled. Like the most amateurish tenderfoot, I took a chance along the face of a cliff near a small waterfall, slipped, fell, and came tumbling down a matter of thirty feet with a sixty-pound pack and my rifle on top of me. In the fall, my foot received a terrific blow, probably on a projecting ledge of rock.

The man who has faced many situations is usually the man who is cautious, and though I had just committed an inexcusable error in my carelessness, I now lost no time in putting up my small silk tent while I could still drag myself about. It was well I did so. For ten days thereafter, I was not able to rest a pound of weight upon my injured foot.

With the music and refreshing coolness of the waterfall less than a hundred feet from my tent door, and the creek itself not more than a quarter of that distance, I was most fortunately situated under the circumstances. The first morning after my fall found me almost helpless. Every move I made gave me excruciating pain. My entire foot and ankle, and my leg halfway to the knee, were swollen to twice their normal size. This first day I dragged myself to a sapling, cut it as I lay on my side, and made me a rough crutch of it. The second day, my entire lower limb was swollen until it had lost all semblance to form, and was so badly discolored that a cold and terrible dread began to grow in me. I had only thirty cartridges. I fired ten that first day, in the futile hope that some wandering adventurer might have drifted within the sound of my rifle. Occasionally I hallooed. Night of the second day found me in the beginning of a fever, and, at a cost of physical agony, I prepared myself for the worst—placed my possessions within the reach of my hands, and dragged myself up from the creek with a small pail of water.

I shall never forget the dawn of the third day. Racked with pain, with the fever in my blood, my leg now stiff as a board to the thigh, I was still not blind to the beauty of the morning. The rising sun first lighted up the waterfall, then it fell in a warm and golden flood where I had made my camp. In that silence, broken only by the music of the water, every soft note that was made by the wild things came to me distinctly. It was a morning to put cheer and hope into the heart of a dying man. Then my eyes turned, and, a few feet beyond the reach of my hand, I found something looking at me.

Yes; to me, in that moment, it was a thing living and vibrant with life, and yet it was nothing more than a flower. It grew on a stem a foot high, and the face of it made me think of one of our home-garden pansies; only, the flower was all one color, with longer petals—a soft, velvety blue. It seemed to have turned to face the morning sun, and, in facing the sun, it was squarely facing me—a piquant, joyous, laughing little face, asking me as clearly as in words, “What can possibly be the matter with you on this fine morning?”

I am not going into the psychology or soul-language of that flower. I am not going to argue about it at all, but simply tell what it did for me. Perhaps, if you want to lay it all to something, you may say it was because I was out of my head a part of the time with fever. But that flower was my doctor through the days of torture and hopelessness that followed. Now and then a bird sang near me; occasionally a wild thing would come and peer at me curiously, then go its way. But the flower never left me, and only turned its face partly away from me in the hours of its evening worship. For its God was the sun. It faced the sun in the morning, wide-awake and open. Late in the afternoon, it would turn a little on its stem, and with the setting of the sun, its soft petals would begin to close, and it would go to sleep, like a little child, with the coming of dusk. Day after day, it grew nearer and more of a beloved comrade to me.