I can hear the musical rippling of the creek again, now that Bill and his blustering pals are gone, and my typewriter is like a tiny machine gun sending its clicking notes out into the still forest. A pair of moose-birds, almost as big as the jays, are hopping about, so near that, at times, they are perched on the end of my sapling table. They are the tamest birds in the wilderness, and within another day or so will be eating out of my hand. Unlike the jays, they make no disturbance. They are soft and quiet, never making a sound, and their big, beautiful eyes fairly pop with their intense interest in me. I like their company, because there is a philosophy about them. They never tire of looking at me, and studying me, and at times I have the very pleasant fancy that they are bursting with a desire to speak. They are very gentle, and never fight or scold or commit any sins that I know of; and just now, as the two look at me with their big soft eyes, I find myself wondering which of us is of most account in the final analysis of things.
Ten or fifteen rods above me, the creek widens and forms a wide pool overhung with trees, so that, in the hottest weather, it must be a delightfully refreshing place. I can see it plainly from where I am sitting, for the creek twists a little, so that it is running directly toward me when I look in that direction. Many wild things come to that pool. This morning, I found a bear-track there, and the fresh hoof-prints of a doe and fawn. Yesterday, a pair of traveling otters discovered it, but when I tried them out with the voice of my typewriter, they turned back. I am confident they will return, and that we shall get acquainted.
At the present moment, in looking toward the pool, I am struck by what at first thought I might consider a discordant note in this wonderland of quiet and peace that is about me. At the edge of the pool, rigid and watchful, a hawk is poised on a dead limb projecting from a lightning-struck stub. He is hungry and eager to kill. I have seen him launch himself twice after a victim, but each time without success. Finally, he will succeed. He will kill a living thing that he himself may continue to live. Yet I have no inclination to shoot him. For to live, and to cherish that spark of life that is in him, is as much his right as it is mine. He is not, like man, a killer for the love of killing. He wants his breakfast.
And in fairness to him I think of two tender young spruce-partridges which I shot late last evening, and which I shall roast for my dinner, along with a potato and a flavor of bacon. My religion does not demand vegetarianism any more than it does flesh; for that, too, is life. For the trees whispering above me now are as alive to me as the moose-birds perched at the end of my table, yet when necessity comes I cut them down with an ax, and make a cabin or cook my food with them. All nature cries out that life must exist upon life, that one tree must grow upon the mold of another, that for each green blade of grass another blade must die. It is not against a wise and necessary destruction that the God of all nature cries out. The crime—the crime greater than all other crimes—is destruction without cause.
That is what I must come to now, even in this glory of peace that is whispering about me—I must face the task of confessing my own sins as a killer, as a destroyer of life for the love and thrill of killing. I was born, like all the children of men, a monumental egoist. My parents were egoists. My forefathers for ten thousand generations were egoists before me, and I was the last product of their egoism—one of the billion and a half people who are living to-day in the blindness of a self-conceit that has filled their worlds with schisms and religions as false and as unstable as the treacherous sands of human “almightiness” upon which they have been built.
From the beginning, I did not need argument or education to tell me that I was the greatest of all created things—that my particular brand of life, of all life on the earth, was the only life that God had intended to be inviolate. That fact was pounded home to me in the public schools; it was preached to me in the churches. I was part and parcel of the great “I Am.” For me, all the universe had been built. For me, the Great Hereafter was solely created. All other life was merely incidental, and created especially for my benefit. It was mine to do with as I pleased. In a mild sort of way, the school and the church told me to have a little charity, and not to “hurt the poor little birdies.”
But church and school did not tell me, and has never told its pupils, that all other life on the earth was as precious as my own, and had an equal right to fight for its existence. It is true I was told that never a sparrow falls that God does not see it, but it is also true that, for six years, my state urged its children to kill sparrows for a bounty of two cents a head. I found no course in school or college that attempted to teach me that the spark of life animating my own body was no different from the sparks which animated all other living things. Both religion and school instilled into me that I was next in place to God. All other life, from the life of trees and flowers to that of beasts and birds, was put on earth for my special benefit. No other life had a right to exist unless the human egoist saw fit to let it live. And all this simply because human life happened to be the most powerful life, and cleverest in the art and science of destroying other life.
I wonder what would happen if for ten generations the churches and schools would teach their little children and their grown-ups that there is a heaven for flowers and trees and birds and butterflies just as surely as there is a heaven for man! What would happen if the teaching of the Great Truth of nature began in the kindergarten, and went on through the lives of men and women, growing stronger in the race as generation added itself to generation? It is something to think about in these days when, in our madness for a faith, we are reviving ghosts and phantom voices and are frightening our children again with the diseased and weird belief that the spirits of the dead can come back to us. We want something that is clean and healthy and inspiring, something that is beautiful to contemplate, and which is not an overwhelming insult to that Great Power of the universe of which we are so small a part—and in the kindergarten we could plant the seed of that thing, so that, through the school and the church and all life, it would continue to grow stronger with each generation, until, at last, man would shake off that deadliest of all his enemies, his own egoism and self-conceit. Then, and not until then, will he find contentment and peace and happiness in the brotherhood of all other life that is about him.