“It was jest what you do to the fish ye ketch, Mirandy, to stop their sufferin’.”
Miranda looked up quickly, and her eyes grew large.
“Do you know, I never thought of that before, Dave,” she replied. “I’ll never catch a fish again, long as I live! Let’s get away from here.”
“Ye see,” began Dave, making up his mind to sow a few seeds of doubt in Miranda’s mind as to the correctness of her theories, “ye see, Mirandy, ’tain’t possible to be consistent right through in this life; but what ye’ll find, life’ll make a fool o’ ye at one point or another. I ain’t a-goin’ to say I think ye’re all wrong, not by no means. Sence I’ve seen the way ye understand the live critters of the woods, an’ how they understand you, I’ve come to feel some different about killin’ ’em myself. But, Mirandy, Nature’s nature, an’ ye can’t do much by buckin’ up agin her. Look now, ye told me to shoot the lou’-cerfie coz he killed the deer kid. But he didn’t go to kill it for ugliness, nor jest for himself to make a dinner off of—you know that. He killed it for his mate, too. Lou’-cerfie ain’t built so’s they can eat grass. If the she lou’-cerfie didn’t git the meat she needed, her kittens’d starve. She’s jest got to kill. Nature’s put that law onto her, an’ onto the painters, an’ the foxes an’ wolves, the ’coons an’ the weasels. An’ she’s put the same law, only not so heavy, onto the bears, an’ also onto humans, what’s all built to live on all kinds of food, meat among the rest. An’ to live right, and be their proper selves, they’ve all got to eat meat sometimes, for Nature don’t stand much foolin’ with her laws!”
“I’m well,” interrupted Miranda, eagerly, with the obvious retort.
“Maybe ye won’t be always!” suggested Dave.
“Then I’ll be sick—then I’ll die before I’ll eat meat!” she protested passionately. “What’s the good of living, anyway, if it’s nothing but kill, kill, kill, and for one that lives a lot have got to die!”
Dave shook his head soberly.
“That’s what nobody, fur’s I can see, Mirandy, has ever been able to make out yet. I’ve thought about it a heap, an’ read about it a heap, alone in camp, an’ I can’t noways see through it. Oftentimes it’s seemed to me all life was jest like a few butterflies flitterin’ over a graveyard. But all the same, if we don’t go to too much foolish worryin’ ’bout what we can’t understand, we do feel it’s good to be alive; an’ I do think, Mirandy, this life might be somethin’ finer than the finest kind of a dream.”
Something in his voice, at these last words, thrilled Miranda, and at the same time put her on her guard.