After their many vicissitudes, the boulders have settled down upon the bosom of the pasture and come to be a fixture in the landscape. This present age is to them the serene and mellow autumn of their troubled life. Their day is a thousand years. But they are melting into soil—as icicles dissolve in the sun—in that measureless and yet imperceptible thaw which melts granite. The pasture land is perhaps the dust of a still more primitive race whose life has been transmuted into the dandelion and the thistle.
[NEIGHBORS]
All wild animals are wary and suspicious, even when they do not prey upon one another. What friend has the rabbit, the chipmunk or the weasel? They lead friendless lives and die tragic deaths. Why should not a rabbit gossip with a woodchuck, for instance? One would think their common danger might draw them together, and that they might perhaps learn a little woodcraft one of the other. But caste is nowhere stronger than in the woods. They do not sit at meat together unless, indeed, one is himself the repast.
Like a subtle atmosphere the spirit of the wild pervades the forest. Whoever enters comes under its spell. In the woods the dog tends to revert to the wolf, and savage instincts come to light. On the street he may pay no heed to people, will move in and out among them, himself a bit of civilization; but let him leave the village and go into the woods, and he is suspicious and on his guard.
We have so fostered this attitude of fear and distrust that our wild neighbors are at best but casual acquaintances, if not complete strangers to us. We are like sharpshooters ambushed around the outposts of an encampment. A stray inmate pokes his head out of the trenches and essays to go to the spring for water. Perhaps we let him drink and make a note of that, then—whiz! we let fly at him. We discover what he has had for dinner and a few other trifling matters—and we get his skin. His ways remain strange to us and his language no more familiar than Choctaw. Sometimes we catch him and put him in a cage. But what can be learned of a poor, sullen prisoner fretting away his life with terrible thoughts of distant sunlight and running streams and friendly woods?
The acquaintance of a wild animal is not to be made with a gun. Practically nothing is learned in this way; it is difficult enough to know them without this barrier. But never to have loved the wild things is to have lost much—to have lived less. Any dolt can shoot an animal and have a bag of bones for his pains, but to win over such a creature in the smallest degree implies a victory, and is evidence of the redeeming power of the heart. There is a rare pleasure in encountering deer when you have no designs upon them. Such furtive meetings are in themselves adequate. They have the fascination of lovely faces seen for a fleeting moment in a crowd, instantly to be lost sight of. How little we really know about the lives of animals. We can surmise a few things and imagine a great many, but we know next to nothing. Perhaps there is not so very much to know. Their emotions are not complex but simple; their lives run in narrow grooves. That they suffer, much as we suffer, is certain, and the main thing is to be kind. It is impossible to come upon a wild animal and watch it unobserved without deriving a subtle impression foreign to our usual life. There is something in the free, savage existence which is a shock to the thought-burdened, educated mind, and breaks for a moment its prison of glass.
A glen to which I often go is, like most others in the sequestered woods, really populous, while being to all appearances quite deserted. Its inhabitants are closely associated with the brook; they drink at it and all their lives hear its song. This glen is their world, and yet they possess it and live in it in virtue of persistent self-effacement.