James Curwood - God's Country; The Trail to Happiness

“You want peace. You go in quest of a Breast mightier than all life to rest thy tired head upon. And thy quest is like the drifting of a ship without a rudder at sea. For you think that the world is young because thou livest in it now – and it is old, so old that thousands and tens of thousands of peoples lived and died before Christ was born. You think that civilization has come to pass, and ‘civilization’ has died a thousand times under the dust of the ages. You believe you are treading the only path to God – yet have a million billion people died before you, unknowing the religions which you now know.

“O you mortals of to-day, you are small and near-sighted, and hard of hearing – even more than they who lived a million years before you, when the world was an hour or two younger than now!

“What are you? Proud of thy purse, vain of thy power, conceited in thy self-glorification – yet you seek a simple thing and cannot find it. You cannot find rest . You cannot find faith . You cannot find understanding . You cannot find that Breast mightier than all life upon which to rest thy head when the end comes and when you go to join those trillions who have gone before you.

“And, in your despair, you cry out that you know not which way to turn, that you seek in darkness, that the world is a wilderness of schisms and religions, and that you cannot tell which is the right and which is the wrong. For you know that worlds have lived and died through the eons of centuries before Christianity was born. And you are oppressed by doubt even as you grope!

“Yet you know deep in thy soul that the heavens were not an accident. You know that hundreds and thousands of worlds greater than thine own have traveled their paths in space for eternities. You know that the sun was set in the skies so long ago that all the people of the earth could not count the years of its life. And you know that a Great Hand placed it there. And that Hand, you say, was God.

“Yet you seek – and you seek – and you seek – and doubt everlastingly clouds thine eyes; and when darkness comes and you stand at the edge of the Great Beyond, you look back, and – lo! – the path you have traveled seems very short, and it is cluttered with brambles and thorns and the wreckage of shattered hopes and wasted years.

“And then you see the Light!

“And, as thy spirit departs, the mystery unveils – the answer comes.

“For that which you sought, you looked too far. Close under thy feet and close over thy head might you have found it!”

This morning is a glory of sunshine and peace after last night’s rain. It seems inconceivable that the blue sky above the forest was filled a few hours ago with the crash of thunder and the blaze of lightning. I was up at dawn, wakened by a pair of red squirrels playing upon the roof of my cabin. Together we watched the sun rise, and after that they chattered about my open door while I prepared my breakfast. We are becoming great friends. One of them I have given the name of Nuts, and for no reason in the world unless it is because there are no nuts up here; and the other, the sleek, beautiful little female, I call Spoony because she looks at me so slyly, with her pretty head perked on one side, as if flirting with me.

It is only eight o’clock, yet we have been up nearly four hours. At the edge of the creek, less than a stone’s throw from the cabin, I have built me a narrow table of smooth-hewn saplings between two old spruce trees, and this is my open-air studio when the weather is fine. Word of it has gone abroad, though I am many hundreds of miles from civilization. Many kinds of wild things have come to get acquainted with me, fascinated chiefly, I think, by the marvelous new language of my clicking typewriter. The welcome and friendship of these little wilderness-hearts are growing nearer and more apparent to me every day; and with each day the Great Truth speaks to me even more clearly than the day before – that each of these beating hearts, like my own, is a part of that nature which I worship and is as vitally a spark of its life as the heart which is beating inside my own flannel shirt.

These friends of mine, gathering about me more intimately and in greater number with each passing day, are individuals to me because I have come to understand them and know their language. There is the Artful Dodger, for instance – I sometimes call him Bill Sykes or Captain Kidd – screaming close over my head this very moment. In very intimate moments I call him Arty, or Kid, or Bill. He is a big blue jay. In spite of all that has been said and written against him, I have a very brotherly affection for Bill. He is a man’s man, among birds, notwithstanding that he occasionally breakfasts on the eggs of other birds, and kills more than is good for his reputation. Also, he is the greatest liar and the biggest fraud and the most brazen-faced cheat in the bird kingdom. But I know Bill intimately now, where I used to kill him as a pest, and I love him for all his sins.

He is a pirate who never loses his sense of humor. He is always raising a disturbance just for the excitement of it, and when he has drawn a crowd, so to speak, he will slip slyly away to some nearby vantage-point and laugh and chuckle over the rumpus he has raised. Right now, he is screaming himself hoarse forty feet above my head. Two others have joined him, and they are making such a bedlam of sound that Nuts and Spoony have ceased their chattering. There! – I have fired a stick at them, and they are gone. They have had their joke, and are quite satisfied – for the present.

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.

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