On the Trail | Page 3

It is as if they entered
an empty house and passed through deserted rooms, but all the time the
intruders are stealthily watched by unseen, hostile, or frightened eyes.
Every form of moving life is stilled and magically fades into its
background. The tawny rabbit halts amid the dry leaves of a fallen tree.
No one sees it. The sinuous weasel slips silently under a rock by the
side of the trail and is unnoticed. The mother grouse crouches low amid
the underbrush and her little ones follow her example, but the careless
company has no time to observe and drifts quickly by. Only the
irrepressible red squirrel might be seen, but isn't, when he loses his

balance and drops to a lower branch in his efforts to miss nothing of the
excitement of the invasion.
This is not romance, it is truth. To think sentimentally about nature, to
sit by a babbling brook and try to put your supposed feelings into verse,
will not help you to know the wild. The only way to cultivate the
sympathy and understanding which will enable you to feel its
heart-beats, is to go to it humbly, ready to see the wonders it can show;
ready to appreciate and love its beauties and ready to meet on friendly
and cordial terms the animal life whose home it is. The wild world is,
indeed, a wonderful world; how wonderful and interesting we learn
only by degrees and actual experience. It is free, but not lawless; to
enter it fully we must obey these laws which are slowly and silently
impressed upon us. It is a wholesome, life-giving, inspiring world, and
when you have learned to conform to its rules you are met on every
hand by friendly messengers to guide you and teach you the ways of
the wild: wild birds, wild fruits and plants, and gentle, furtive, wild
animals. You cannot put their messages into words, but you can feel
them; and then, suddenly, you no longer care for soft cushions and rugs,
for shaded lamps, dainty fare and finery, for paved streets and concrete
walks. You want to plant your feet upon the earth in its natural state,
however rugged or boggy it may be. You want your cushions to be of
the soft moss-beds of the piny woods, and, with the unparalleled sauce
of a healthy, hearty appetite, you want to eat your dinner out of doors,
cooked over the outdoor fire, and to drink water from a birch-bark cup,
brought cool and dripping from the bubbling spring.
You want, oh! how you want to sleep on a springy bed of balsam
boughs, wrapped in soft, warm, woollen blankets with the sweet night
air of all outdoors to breathe while you sleep. You want your
flower-garden, not with great and gorgeous masses of bloom in evident,
orderly beds, but keeping always charming surprises for unexpected
times and in unsuspected places. You want the flowers that grow
without your help in ways you have not planned; that hold the
enchantment of the wilderness. Some people are born with this love for
the wild, some attain it, but in either case the joy is there, and to find it
you must seek it. Your chosen trail may lead through the primeval

forests or into the great western deserts or plains; or it may reach only
left-over bits of the wild which can be found at no great distance from
home. Even a bit of meadow or woodland, even an uncultivated field
on the hilltop, will give you a taste of the wild; and if you strike the
trail in the right spirit you will find upon arrival that these remnants of
the wild world have much to show and to teach you. There are the sky,
the clouds, the lungfuls of pure air, the growing things which send their
roots where they will and not in a man-ordered way. There is the wild
life that obeys no man's law: the insects, the birds, and small
four-footed animals. On all sides you will find evidences of wild life if
you will look for it. Here you may make camp for a day and enjoy that
day as much as if it were one of many in a several weeks' camping trip.
However, this is not to be a book of glittering generalities but, as far as
it can be made, one of practical helpfulness in outdoor life; therefore
when you are told to strike the trail you must also be told how to do it.
=When You Strike the Trail=
For any journey, by rail or by boat, one has a general idea of the
direction to be taken, the character of the land or water to be crossed,
and of what one will find at