In my home are twenty-seven guns, and all of them have been used. Many of the stocks are scarred with tiny notches whereby I kept track of my “kills.” With them, I have left red trails to Hudson’s Bay, to the Barren Lands, to the country of the Athabasca and the Great Bear, to the Arctic Ocean, to the Yukon and Alaska, and throughout British Columbia. This is not intended as a pæan of triumph. It is a fact which I wish had never existed. And yet it may be that my love of nature and the wild things, at the last, is greater because of those reckless years of killing. I am inclined to believe so. In my pantheistic heart, the mounted heads in my home are no longer crowned with the grandeur of trophies, but rather with the nobility of martyrs. I love them. I commune with them. I am no longer their enemy, and I warm myself with the belief that they know I am fighting for them now. In this religion of the open, I have come to understand and gather peace from the whispering voices and even the silence of all God-loving things. I have learned to love trees, and there are times when I put my hands on them because I love them, and rest my head against them because they are comrades and their comradeship and their might give me courage. There is a gnarled old cripple of an oak in the yard of my Michigan home, a broken and twisted dwarf which many people have told me to destroy. But that tree and I have “talked over” many things together; it has pointed out to me how to stand up under adversity, has shown me how to put up a man’s fight. For, eaten to the heart, a deformity among its kind, each spring and summer saw it making its valiant struggle to “do its best.” It was then I became its friend, gave it a helping hand, stopped its decay and death, and each season now the old oak is stronger, and often I go out and sit with my back against it, and I hear and understand its voice, and I know that it is a great friend that will never do me wrong. It is thus that this religion of mine finds its strength from the sources of great and unknown power. But before it comes in all its peace and joy, man must bring down his head from out of the clouds of egoism, and say, “The oak is as great as I--perhaps greater.”