This is the way the races are all run off. Now and then they may end tragically. A fox cannot reckon on the hunter with a gun. Only dogs entered into the account when the balance in the scheme of things was struck for the fox. But, mortal finish or no, the spirit of the chase is neither rage nor terror, but the excitement of a matched game, the ecstasy of pursuit for the hound, the passion of escape for the fox, without fury or fear--except for the instant at the start and at the finish--when it is a finish. This is the spirit of the chase--of the race, more truly, for it is always a race, where the stake is not life and death, as we conceive of life and death, but rather the joy of being. The hound cares as little for his own life as for the life he is hunting. It is the race, instead; it is the moment of crowded, complete, supreme existence for him--“glory” we call it when men run it off together. Death, and the fear of death, are inconceivable to the animal mind. Only enemies exist in the world out of doors, only hounds, foxes, hawks--they, and their scents, their sounds and shadows; and not fear, but readiness only. The level of wild life, of the soul of all nature, is a great serenity. It is seldom lowered, but often raised to a higher level, intenser, faster, more exultant. The serrate pines on my horizon are not the pickets of a great pen. My fields and swamps and ponds are not one wide battlefield, as if the only work of my wild neighbors were bloody war, and the whole of their existence a reign of terror. This is a universe of law and order and marvelous balance; conditions these of life, of normal, peaceful, joyous life. Life and not death is the law, joy and not fear is the spirit, is the frame of all that breathes, of very matter itself. And ever at the loom of Birth The Mighty Mother weaves and sings; She weaves--fresh robes for mangled earth; She sings--fresh hopes for desperate things. “For the rest,” says Hathi, most unscientific of elephants, in the most impossible of Jungle Stories, “for the rest, Fear walks up and down the Jungle by day and by night.... And only when there is one great Fear over all, as there is now, can we of the Jungle lay aside our little fears and meet together in one place as we do now.” Now, the law of the Indian Jungle is as old and as true as the sky, and just as widespread and as all-encompassing. It is the identical law of my New England pastures. It obtains here as it holds far away yonder. The trouble is all with Hathi. Hathi has lived so long in a British camp, has seen so few men but British soldiers, and has felt so little law but British military law in India, that very naturally Hathi gets the military law and the Jungle law mixed up. Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty are they; But the head and the hoof of the Law, and the haunch and the hump is--Obey! else one of the little fears, or the BIG FEAR, will get you!