It isn't a land of the Present Time at all. It is a place that has never
grown old. When a man passes the last outpost of civilization, and the
shadows of the unbroken woods drop over him, he is likely to forget that
the year is nineteen hundred and twenty, and that the day before
yesterday he had seen an aeroplane passing over his house. It is true
that in this place he sees winged creatures in the air, seeming masters
of the aërial tracts, but they are not aëroplanes. Instead they are the
buzzards, and they are keeping even a closer watch on him than he is on
them. They know that many things may happen whereby they can get
acquainted before the morning breaks. The world seems to have kicked off
its thousand-thousand years as a warm man at night kicks off covers; and
all things are just as they used to be. It is the Young World,--a world
of beasts rather than men, a world where the hand of man has not yet
been felt.
Of course it won't be that way forever. Sometime the forests will fall.
What will become of the beasts that live in them there is no telling;
there are not many places left for them to go. But at present it is just
as savage, just as primitive and untamed as those ancient forests of the
Young World that a man recalls sometimes in dreams.
On this particular early-September day, the age-old drama of the
wilderness was in progress. It was the same play that had been enacted
day after day, year upon year, until the centuries had become too many
to count, and as usual, there were no human observers. There were no
hunters armed with rifles waiting on the deer trails to kill some of the
players. There were no naturalists taking notes that no one will believe
in the coverts. It was the usual matinée performance; the long, hot day
was almost at a close. The play would get better later in the evening,
and really would not be at its best until the moon rose; but it was not
a comedy-drama even now. Rather it was a drama of untamed passions and
bloodshed, strife and carnage and lust and rapine; and it didn't,
unfortunately, have a particularly happy ending. Mother Nature herself,
sometimes kind but usually cruel, was the producer; she furnished the
theater, even the spotted costume by which the fawn remained invisible
in the patches of light and shadow; and she had certain great purposes
of her own that no man understands. As the play was usually complicated
with many fatalities, the buzzards were about the only ones to benefit.
They were the real heroes of the play after all. Everything always
turned out all right for them. They always triumphed in the end.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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