Another effect upon the mind and soul as the result of this outdoor life is remarkable to those who have never given it a thought. One of our poets once said, “The undevout astronomer is mad.” And every Indian will tell you that the undevout Indian is either mad or “getting civilized.” One of our California historians once wrote something to the effect that the California Indian had no religion, no mythology, no reverence, no belief in anything outside of and beyond himself. Jeremiah Curtin, a careful and close student of the California Indian for many years, in his wonderfully interesting book, “Creation Myths of Primitive America,” shows the utter fallacy of this idea. He says: “Primitive man in America stood at every step face to face with divinity as he knew or understood it. He could never escape from the presence of those powers which had constituted the first world, and which composed all that there was in the present one. ... The most important question of all in Indian life was communication with divinity, intercourse with the spirits of divine personages.” Indeed, the Indian sees the divine power in everything. His God speaks in the storm, the howling wind, the tornado, the hurricane, the roaring rapids and dashing cataracts of the rivers, the never-ending rise and fall of the ocean, the towering mountains and the tiny hills, the trees, the bees, the buds and blossoms. It is God in the flower that makes it grow and gives it its odor; that makes the tree from the acorn; that makes the sun to shine; that sends the rain and dew and the gentle zephyrs. The thunder is His voice, and everything in Nature is an expression of His thought. This belief compels the Indian to a close study of Nature. Hence the keenness of his powers of observation. He knows every plant, and when and where it best grows. He knows the track of every bird, insect, reptile, and animal. He knows all the signs of the weather. He is a past-master in woodcraft, and knows more of the habits of plants and animal life than all of our trained naturalists put together. He is a poet, too, withal, and an orator, using the knowledge he has of nature in his thought and speech. No writer that ever lived knew the real Indian so well as Fenimore Cooper, and we all know the dignified and poetical speech of his Indian characters. I know scores and hundreds of dusky-skinned Henry D. Thoreaus and John Burroughses, John Muirs and Elizabeth Grinnells and Olive Thorne Millers. Indeed, to get an Indian once started upon his lore of plant, tree, insect, bird, or animal, is to open up a flood-gate which will deluge any but the one who knows what to expect. CHAPTER V THE INDIAN AND SLEEPING OUT OF DOORS [Illustration: TERRACED HOUSES OF THE HOPIS, ALLOWING SLEEPING OUT OF DOORS.]