t get talaria to their heels.

Higher Laws

As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing
my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck
stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight,
and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was
hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or
twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the
woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking
some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been
too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar.
I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or,
as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a
primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the
wild not less than the good. The wildness and adventure that are in
fishing still recommended it to me. I like sometimes to take rank hold
on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have owed
to this employment and to hunting, when quite young, my closest
acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us
in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little
acquaintance. Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending
their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of
Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her,
in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who
approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to
them. The traveller on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head
waters of the Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of
St. Mary a fisherman. He who is only a traveller learns things at
second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most
interested when science reports what those men already know practically
or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human
experience.

They mistake who assert that the Yankee has few amusements, because he
has not so many public holidays, and men and boys do not play so many
games as they do in England, for here the more primitive but solitary
amusements of hunting, fishing, and the like have not yet given place
to the former. Almost every New England boy among my contemporaries
shouldered a fowling-piece between the