separated me from the valley and river. So wild and
solitary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretching away into
infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wild animals are so
few that they have made no discoverable path in the wilderness of
thorns.... Not once nor twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned
to this solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival,
and leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun
compelled me. And yet I had no object in going,--no motive which could
be put into words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to
shoot,--the shooting was all left behind in the valley.... Sometimes I
would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more
than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless,
generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak
wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb.... At a slow
pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I
would ride about for hours together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill,
I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the
prospect. On every side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and
irregular. How gray it all was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the
haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim and the outline obscured
by distance. Descending from my outlook, I would take up my aimless
wanderings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on the same
landscape from another point; and so on for hours. And at noon I would
dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an hour or longer. One
day in these rambles I discovered a small grove composed of twenty or
thirty trees, growing at a convenient distance apart, that had evidently
been resorted to by a herd of deer or other wild animals. This grove was
on a hill differing in shape from other hills in its neighborhood; and,
after a time, I made a point of finding and using it as a resting-place
every day at noon. I did not ask myself why I made choice of that one
spot, sometimes going out of my way to sit there, instead of sitting
down under any one of the millions of trees and bushes on any other
hillside. I thought nothing about it, but acted unconsciously. Only
afterward it seemed to me that, after having rested there once, each
time I wished to rest again, the wish came associated with the image of
that particular clump of tr