This old forest street of theirs, so broad, so roomy, so arched with hoary
trees, so silent now and filled with the pity and pathos of their ruin--it
may not after all have been marked out by them. But ages before they had
ever led their sluggish armies eastward to the Mississippi and, crossing,
had shaken its bright drops from their shaggy low-hung necks on the eastern
bank--ages before this, while the sun of human history was yet silvering the
dawn of the world--before Job's sheep lay sick in the land of Uz-- before a
lion had lain down to dream in the jungle where Babylon was to arise and to
become a name,--this old, old, old high road may have been a footpath of the
awful mastodon, who had torn his terrible way through the tangled, twisted,
gnarled and rooted fastnesses of the wilderness as lightly as a wild young
Cyclone out of the South tears his way through the ribboned corn.
Ay, for ages the mastodon had trodden this dust. And, ay, for ages later the
bison. And, ay, for ages a people, over whose vanished towns and forts and
graves had grown the trees of a thousand years, holding in the mighty claws
of their roots the dust of those long, long secrets. And for centuries later
still along this path had crept or rushed or fled the Indians: now coming
from over the moon-loved, fragrant, passionate Southern mountains; now from
the sad frozen forests and steely marges of the Lakes: both eager for the
chase. For into this high road of the mastodon and the bison smaller
pathways entered from each side, as lesser watercourses run into a river:
the avenues of the round-horned elk, narrow, yet broad enough for the
tossing of his lordly antlers; the trails of the countless migrating
shuffling bear; the slender woodland alleys along which buck and doe and
fawn had sought the springs or crept tenderly from their breeding coverts or
fled like shadows in the race for life; the devious wolf-runs of the
maddened packs as they had sprung to the kill; the threadlike passages of
the stealthy fox; the tiny trickle of the squirrel, crossing, recrossing,
without number; and ever close beside all these, unseen, the grass-path or
the tree-path of the cougar.
Ay, both eager for the chase at first and then more eager for each other's
death for the sake of the whole chase: so that this immemorial game-trace
had become a war-path--a long dim forest street alive with the advance and
retreat of plume-bearing, vermilion-painted armies; and its rich black dust,
on which hereand there a few scars of sunlight now lay like stillest
thinnest yellow leaves, had been dyed from end to end with the red of the
heart.