The Choir Invisible

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.