The Prairie (41 page)

"Can your idols walk or speak, or have they the glorious gift of
reason?" demanded the trapper, with some indignation in his voice;
"though but little given to run into the noise and chatter of the
settlements, yet have I been into the towns in my day, to barter the
peltry for lead and powder, and often have I seen your waxen dolls, with
their tawdry clothes and glass eyes—"

"Waxen dolls!" interrupted Obed; "it is profanation, in the view of the
arts, to liken the miserable handy-work of the dealers in wax to the
pure models of antiquity!"

"It is profanation in the eyes of the Lord," retorted the old man, "to
liken the works of his creatur's, to the power of his own hand."

"Venerable venator," resumed the naturalist, clearing his throat, like
one who was much in earnest, "let us discuss understandingly and in
amity. You speak of the dross of ignorance, whereas my memory dwells
on those precious jewels, which it was my happy fortune, formerly, to
witness, among the treasured glories of the Old World."

"Old World!" retorted the trapper, "that is the miserable cry of all the
half-starved miscreants that have come into this blessed land, since the
days of my boyhood! They tell you of the Old World; as if the Lord had
not the power and the will to create the universe in a day, or as if he
had not bestowed his gifts with an equal hand, though not with an equal
mind, or equal wisdom, have they been received and used. Were they to
say a worn out, and an abused, and a sacrilegious world, they might not
be so far from the truth!"

Doctor Battius, who found it quite as arduous a task to maintain any
of his favourite positions with so irregular an antagonist, as he would
have found it difficult to keep his feet within the hug of a western
wrestler, hemmed aloud, and profited by the new opening the trapper had
made, to shift the grounds of the discussion—

"By Old and New World, my excellent associate," he said, "it is not to
be understood that the hills, and the valleys, the rocks and the rivers
of our own moiety of the earth do not, physically speaking, bear a date
as ancient as the spot on which the bricks of Babylon are found; it
merely signifies that its moral existence is not co-equal with its
physical, or geological formation."

"Anan!" said the old man, looking up enquiringly into the face of the
philosopher.

"Merely that it has not been so long known in morals, as the other
countries of Christendom."

"So much the better, so much the better. I am no great admirator of your
old morals, as you call them, for I have ever found, and I have liv'd
long as it were in the very heart of natur', that your old morals are
none of the best. Mankind twist and turn the rules of the Lord, to suit
their own wickedness, when their devilish cunning has had too much time
to trifle with His commands."

"Nay, venerable hunter, still am I not comprehended. By morals I do
not mean the limited and literal signification of the term, such as
is conveyed in its synonyme, morality, but the practices of men, as
connected with their daily intercourse, their institutions, and their
laws."

"And such I call barefaced and downright wantonness and waste,"
interrupted his sturdy disputant.

"Well, be it so," returned the Doctor, abandoning the explanation in
despair. "Perhaps I have conceded too much," he then instantly added,
fancying that he still saw the glimmerings of an argument through
another chink in the discourse. "Perhaps I have conceded too much, in
saying that this hemisphere is literally as old in its formation, as
that which embraces the venerable quarters of Europe, Asia, and Africa."

"It is easy to say a pine is not so tall as an alder, but it would be
hard to prove. Can you give a reason for such a belief?"

"The reasons are numerous and powerful," returned the Doctor, delighted
by this encouraging opening. "Look into the plains of Egypt and Arabia;
their sandy deserts teem with the monuments of their antiquity; and then
we have also recorded documents of their glory; doubling the proofs of
their former greatness, now that they lie stripped of their fertility;
while we look in vain for similar evidences that man has ever reached
the summit of civilisation on this continent, or search, without our
reward, for the path by which he has made the downward journey to his
present condition of second childhood."

"And what see you in all this?" demanded the trapper, who, though a
little confused by the terms of his companion, seized the thread of his
ideas.

"A demonstration of my problem, that nature did not make so vast a
region to lie an uninhabited waste so many ages. This is merely the
moral view of the subject; as to the more exact and geological—"

"Your morals are exact enough for me," returned the old man, "for I
think I see in them the very pride of folly. I am but little gifted in
the fables of what you call the Old World, seeing that my time has been
mainly passed looking natur' steadily in the face, and in reasoning on
what I've seen, rather than on what I've heard in traditions. But I have
never shut my ears to the words of the good book, and many is the long
winter evening that I have passed in the wigwams of the Delawares,
listening to the good Moravians, as they dealt forth the history and
doctrines of the elder times, to the people of the Lenape! It was
pleasant to hearken to such wisdom after a weary hunt! Right pleasant
did I find it, and often have I talked the matter over with the Great
Serpent of the Delawares, in the more peaceful hours of our out-lyings,
whether it might be on the trail of a war-party of the Mingoes, or on
the watch for a York deer. I remember to have heard it, then and there,
said, that the Blessed Land was once fertile as the bottoms of the
Mississippi, and groaning with its stores of grain and fruits; but
that the judgment has since fallen upon it, and that it is now more
remarkable for its barrenness than any qualities to boast of."

"It is true; but Egypt—nay much of Africa furnishes still more striking
proofs of this exhaustion of nature."

"Tell me," interrupted the old man, "is it a certain truth that
buildings are still standing in that land of Pharaoh, which may be
likened, in their stature, to the hills of the 'arth?"

"It is as true as that nature never refuses to bestow her incisores on
the animals, mammalia; genus, homo—"

"It is very marvellous! and it proves how great He must be, when His
miserable creatur's can accomplish such wonders! Many men must have been
needed to finish such an edifice; ay, and men gifted with strength and
skill too! Does the land abound with such a race to this hour?"

"Far from it. Most of the country is a desert, and but for a mighty
river all would be so."

"Yes; rivers are rare gifts to such as till the ground, as any one may
see who journeys far atween the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi. But
how do you account for these changes on the face of the 'arth itself,
and for this downfall of nations, you men of the schools?"

"It is to be ascribed to moral cau—"

"You're right—it is their morals; their wickedness and their pride,
and chiefly their waste that has done it all! Now listen to what the
experience of an old man teaches him. I have lived long, as these grey
hairs and wrinkled hands will show, even though my tongue should fail
in the wisdom of my years. And I have seen much of the folly of man; for
his natur' is the same, be he born in the wilderness, or be he born in
the towns. To my weak judgment it hath ever seemed that his gifts are
not equal to his wishes. That he would mount into the heavens, with
all his deformities about him, if he only knew the road, no one will
gainsay, that witnesses his bitter strivings upon 'arth. If his power
is not equal to his will, it is because the wisdom of the Lord hath set
bounds to his evil workings."

"It is much too certain that certain facts will warrant a theory, which
teaches the natural depravity of the genus; but if science could
be fairly brought to bear on a whole species at once, for instance,
education might eradicate the evil principle."

"That, for your education! The time has been when I have thought it
possible to make a companion of a beast. Many are the cubs, and many are
the speckled fawns that I have reared with these old hands, until I have
even fancied them rational and altered beings—but what did it amount
to? the bear would bite, and the deer would run, notwithstanding my
wicked conceit in fancying I could change a temper that the Lord himself
had seen fit to bestow. Now if man is so blinded in his folly as to
go on, ages on ages, doing harm chiefly to himself, there is the same
reason to think that he has wrought his evil here as in the countries
you call so old. Look about you, man; where are the multitudes that once
peopled these prairies; the kings and the palaces; the riches and the
mightinesses of this desert?"

"Where are the monuments that would prove the truth of so vague a
theory?"

"I know not what you call a monument."

"The works of man! The glories of Thebes and Balbec—columns, catacombs,
and pyramids! standing amid the sands of the East, like wrecks on a
rocky shore, to testify to the storms of ages!"

"They are gone. Time has lasted too long for them. For why? Time was
made by the Lord, and they were made by man. This very spot of reeds
and grass, on which you now sit, may once have been the garden of some
mighty king. It is the fate of all things to ripen, and then to decay.
The tree blossoms, and bears its fruit, which falls, rots, withers,
and even the seed is lost! Go, count the rings of the oak and of the
sycamore; they lie in circles, one about another, until the eye is
blinded in striving to make out their numbers; and yet a full change of
the seasons comes round while the stem is winding one of these little
lines about itself, like the buffaloe changing his coat, or the buck his
horns; and what does it all amount to? There does the noble tree fill
its place in the forest, loftier, and grander, and richer, and more
difficult to imitate, than any of your pitiful pillars, for a thousand
years, until the time which the Lord hath given it is full. Then come
the winds, that you cannot see, to rive its bark; and the waters from
the heavens, to soften its pores; and the rot, which all can feel and
none can understand, to humble its pride and bring it to the ground.
From that moment its beauty begins to perish. It lies another hundred
years, a mouldering log, and then a mound of moss and 'arth; a sad
effigy of a human grave. This is one of your genuine monuments, though
made by a very different power than such as belongs to your chiseling
masonry! and after all, the cunningest scout of the whole Dahcotah
nation might pass his life in searching for the spot where it fell, and
be no wiser when his eyes grew dim, than when they were first opened. As
if that was not enough to convince man of his ignorance; and as though
it were put there in mockery of his conceit, a pine shoots up from the
roots of the oak, just as barrenness comes after fertility, or as these
wastes have been spread, where a garden may have been created. Tell me
not of your worlds that are old! it is blasphemous to set bounds and
seasons, in this manner, to the works of the Almighty, like a woman
counting the ages of her young."

"Friend hunter, or trapper," returned the naturalist, clearing his
throat in some intellectual confusion at the vigorous attack of his
companion, "your deductions, if admitted by the world, would sadly
circumscribe the efforts of reason, and much abridge the boundaries of
knowledge."

"So much the better—so much the better; for I have always found that a
conceited man never knows content. All things prove it. Why have we
not the wings of the pigeon, the eyes of the eagle, and the legs of
the moose, if it had been intended that man should be equal to all his
wishes?"

"There are certain physical defects, venerable trapper, in which I am
always ready to admit great and happy alterations might be suggested.
For example, in my own order of Phalangacru—"

"Cruel enough would be the order, that should come from miserable
hands like thine! A touch from such a finger would destroy the mocking
deformity of a monkey! Go, go; human folly is not needed to fill up the
great design of God. There is no stature, no beauty, no proportions,
nor any colours in which man himself can well be fashioned, that is not
already done to his hands."

"That is touching another great and much disputed question," exclaimed
the Doctor, who seized upon every distinct idea that the ardent and
somewhat dogmatic old man left exposed to his mental grasp, with the
vain hope of inducing a logical discussion, in which he might bring his
battery of syllogisms to annihilate the unscientific defences of his
antagonist.

It is, however, unnecessary to our narrative to relate the erratic
discourse that ensued. The old man eluded the annihilating blows of his
adversary, as the light armed soldier is wont to escape the efforts of
the more regular warrior, even while he annoys him most, and an hour
passed away without bringing any of the numerous subjects, on which they
touched, to a satisfactory conclusion. The arguments acted, however, on
the nervous system of the Doctor, like so many soothing soporifics, and
by the time his aged companion was disposed to lay his head on his pack,
Obed, refreshed by his recent mental joust, was in a condition to seek
his natural rest, without enduring the torments of the incubus, in the
shapes of Teton warriors and bloody tomahawks.

—Save you, sir.
—Shakespeare.

The sleep of the fugitives lasted for several hours. The trapper was the
first to shake off its influence, as he had been the last to court its
refreshment. Rising, just as the grey light of day began to brighten
that portion of the studded vault which rested on the eastern margin of
the plain, he summoned his companions from their warm lairs, and pointed
out the necessity of their being once more on the alert. While Middleton
attended to the arrangements necessary to the comforts of Inez and
Ellen, in the long and painful journey which lay before them, the old
man and Paul prepared the meal, which the former had advised them to
take before they proceeded to horse. These several dispositions were
not long in making, and the little group was soon seated about a
repast which, though it might want the elegancies to which the bride of
Middleton had been accustomed, was not deficient in the more important
requisites of savour and nutriment.