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James Oliver Curwood

God's Country; The Trail to Happiness

The First Trail

MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS

To-night I am in a little cabin in the heart of a great wilderness. Outside it is dark. I can hear the wind sighing in the thick spruce tops. I hear the laughter of a stream out of which I took my supper of trout. The People of the Night are awake, for a little while ago I heard a wolf howl, and, not far away, in an old stub, lives an owl that hoots at the light in my window. I think it’s going to storm. There is a heaviness in the air, and, in the drowse of it, the sweetness of distant rain.

I am strangely contented as I start the writing of this strangest of all the things I have written. I had never thought to give voice to the things that I am about to put on paper; yet have I dreamed that every soul in the world might know of them. But the task has seemed too great for me, and I have kept them within myself, expecting them to live and die there.

I am contented on this black night, with its promise of storm, for many reasons – though I am in the heart of a peopleless forest fifteen hundred miles from my city home. In the first place, I have built, with my own hands, this cabin that shelters me. My palms are still blistered by the helve of the ax. I am the architect of the fireplace of stone and mud in which a small fire burns for cheer, though it is late spring, with summer in the breath of the forests. I have made the chair in which I sit and the table on which I write, and the builder of a marble palace could take no greater pleasure in his achievement than have I.

I am contented because, just now, I have the strange conviction that, in this wild and peopleless place, I am very close to that which many peoples have sought through many ages and have not found.

In the distance, I can hear thunder, and a flash of lightning illumines my window. A cry of a loon comes with the flash. It is strange; it is weird – and wonderful. And also, in a way, it has just occurred to me that it is a fitting kind of night to begin that which I have been asked to write. For this night, for a short space, will be like the great world at large – a world that is rocking in the throes of a mighty tumult – a tumult of unrest, of discontent, of mad strivings, of despair, and lack of faith – a world that is rushing blindfold into unknown things, that is seeking rest and peace, yet can never find them.

It is, I repeat, a strange night to begin the writing of that which I have been asked to write, and yet I do not think that I would have the night changed. It seems to picture to me more vividly the unrest of the world fifteen hundred miles away – and fifteen thousand miles away. I seem to see with clearer vision what has happened during the past two years – the mad questing of a thousand million people for a spiritual thing which they cannot find. I see, from this vantage-point of the deep forest, a world torn by five hundred schisms and religions, and I see not one religion that fills the soul with faith and confidence. I see the multitudes of the earth reaching up their arms and crying for the Great Mystery of life to be solved. Questions that are racking the earth come to me in the whisperings of the approaching storm. Can the ghosts of the dead return? Can the spirits of the departed commune with the living? Is the world on the edge of an inundation of spiritualism? Does the salvation of humanity lie there – or there – or there? What shall I believe? What can I believe?