JOHN said that when he had begun to realize the tragic futility of Homo sapiens he was seized with “a panicky sense of doom.” and along with that “a passion of loneliness.” He felt more lonely in the presence of others than in isolation. At the same time, apparently, something strange was happening to his own mind. At first he thought perhaps he was going mad, but clung to the faith that he was after all merely growing up. Anyhow he was convinced that he must cut right adrift and face this upheaval in himself undisturbed, It was as though a grub were to feel premonitions of dissolution and regeneration, and to set purposefully about protecting itself with a cocoon.
Further, if I understood him, he felt spiritually contaminated by contact with the civilization of Homo sapiens. He felt he must for a while at least strip away every vestige of it from his own person, face the universe in absolute nakedness, prove that he could stand by himself, without depending in any way whatever on the primitive and debased creatures who dominated the planet. At first I thought this hunger for the simple life was merely an excuse for a boyish adventure, but now I realize that it did have for him a grave importance which I could only dimly comprehend.
Of some such kind were the motives that drove him into the wildest region of this island. The thoroughness with which he carried out his plan amazed me. He simply walked out of a Highland railway station, had a good meal in an inn, strode up on to the moors toward the high mountains, and, when he judged himself safe from interruption, took off all his clothes, including his shoes, and buried them in a hole among the rocks. He then took his bearings carefully, so as to be able to recover his property in due season, and moved away in his nakedness, seeking food and shelter in the wilderness.
His first days were evidently a terrible ordeal. The weather turned wet and cold. John, it must be remembered, was an extremely hardy creature, and he had prepared himself for this adventure by a course of exposure, and by studying beforehand all possible means of securing food in the valleys and moors of Scotland without so much as a knife or a piece of string to aid him. But fate was at first against him. The bad weather made shelter a necessity, and in seeking it he had to spend much time that might otherwise have been spent in the search for food.
He passed the first night under a projecting rock, wrapped in heather and grass that he had collected before the weather broke. Next day he caught a frog, dismembered it with a sharp stone, and ate it raw. He also ate large quantities of dandelion leaves, and other green stuff which from previous study he knew to be edible. Certain fungi, too, contributed to his diet on that day, and indeed throughout his adventure. On the second day he was feeling “pretty queer.” On the third evening he was in a high fever, with a bad cough and diarrhoea. On the previous day, foreseeing possible illness, he had greatly improved his shelter, and laid by a store of such food as he considered least indigestible. For some days, he didn’t know how long, he lay desperately sick, scarcely able to crawl to the stream for water. “I must have been delirious at one time,” he said, “because I seemed to have a visit from Pax. Then I came to and found there wasn’t any Pax, and I thought I was dying, and I loved myself desperately, knowing I was indeed a rare bright thing. And it was torture to be just wasted like that. And then that unspeakable joy came, that joy of seeing things as it were through God’s eyes, and finding them after all right, fitting, in the picture.” There followed a few days of convalescence, during which, he said, “I seemed to have lost touch completely with all the motives of my adventure. I just lay and wondered why I had been such a self-important fool. Fortunately, before I was strong enough to crawl back to civilization I lashed myself into facing this spiritual decay. For even in my most abject state I vaguely knew that somewhere there was another ‘I’, and a better one. Well, I set my teeth and determined to go on with the job even if it killed me.”
Soon after he had come to this decision some local boys with a dog came up the hill right on to his hiding-place. He leapt up and fled. They must have caught a glimpse of his small naked figure, for they gave chase, hallooing excitedly. As soon as he was on his feet he realized that his legs were like water. He collapsed. “But then,” he said, “I suddenly managed to tap some deep reserve of vitality, so to speak. I simply jumped up and ran like hell round a corner of hillside, and farther, to a rocky place. There I climbed a pretty bad pitch into a hole I knew of and had counted on. Then I must have fainted. In fact, I think I must have lain unconscious for almost twenty-four hours, for when I came to, the sun seemed to have gone back to early morning. I was cold as death, and one huge ache, and so weak I couldn’t move from the twisted position I was in.”
Later in the day he managed to crawl back to his lair, and with great difficulty moved his bedding to a safer but less comfortable spot. The weather was now hot and bright. For ten days or so he spent nearly all his time creeping about in search of frogs, lizards, snails, birds’ eggs and green stuff, or just lying in the sun recovering his strength. Sometimes he managed to catch a few fish by “tickling” them in a pool in the river. The whole of one day he spent in trying to get a flame by striking sparks from stones on a handful of dry grass. At last he succeeded, and began to cook his meal, in an ecstasy of pride and anticipation. Suddenly he noticed a man, far away but obviously interested in the smoke of his fire. He put it out at once and decided to go much farther into the wilds.
Meanwhile, though his feet had been hardened with long practice at home, they were now terribly sore, and quite unfit for “a walking tour.” He made moccasins out of ropes of twisted grass which he bound round his feet and ankles. They kept in place for a while, but were always either coming undone or wearing through. After many days of exploration, and several nights without shelter, two of which were wet, he found the high cave where later the climbers discovered him. “It was only just in time,” he said. “I was in a pretty bad state. Feet swollen and bleeding, ghastly cough, diarrhoea. But in that cave I soon felt snugger than I had ever felt in my life, by contrast with the past few weeks. I made myself a lovely bed, and a fireplace, and I felt fairly safe from intrusion, because mine was a remote mountain, and anyhow very few people could climb those rocks. Not far below there were grouse and ptarmigan; and deer. On my first morning, sitting in the sun on my roof, positively happy, I watched a herd of them crossing a moor, stepping so finely, ears spread, heads high.”
The deer seem to have become his chief interest for a while. He was fascinated by their beauty and freedom. True, they now depended for their existence on a luxurious civilization; but equally they had existed before there was any civilization at all. Moreover, he coveted the huge material wealth that the slaughter of one stag would afford him. And he had apparently a queer lust to try his strength and cunning against a worthy quarry. For at this time he was content to be almost wholly the primitive hunter, “though with a recollection, away at the back of my mind, that all this was just a process of getting clean in spirit for a very different enterprise.”
For ten days or so he did little but devise means for catching birds and hares, and spent all spare time in resting, recuperating, and brooding over the deer. His first hare, caught after many failures, he took by arranging a trap in its runway. A huge stone was precariously held in position by a light stick, which the creature dislodged. Its back was broken. But a fox ate most of it in the night. From its skin, however, he made a rough bow-string, also soles and thongs for his foot-gear. By splitting its thigh bones and filing them on the rock he made some fragile little knives to help him in preparing his food. Also he made some minute sharp arrowheads. With a diversity of traps, and his toy bow and arrows, and vast patience and aptitude, he managed to secure enough game to restore him to normal strength. Practically his whole time was spent in hunting, trapping, cooking, making little tools of bone or wood or stone. Every night he rolled himself in his grass bedding dead tired, but at peace. Sometimes he took his bedding outside the cave and slept on a ledge of the precipice, under stars and driving cloud.
But there were the deer; and beyond them the spiritual problem which was the real motive of his adventure, and had not yet been consciously faced at all. It was clear that if he did not greatly improve his way of life, he would have no time for that concentrated meditation and spiritual exercise which he so greatly needed. The killing of the stag became a symbol for him. The thought of it stirred unwonted feelings in him. “It was as though all the hunters of the past challenged me,” he said, “and as though, as though — well, as though the angels of God ordered me to do this little mighty deed in preparation for mightier deeds to come. I dreamt of stags, of their beauty and power and speed. I schemed and plotted, and rejected every plan. I stalked the herd, weaponless, intent only on learning their ways. One day I came upon some deer-stalkers, and I stalked them too, until they brought down a stag of ten; and how I despised them for their easy slaughter. To me they were just vermin preying upon my game. But when I had thought that thought, I laughed at myself; for I had no more right to the creatures than any one else.”
The story of how John finally took his stag seemed to me almost incredible, yet I could not but believe it. He had marked down as his quarry the finest beast of the herd, an eight-year-old monarch, bearing besides his brow, bay and tray, “three on top” on the right, and four on the left, The weight of antler gave his head a superb poise. One day John and the stag met one another face to face round a shoulder of moor. They stood for full three seconds, twenty paces apart, gazing at one another, the stag’s wide nostrils taking the scent of him. Then the beast swung round and cantered easefully away.
When John described that meeting, his strange eyes seemed to glow with dark fire. He said, I remember, “With my soul I saluted him. Then I pitied him, because he was doomed, and in the prime. But I remembered that I too was doomed. I suddenly knew that I should never reach my prime. And I laughed aloud, for him and for me, because life is brief and wild, and death too is in the picture.”
John took long to decide on the method of his attack. Should he dig a pit for him, or lasso him with a cord of hide, or set a mighty stone to fell him, or pierce him with a bone-pointed arrow? Few of these devices seemed practicable; all but the last seemed ugly, and that last was not practicable. For some time he busied himself making dirks of various kinds, of wood, of the fragile bones of hares, of keen stone splinters from a neighbouring mountain. Patient experiment produced at last a preposterous little stiletto of hard wood pointed with bone, the whole “streamlined” by filing upon the rock. With this fantastic weapon and his knowledge of anatomy, he proposed to leap on the stag from a hiding-place and pierce its heart. And this in the end he did, after many days of fruitless stalking and waiting. There was a little glade where the deer sometimes grazed, and beside it a rock some ten feet high. On the top of this rock he secreted himself early one morning, when the wind was such that his scent would not betray him. The great stag came round the shoulder of hill, attended by three hinds. Cautiously they sniffed and peered; then, at last, lowered their heads and peacefully grazed. Hour after hour John lay, waiting for the right beast to stray below the rock. But it was as though the stag deliberately avoided the danger-spot. Finally the four deer left the glade. Two more days were spent in vain watching. Not till the fourth day did John leap from the rock upon the back of the grazing stag, bringing it down with its right flank to the ground. Before the creature could regain its feet John had thrust his primitive weapon home with all his weight. The stag half righted itself, wildly swung its antlers, tearing John’s arm, then collapsed. And John, to his own surprise, behaved in a style most unseemly in a hunter. For the third time in his life, he burst into spontaneous tears.
For days afterwards he struggled to dismember the carcass with his inadequate implements. This task proved even more difficult than the killing, but in the end he found himself with a large quantity of meat, an invaluable hide, and the antlers, which, with desperate efforts, he smashed in pieces with a great stone and worked up as knives and other tools, by scraping them on the rocks.
At the end he could hardly lift his hands with fatigue, and they were covered with bleeding blisters. But the deed was accomplished. The hunters of all the ages saluted him, for he had done what none of them could have done. A child, he had gone naked into the wilderness and conquered it. And the angels of heaven smiled at him, and beckoned him to a higher adventure.
John’s way of life now changed. It had become a fairly easy matter for him to keep himself alive, and even in comfort. He set his traps, and let fly his arrows, and gathered his green things; but all was now routine work. He was able to carry it out while giving his best attention to the strange and disturbing events which were beginning to occur within his own mind.
It is obviously quite impossible for me to give anything like a true account of the spi............