Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/176

156 in his course by day and his couch of moss or hemlock by night! The draught from the cold, pure spring; the juicy berry, the grape cluster, the extemporized meal from the game brought down by his arrow or taken in his snare; the fragrance of that mysterious earth-smell in the springtime, after the scentlessness of the forest in winter; the mingling of the damp ooze from the decay of leaves and mossy trunks with the sweet bloom of swelling buds, — these were the luxuries of the wilderness.

The Indian, in the lack of help from any artificial educational processes, gathered his wood-craft and his skill from two sources. His main reliance was ever on his own individual observation, the training of his own senses, the increasing and improving of his own personal experience. Beyond this he was helped in anticipating such acquisitions, or in extending his knowledge, by the free communication from his elders of facts and phenomena beyond his immediate ken. While hours of listless indolence, of sleep, or dull taciturnity might pass among a group, or in the lodge, or the open camp, there were frequent occasions for free and lively gossip, for relations of experience and adventure, and for keeping alive traditionary lore by renewed repetition. It was in this way that the legends of the tribes were transmitted; and these doubtless had for those most interested in them a significance and dignity which we try in vain to find in such fragmentary and trivial relations as have come to us. The natural and the supernatural made for the Indian one continuous, blended, and homogeneous aspect of things and events. He made no distinction between them; still less did he divide them by any sharp line. He thus anticipated one of the results reached by many of speculative mind in our own time, in recognizing the impossibility of parting fact and phenomena respectively between the natural and the supernatural.

It was thus that the Indians became such experts in the