The Master Backwoodsman [antikvár]

CHAPTER 1 The Lure of the Backwoods Civilization these days seems to be closing in more and more stiflingly all about us. Yet on this continent there remains real wilderness where you can still make your own way, cut firewood and browse with no harm to anyone, and answer the instinctive call of the open places while eyes will never be keener or stride more lusty. This is good, for essentially we all need the tonic of our remaining backwoods. The trail's call is instinctive, having nothing to do with our common sense. We realize we are perhaps fools for answering it, and yet we go. The comforts of worldly conveniences, to relegate the matter to its basic level, are not to be disregarded lightly: the burden-lightening ease of having our physical labor performed for us, the agreeableness of cultivated minds, of theaters and television, of books, of keeping abreast of world developments. These we renounce. In exchange, we undertake an existence in which there is considerable hard toil—work so admittedly long and exhausting that few men paid to labor would consider it for a second. We go back to the pioneer demands of eating simply, of enduring much, of sleeping out in storms and wind. We deliberately put ourselves where such discomforts as wet, cold and heat, hunger, thirst, danger, and monotony become a part of our lives. On numerous occasions in the self-reliance of a wilderness existence even the stoutest hearted will admit to himself privately—very privately if he is really stouthearted, so 11