My sensations then were dominated by the relief of salvation. I became conscious of them. Racing blood, bursting heart, labored pang of chest, prickling, burning skin, a queer involuntary flutter of muscles, like a palsy--these attested to the instinctive primitive nature of my state. I heard the crashing of brush, the pound of soft jumps over to my left. With eyes that seemed magnifying I gazed to see a big red woolly steer plunge wildly down the slope and disappear. A third shock possessed me--amaze. I had mistaken a wild, frightened steer for a red cinnamon bear!
I sat there some moments straddling that branch. Then I descended, and went back to the place I had dropped my rifle, and securing that I stood a moment listening. The hounds had taken the chase around below me into the gorge and were drawing away. It was useless to try to follow them. I sat down again and gave myself up to meditation.
I tried to treat the situation as a huge joke, but that would not go. No joke indeed! My horse had made me risk too much, my excitement had been too intense, my fright had been too terrible. Reality for me could not have been any more grave. I had risked my neck on a stubborn coward of a horse, I had mistaken a steer for a bear, I had forgotten how to manipulate the borrowed rifle. These were the careless elements of tragedy. The thought sobered me. I took the lesson to heart. And I reflected on the possible point of view of the bear. He had probably gone to sleep on a full stomach of juniper berries and a big drink of spring water. Rudely he had been routed out by a pack of yelping, fiendish hounds. He had to run for his life. What had he done to deserve such treatment? Possibly he might have killed some of Haught's pigs, but most assuredly he had never harmed me. In my sober frame of mind then I rather disapproved of my wholly unjustifiable murderous intent. I would have deserved it if the steer had really been the bear. Certainly I hoped the bear would outrun the hounds and escape. I weighed the wonderful thrill of the chase, the melody of hounds, the zest of spirited action, the peril to limb and life against the thing that they were done for, with the result that I found them sadly lacking. Peril to limb and life was good for man. If this had not been a fact my performance would have been as cowardly as that of my horse. Again I had rise up before my mind the spectacle of opposing forces--the elemental in man restrained by the spiritual. Then the old haunting thought returned to vex me--man in his development needed the exercise of brawn, muscle, bone red-blood, violence, labor and pain and agony. Nature recognized only the survival of the fittest of any species. If a man allowed a spiritual development, intellect, gentleness, to keep him from all hard, violent action, from tremendous exertion, from fierce fight with elements and beasts, and his own kind--would he not soon degenerate as a natural physical man? Evolution was a stern inevitable seeking of nature for perfection, for the unattainable. This perfection was something that lived and improved on strife. Barbarians, Indians, savages were the most perfect specimens of nature's handiwork; and in proportion to their development toward so-called civilized life their physical prowess and perfectness--that was to say, their strength to resist and live and reproduce their kind--absolutely and inevitably deteriorated.