rong, supple, healthy, soon
we succumb to some germ or other that gets a hold in our blood or lungs
and fights for its life, its species, until it kills us. Fight therefore
is absolutely necessary to long life, and Alas! eventually that fight
must be lost. The savages, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks all
worshipped physical prowess in man. Manhood, strength--the symbols of
fight! To be physically strong and well a man must work hard, with
frequent intervals of change of exercise, and he must eat meat. I am not
a great meat eater, but I doubt if I could do much physical labor or any
brain work on a vegetable diet. Therefore I hold it fair and manly to go
once a year to the wilderness to hunt. Let that hunt be clean hard toil,
as hard as I can stand! Perhaps nature created the lower animals for the
use of man. If I had been the creator I think I would have made it
possible for the so-called higher animal man to live on air.

Somewhere I read a strange remarkable story about monkeys and priests in
the jungle of India. An old order of priests had from time out of mind
sent two of their comrades into the jungle to live with the monkeys, to
tame them, feed them, study them, love them. And these priests told an
incredible story, yet one that haunted with its possibilities of truth.
After a long term of years in which one certain priest had lived with
the monkeys and they had learned truly he meant them no harm and only
loved them, at rare moments an old monkey would come to him and weep and
weep in the most terrible and tragic manner. This monkey wanted to tell
something, but could not speak. But the priest knew that the monkey was
trying to tell him how once the monkey people had been human like him.
Only they had retrograded in the strange scale of evolution. And the
terrible weeping was for loss--loss of physical stature, of speech,
perhaps of soul.

What a profound and stunning idea! Does evolution work backward? Could
nature in its relentless inscrutable design for the unattainable
perfection have developed man only to start him backward toward the dim
ages whence he sprang? Who knows! But every man can love wild animals.
Every man can study and try to understand the intelligence of his horse,
the loyalty of his dog. And every hunter can hunt less with his
instinct, and more with an understanding of his needs, and a
consideration for the beasts only the creator knows.

X

The last day of everything always