he is officially dead, and none of the travellers can kill him any more. Yet he has served them a good turn.
I knew that catamount well. One night when we lay in the bogs of the South Beaver Meadow, under a canopy of mosquitoes, the serene midnight was parted by a wild and human-like cry from a neighboring mountain. “That ’s a cat,” said the guide. I felt in a moment that it was the voice of “modern cultchah.” “Modern culture,” says Mr. Joseph Cook in a most impressive period,—“modern culture is a child crying in the wilderness, and with no voice but a cry.” That describes the catamount exactly. The next day, when we ascended the mountain, we came upon the traces of this brute,—a spot where he had stood and cried in the night; and I confess that my hair rose with the consciousness of his recent presence, as it is said to do when a spirit passes by.
Whatever consolation the absence of catamount in a dark, drenched, and howling wilderness can impart, that I experienced; but I thought what a satire upon my present condition was modern culture, with its plain thinking and high living! It was impossible to get much satisfaction out of the real and the ideal,—the me and the not-me. At this time what impressed me most was the absurdity of my position looked at in the light of modern civilization and all my advantages and acquirements. It seemed pitiful that society could do absolutely nothing for me. It was, in fact, humiliating to reflect that it would now be profitable to exchange all my possessions for the woods instinct of the most unlettered guide. I began to doubt the value of the —“culture” that blunts the natural instincts.
