Отрывок из книги
VOYAGEUR CLASSICS
BOOKS THAT EXPLORE CANADA
.....
There was more, much more. Traplines, plans! plans! — plans to inflict torture and death and then to go out and boast of it! I was startled at this latter accusation, and a little indignant. I was trying my best to earn us a living; a man had to kill whatever way he could, and all he could; fur was getting low. But the truth peered out in a most unwelcome fashion from between the lines of this recital, and when it was done I marched out of the house to visit my pet ridge, hurt, bewildered, and not a little angry. I made a fire up there and sat and smoked and thought the matter over while I skinned a marten, and fought my battle out alone as Anahareo had done this many days. And all at once I saw myself as I was, saw clearly the selfishness that had been bred in me during a life of solitary wandering, and realized how narrow was the rut that I had got into. Even my niggardly attentions had been only the scraps, the leavings, the tag ends left over from the spent emotions of the day, that I was offering to this woman who had given her happiness into my hands. And I went down that mountain trail at a run, my dignity, my accursed self-assurance thrown to the winds, and arrived home with my snowshoes nearly smoking, hoping I was not too late. You guessed it; I was not. And from that day, on which I recognized to some extent my woeful shortcomings and what they might have led to, and made some effort to overcome them, could be counted the first steps in a regeneration that worked a revolution in our whole scheme of existence.
Don’t imagine that there was any sudden and complete renunciation such as overcomes the luckless and often temporarily aberrated victim of a highly emotionalized revival meeting; this would have been, at best, but temporary. It was a slow, hard process fraught with many mental upheavals and self-examinations, and numerous backslidings and reversals to type, and it involved a self-discipline as severe as any that the trail, with all its stern severities, had ever imposed upon me. But I emerged from each conflict, I hoped, the better for it, and was not without assistance.
.....
