Читать книгу Wilderness, A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska - Rockwell Kent - Страница 4

PREFACE

Table of Contents

Most of this book was written on Fox Island in Alaska, a journal added to from day to day. It was not meant for publication but merely that we who were living there that year might have always an unfailing memory of a wonderfully happy time. There’s a ring of truth to all freshly written records of experience that, whatever their shortcomings, makes them at least inviolable. Besides the journal, a few letters to friends have been drawn upon. All are given unchanged but for the flux of a new paragraph or chapter here and there to form a kind of narrative, the only possible literary accompaniment to the drawings of that period herein published. The whole is a picture of quiet adventure in the wilderness, above all an adventure of the spirit.

What one would look for in a story of the wild Northwest is lacking in these pages. To have been further from a settled town might have brought not more but less excitement. The wonder of the wilderness was its tranquillity. It seemed that there both men and the wild beasts pursued their own paths freely and, as if conscious of the wide freedom of their world, molested one another not at all. It was the bitter philosophy of the old trapper who was our companion that of all animals Man was the most terrible; for if the beasts fought and killed for some good cause Man slew for none.

Deliberately I have begun this happy story far out in Resurrection Bay;—and again dropped its peaceful thread on the forlorn threshold of the town. We found Fox Island on Sunday, August twenty-fifth, 1918, and left there finally on the seventeenth of the following March.

R. K.

Arlington, Vermont,

December, 1919.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Table of Contents

	Facing Page
“Zarathustra Himself Led the Ugliest Man by the Hand, in Order to Show Him His Night-World and the Great Round Moon and the Silvery Waterfalls Nigh Unto His Cave”	2
Unknown Waters	6
Home Building	12
Fire Wood	16
The Sleeper	20
The Windlass	24
The Snow Queen	28
Fox Island, Resurrection Bay, Kenai Peninsula, Alaska	32
Rain Torrents	36
Day	42
Night	46
Wilderness	50
One of Rockwell’s Drawings	54
Sunrise	56
Adventure	60
On the Height	68
The Day’s Work	72
Meal Time	76
Day’s End	80
The Cabin Window	90
“Go to Bed”	94
Driftwood	98
The Whittler	104
“Get Up!”	110
Man	114
Woman	118
Foreboding	124
Lone Man	128
Cain	136
Superman	140
The North Wind	146
Another of Rockwell’s Drawings	152
Weltschmerz	154
Victory	158
Zarathustra and His Playmates	164
Frozen Fall	168
The Hermit	172
Ecstasy	176
Pelagic Reverie	184
Prison Bars	188
Running Water	192
Immanence	196
The Vision	202
The Imperishable	206
The Star-Lighter	210