Wild Life Read Online Free

under me. The dying words of Jules Verne notwithstanding, it’s my habit when I can escape to this study to keep my morning hours for reading, my afternoons for writing. Being as it was already (though barely) afternoon, I dipped the pen in the ink pot and drove the nib across the page with a pent-up fury. “The horrible sight,” I wrote, “so clouded her mind and bound up the winds of reason that she nearly cried quits with Fate and gave up the battle of Life.”
    Melba always has complained of her son-in-law, Homer, that he torments his daughter in a man’s careless way by bringing down with him from the log camps horrid tales of Wild Men of the Woods, and so forth. I don’t believe a child is spoiled by the telling of monster stories; I’ve told them myself, in such a way as to make the boys jump. But Homer will swear every story is true, and that he has been a witness of great barefooted tracks in the mud, twenty inches from toe to heel, and night screaming of a bestial sort which is not the roaring of bears or lions, which he claims he would recognize. He brings to his family gruesome accounts of monstrous hairy men stepping forth from the shrub-wood to crush an empty oil barrel, or bend back the iron top of a donkey engine, or brandish an uprooted tree, and long recountings of stories other men have told him, of women captured from sylvan picnics and toted miles across the mountains on the shoulders of stinking man-beasts. (Such is the nature of men, I am sure in their own camps, outside the earshot of wives and children, these timbermen tell one another the lascivious details of the ways in
which these creatures force their sexual attentions on captive women.)
    Melba, I’m sure, wishes that her son-in-law would bring home to his wife and daughter gentler tales of the sort she told her own young child: St. Augustine’s fables of men whose ears are large enough to sleep in, and fanciful tales of griffins and centaurs. The Wild Man of the Woods strikes her as altogether too near to the real, and consequently dreadful. It is a discredited feeling in civilized nations, but I believe we are all still afraid of the dark, and here in this land of dark forests the very air is imbued with such stories; indeed, the loggers had the tales first from the Indians. The realness of them is another matter. As the woods are daylighted, and wilderness gives way to modern advances in education and technology, I expect to see the end of the Wild Man, exactly as faeries and gnomes disappeared with the encroaching of the cities in Europe.
    I also frankly wonder why Homer’s stories remind me of certain of the white man’s fearful fictions of other races. It seems to me men always have endowed the Indian, the Negro, the Hottentot with savagery and a strong reek, with apelike looks and movements, and with a taste for white women, and my own belief is that it’s not a matter of other races but a matter of fear. There is a bestial side to human nature, basic and primitive impulses in the bodies of men which clamor for satisfaction, and it must be a Christian comfort to ascribe such things not to oneself or one’s tribe but to hairy giants and savages. It may be the Wild Man of the Woods is but a ghost of the wild man within.
    I am forgiving of poor, dull Homer, though, inasmuch as I’m always on the lookout for the seeds of my novels and have begun to make these wild-man tales over, turn them quite on their backs and fill the shells with my own turtle stew: the brave Helena Reed, Girl Adventurer, has come face-to-face with a secret race of hairy mountain giants, and in particular with a single example, the great and fearful Tatoosh of the See-Ah-Tiks (whose civilization, of course, will prove more enlightened than our own).
    Today I wrote straight through—brought the dear girl to the very gates of their great secret cavern—2,000 words in rather more than five and a half hours.