Pelts were
valuable, and with a few bales a man might purchase the earth. Animals
were made for men to catch and skin. He did not know what men were
made for, unless, perhaps, for the factor.
As he grew older he modified these concepts, but the process was a
continual source of naive apprehension and wonderment. It was not
until he became a man and had wandered through half the cities of the
States that this expression of childish wonder passed out of his eyes
and left them wholly keen and alert. At his boy's first contact with
the cities, while he revised his synthesis of things, he also
generalized afresh. People who lived in cities were effeminate. They
did not carry the points of the compass in their heads, and they got
lost easily. That was why they elected to stay in the cities. Because
they might catch cold and because they were afraid of the dark, they
slept under shelter and locked their doors at night. The women were
soft and pretty, but they could not lift a snowshoe far in a day's
journey. Everybody talked too much. That was why they lied and were
unable to work greatly with their hands. Finally, there was a new
human force called "bluff." A man who made a bluff must be dead sure
of it, or else be prepared to back it up. Bluff was a very good
thing--when exercised with discretion.
Later, though living his life mainly in the woods and mountains, he
came to know that the cities were not all bad; that a man might live in
a city and still be a man.
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