I'd Rather Sing One Wild Song And

...in His Gambling, He Had One Besetting Weakness -- Faith In A System; And This Made His Damnation Certain.

He Had No Conscious Knowledge Of Death, But Like Every Animal Of The Wild, He Possessed The Instinct Of Death. To Him It Stood As The Greatest Of Hurts. It Was The Very Essence Of The Unknown; It Was The Sum Of The Terrors Of The Unknown, The One Culminating And Unthinkable Catastrophe That Could Happen To Him, About Which He Knew Nothing And About Which He Feared Everything.

The First Theft Marked Buck As Fit To Survive In The Hostile Northland Environment. It Marked His Adaptability, His Capacity To Adjust Himself To Changing Conditions, The Lack Of Which Would Have Meant Swift And Terrible Death. It Marked, Further, The Decay Or Going To Pieces Of His Moral Nature, A Vain Thing And A Handicap In The Ruthless Struggle For Existence.

He Became Quicker Of Movement Than The Other Dogs, Swifter Of Foot, Craftier, Deadlier, More Lithe, More Lean With Ironlike Muscle And Sinew, More Enduring, More Cruel More Ferocious, And More Intelligent. He Had To Become All These Things, Else He Would Not Have Held His Own Nor Survived The Hostile Environment In Which He Found Himself.

All My Life I Have Had An Awareness Of Other Times And Places. I Have Been Aware Of Other Persons In Me. Oh, And Trust Me, So Have You, My Reader That Is To Be. Read Back Into Your Childhood, And This Sense Of Awareness I Speak Of Will Be Remembered As An Experience Of Childhood. You Were Then Not Fixed, Not Crystallized. You Were Plastic, A Soul In Flux, A Consciousness And An Identity In The Process Of Forming--ay, Of Forming And Forgetting.