"The birds of the
forest came only with the white man." There were parrots in Kentucky, and
there were in Ohio pigeons and birds of prey, eagles and buzzards, but the
birds we know to-day and the bees were later immigrants from lands that
remembered Aristophanes or the hills of Hymettus, or that knew Shelley's
skylark or Keats's nightingale or Rostand's tamer fowls or Maeterlinck's
bees.
Even if we allow to the forests Chateaubriand's color in summer and the
clamor in times of terror--color and clamor which only a keen eye and ear
would have seen and heard--we cannot longer think of them as pathless, if
inhabited by those ancient pathmakers, the buffalo, deer, sheep. And,
naturally, when the Indian came, dependent as he was upon wild game, he
followed these paths or traces made and frequented by the beasts--the ways
to food, to water, to salt, to other habitats with the changing seasons.
The buffalo roads and the deer trails became his vocational trails--the
streets of his livelihood. And as his enemy was likely to find him by
following these traces, they became not only the paths of peace but the
paths of war.
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