GALL OF THE WILD

Evening Star, Issue 18137, 29 November 1922, Page 10

GALL OF THE WILD

SHOULD BE OBEYED ANNUALLY. The otter day (writes H. .A. Vachell in the ‘Daily Mail’), in one of onr parks, a man was attacked by a buck. For eleven months in the year park deer, whether red or fallow. are tame as sheen. In October they become dangerous. They do not have to fight to live, because free pasture is provided. They have to fight to love. The fight to live, insistent in all of us, an ineradicable instinct, is primarily the Call of the Wild. It sends men to the moors and mountains, io the forests and streams, to all the innumerable places where one must fight to live. It is the force behind sport; it makes civilised man endure and enjoy hardships; it renews all that is still primitive in him; it toughens relaxed tissues of mind and body.

To resist' this instinct is unwise. We might, if possible, to pass one month at least out of each year at the “Aubergo de la Bello Etoile,” sleeping on Mother Earth, cooking food we have caught or killed,, braving heat and cold, rain and sun, absorbing at every pore tho virtue of the wilderness.

I knew a famous doctor in San Francisco, blessed (or cursed) with an immense practice. For two months during each year, up to tho close of a long and useful life, he obeyed the Call of the Wild. He fished and trapped and bunted in the primeval woods, living at first hand. He returned io work a new man, rejuvenated, vigorous, and \irile. And what an object-lesson!

The many cannot do this; hut they can achieve some sort of drastic change of life if Ihe will be not atrophied by disuse. There is no tonio like a walk: in a raging storm. “Fugging” indoors paralyses energy. A gipsy cannot sleep in a house. Every caravan I see tells its own joyous tele. 'Thousands of young men camp out. 'there is no music like the frizzling of a steak over a wnod_ tiro. A glass of beer is nectar after climbing the fells of Cumberland. Warm, dry clothes are a luxury when ruin has soaked you to the skin. The Call of tho Wild is the trumpet-call of life, and it cannot ho disregarded with impunity.