who were returning to tree and thicket. As the bluebirds had been
viewless when merged into the backgrounds of their own colour, so he,
while sitting with his back against a tawny cedar, had been drawn into
the entity of the wilderness to which, obviously, he belonged. Here he
blended, harmonized, disappeared when he held motionless. The well-worn,
tall, laced boots were of brown leather, much scuffed, one in colour
with the soil dusting them. The khaki trousers gathered into the
boot-tops, the soft flannel shirt, were the brown of the tree trunks;
skin of hands and face and muscular throat were the bronze of ripe
pine-cones and burnished pine-needles. And, in a landscape spotted with
light and shadow, the head of black hair might have passed for a bit of
such pitch-black shadow as a tuft of thick foliage casts upon the
light-smitten ground.

Beyond this outward harmony there was something at once more intangible
and yet more vital and positive that made the man a piece with the
natural world about him. Perhaps it was that he had lived so many months
of so many years in the open that he had grown to be true brother of the
wild; that he had shed coat after coat of artificial veneer as he took
on the layers of tan; that in doing so he shed from his mind many of the
artificialities of the twentieth century and remembered ancient
instincts. His deep chest knew the tricks of proper breathing; he would
come to the top of a steep climb with unlaboured breath. He stood tall
and stalwart, filled with vigorous strength in repose like the straight
valiant cedars. His eyes were black and piercing, as keen as those of
the hawk which, circling in the deeper sky, had seen him when he moved;
he, too, had seen the hawk. All about him was a lustily masculine phase
of the world, giant trees dominating giant slopes, rugged boulders
upheaved, iron cliffs defying time and battling the years; he, like
them, was virile, his sex clothing him magnificently. He had not shaved